This is getting repetitious. Once again, the United States
stands alone against a United Nations determined to impose its view
of disastrous climate change. And, once again, the U.N. threatens
economic annihilation if we don’t go along. They call America’s
action “unilateralism.” But let’s call it by its real name: “common
sense.”
This time it concerns the insurance industry. On October 7 —
not coincidentally just a few days after the American hurricane
season reaches its peak — the U.N.’s Climate Change Working Group
released a report called “Climate Change and the Financial Services
Industry.” The predictable bottom line: Climate Change has the
potential to destroy the insurance industry, so, America, please
get in line with our view of climate change.
This kind of stuff comes from the top. U.N. Secretary-General
Kofi Annan keeps criticizing our reluctance to adopt the
scientifically discredited Kyoto Protocol. In a recent op-ed in the
Washington Post that was his number one demand.
But the U.N.’s new report goes Annan one further. While finally
admitting that Kyoto won’t do much about the planet’s climate, the
report then demands more and more and more Kyotos, in agreement
with scientists in the Clinton administration who estimated that we
need about 19 Kyotos to stop warming. One Kyoto costs,
conservatively, 2 percent of our GDP per year. Nineteen? Don’t go
there, unless you’re the U.N.
Specifically, the new U.N. report projects that, as a result of
climate change leading to more frequent and severe storms, along
with demographic changes (read: more people able to afford more
expensive beach houses), worldwide insurance losses will total an
additional $150 billion in the next decade. They trot out an
impressive graph showing dramatic increases in damage costs in
recent years.
What isn’t apparent, except to anyone reading the fine print, is
that this figure lists damages from all “natural causes,” and that
most of the recent increase is from two big earthquakes (1994 and
1995). While our greener friends like to blame many oddities on
global warming, no one is crazy enough to say that it causes
earthquakes.
Big European reinsurers (the people who insure the insurance
companies), like Swiss Re and Munich Re, have been singing the
climate change dirge for years. It forms a convincing argument for
raising their rates, and their pro-Kyoto (read: anti-U.S.)
governments are only too happy to nod in agreement.
By far, the biggest producer of weather-related damage is the
hurricane, and the largest exposure, in terms of insured property
value, is the United States east coast, where the insured value is
roughly the same as our annual gross domestic product. Further,
damage costs appear to be going up. So, if the U.N. is right, the
number or severity of hurricanes should be increasing
dramatically.
It’s not. There’s no trend at all in the number of these storms
striking the United States. In fact, the last decade appears to be
especially hurricane-poor. It’s also well known to hurricane
scientists that the average maximum recorded winds have been
declining for the last half-century.
The new U.N. document is so brazen that it contravenes another
U.N. body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In its
latest compendium on the subject, called the “Third Assessment
Report,” which it likes to call the “consensus of scientists” (it’s
really the “consensus of scientists picked by the U.N.”), says:
“There is little sign of long-term changes in tropical storm
intensity and frequency,” and “[r]ecent analyses of changes in
severe local weather (tornadoes, thunder days, lightning and hail)
in a few selected regions provide no compelling evidence for
widespread systematic long-term changes.”
As for the future, the U.N. climate report says that its climate
models show no systematic changes in these storms.
While Munich Re, Swiss Re, and the U.N. Climate Change Working
Group shill for a mutually interested, if falsified, climate
apocalypse, who isn’t surprised that Americans have a different
idea?
Let’s guess that there really is a free market here, and that
U.S. insurers can choose between Munich Re, with rates artificially
kited by fears of worsening climate, and some American reinsurer,
whose rates are predicated on constant climate with increasing
property values. Munich Re would advertise its product as more
reliable, with assurance that it can survive our increasingly harsh
climate. The Americans will be much less expensive. Given the
facts, which would you choose?
Let’s predict that global warming hype isn’t going to put
American reinsurers out of business, but that it could be very
harmful to the economic well-being of their European competitors.
Hurray for American “unilateralism.”
