The insurance industry doesn’t share our President’s skepticism about global warming. A column in today’s Boston Globe by Derrick Z. Jackson quotes Munich Re, the world’s largest re-insurance firm, that the insurance business overall had the worst record of losses in their history in 2004: $210 billion in losses. Now AIG, another insurance giant, says that New York and Florida have lost nearly $2 trillion each of insured coastal property exposure.
“People are getting the idea that there is nowhere to hide on this issue,” said Andrew Logan, insurance program director for Boston-based Ceres, which promotes corporate environmentalism. He adds that losses due to weather have grown 10 times faster than premiums since 1971–an obviously unstable equation.
There is a task force of insurance carriers and politicians charged with coming up with strategy to deal with this–they do say that the time for Americans to hide from global warming is over.
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