Mar. 16, 2006 - 19:03 MST

PAY LATER

Wouldn't it be fabulous if the powers that be would accept the fact that some things might actually be true, regardless of the fact that the cost would be high. There is an article in this morning's Rocky Mountain News by Derrick Z. Jackson of the Boston Globe that discusses one of the things that seem to be threatening us and the implications of what is in the apparent future.

In full -- no italics or bolds:

INSURERS FRET OVER GROWING THREAT POSED BY WARMING

"Neither Tim Wagner nor Mike Kreidler imagined how climate change would intrude into state insurance regulation. Wagner, the director of the Nebraska Department of Insurance, said the reality is literally pelting him."

"While you can't correlate it directly, in the Plains states we've had severe drougts," Wagner, 63, said over the telephone. "We've had fires in Texas and Oklahoma. There's a terrible drought in Arizona right now. When we get rain, we seem to get more and more severe hail. I just drove to Kansas City. Our brand-new car got pummeled while it was parked in north Kansas City. We didn't lose any glass, but plastic parts of the car rack and a piece of the bumper was hanging off. I don't think I remember being in a hail storm like that in my lifetime."

"Kreidler, 62, the Washington state insurance commissioner, has seen his Pacific Northwest weather go from a drought emergency last winter to floods this winter. "Obviously a trigger for the threshold of getting our attention was Katrina and the number of hurricanes we've been having," Kreidler said in a phone intervies. "But even in Washinton the vagaries in weather patterns make you suspicious."

"The suspicions moved Kreidler, a former Democratic congressman, and Wagner, a registered Republican, to form a task force for the National Association of Insurance Commissioners to assess the impact of climate change on the American insurance industry. They hope to join a discussion that has been going on for years in Europe, where insurers Swiss Re and Munich Re have warned of massive financial losses from storm patterns aggravated by global warming."

"When you couple changes in climate with changes in demographics where at this point 70 percent of our population resides within 50 miles of a coastline, and the fact that property values have increased significantly, it just seemed that we had to recognize the issue," Wagner said."

"Munich Re calculated that last year was the most expensive on record for natual catastrophes, with losses of more than $210 billion. Windstorm destruction just the United States, the Caribbean and Mexico cost $83 billion, most of it, of course, coming from Hurricane Katrina."

"The insurance giant AIG, estimates that both Florida and New York have nearly $2 trillion each of insured coastal property exposure."

"AIG said last October that six of the 10 most expensive hurricanes in U.S. History occurred in just the prior 13 months."

"People are getting the idea that there is nowhere to hide on this issue," said Andrew Logan insurance program director for the Boston-based Ceres, which promotes corporate enviromentalism and has been advising Wagner, Kreidler and NAIC. Ceres says that insured losses due to weather have grown 10 times faster than premiums since 1971, and the percentage of total economic losses from catastrophic weather has grown from a "negligible fraction in the 1950s to 25 percent in the past decade," Wagner and Kriedle said they do not know yet what their task force will recommend. They do say that the time for Americans to hide from global warming is over."

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Seems to be a sure sign that insurance premiums are going to go up.

Dunno, seems that I read every year that the ice-caps are shrinking and that melt has to go somewhere, which obviously causes the sea level to rise. Like wise the climate is being changed and global warming seems to be an established fact to everyone but GWB. Apparently he thinks it would cost too much to publicly acknowledge the fact, even to himself.

Takes me back to a TV ad I used to see, I think it was for an oil filter, where the mechanic says, "You can pay me now, or pay me later," the later, of course being much more costly. I guess it is, unfortunately, too late to pay now, so ineveitably, depending on the time lag, the amount involved will be great when the chips are down and folks are lip deep in salt water - - - then we or our offspring or theirs will PAY LATER . . . . . . . . . . . .

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