Year 3, Month 10, Day 17: Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair

The Burlington Free Press (VT) notes that another big insurance organization has gone all DFH on us:

The number of natural disasters per year has been rising dramatically on all continents since 1980, but the trend is steepest for North America where countries have been battered by hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, searing heat and drought, a new report says.

The study being released today by Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurance firm, sees climate change driving the increase and predicts those influences will continue in years ahead, though a number of experts question that conclusion.

Whatever the causes, the report shows that if you thought the weather has been getting worse, you’re right.

The report finds that weather disasters in North America are among the worst and most volatile in the world: “North America is the continent with the largest increases in disasters,” says Munich Re’s Peter Roder.

The report focuses on weather disasters since 1980 in the USA, Canada, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Roder says this report represents the first finding of a climate change “footprint” in the data from natural catastrophes.

Take a bath, you lazy flower children. Sent October 10:

How often are we reminded that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?” The newly released Munich Re report on the likely impact of climate change should bring that old maxim back to the forefront of our thinking. Insurers are quite rightly anxious about having to shell out big bucks to pay for our national failure to anticipate the disastrous consequences of global warming in our own country and around the world.

Conservative politicians may extol the virtues of the free market, but this is merely rhetoric; their deny-and-delay policies will do incalculable damage to our economy when the bill finally comes due. And what a bill: coping with devastated agriculture, crippled infrastructure, decimated biodiversity, geopolitical instability, and catastrophic public-health impacts is going to cost trillions of dollars. It’s both economically and environmentally sensible to address the climate crisis before it’s too late.

Prevention, not cure.

Warren Senders