It's Global Warming, Stupid
by Paul M. Barrett, Bloomberg-Businessweek -- Nov 01, 2012
[...]
Eric Pooley, senior vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund (and former deputy editor of Bloomberg Businessweek), offers a baseball analogy: “We can’t say that steroids caused any one home run by Barry Bonds, but steroids sure helped him hit more and hit them farther. Now we have weather on steroids.”
In an Oct. 30 blog post, Mark Fischetti of Scientific American took a spin through Ph.D.-land and found more and more credentialed experts willing to shrug off the climate caveats. The broadening consensus: “Climate change amps up other basic factors that contribute to big storms. For example, the oceans have warmed, providing more energy for storms. And the Earth’s atmosphere has warmed, so it retains more moisture, which is drawn into storms and is then dumped on us.” Even those of us who are science-phobic can get the gist of that.
Hello!
[... continuing ]
On Oct. 17 the giant German reinsurance company Munich Re issued a prescient report titled Severe Weather in North America. Globally, the rate of extreme weather events is rising, and “nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America.” [...] Munich Re found “a nearly quintupled number of weather-related loss events [5x] in North America for the past three decades.” By contrast, there was “an increase factor of 4 in Asia, 2.5 in Africa, 2 in Europe, and 1.5 in South America.” Human-caused climate change “is believed to contribute to this trend,” the report said
Hello.
Reinsurance company? Those guys insure the insurers.
When your local Insurance company can't pay for all the damages from a Natural Disaster
-- super corporations like Munich Re, they get the ultimate Mega-Bill.
So they kind of care about these "Damages on Steroids" trends. They impact their bottom-line.
So should the rest of North America. Care. Because we too, will be getting the ultimate Livability Bill.
And THAT impacts our super-charged, go-faster-now, way of life.
Hello. Steroids. They do exact their toll.