Insurance Companies Worry About Climate CHange

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=insurers-claim-global-warming-makes-some-uninsurable

In the wake of skyrocketing insurance claims due to natural disasters—hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, blizzards and the like—insurers have been imposing steep rate hikes and, in some cases, fleeing high-risk areas, leaving consumers out in the cold. It's gotten so out of hand, consumer advocates say, that insurers now are even crying climate change as a factor in raising premiums or dumping clients.

As the crisis mounts, hard hit states such as Florida and Louisiana are increasingly stepping up as insurance companies check out, providing coverage for residents dropped by their insurers. And signs are things will get worse before they get better: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is predicting that this year's hurricane season—which officially began June 1—will be "very active," with three to five major hurricanes in the Atlantic.

Hmmmmnnn - insurance companies are worried about business risks created by climate change.   Are  climate change deniers going to refuse to buy insurance or  insurance company shares? Are deniers going to heap abuse upon inusrance companies?  Call insurers liars?  Accuse them of falsifying data?  Of course not - their denials are not based upon fact.

High Temperatures Ahead

From Climate Progress:
http://climateprogress.org/2010/03/19/nasa-giss-james-hansen-global-warming-record-hottest-year/#more-21468

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has released a draft paper “Current GISS Global Surface Temperature Analysis.” It is a must read for warming junkies, but, as James Hansen notes in an e-mail, “it is too long for popular use.” So Hansen offers “some of the main conclusions,” as well as a description of a rather shocking hack of the GISS website (all of which is reprinted below). The first conclusion is:
1) Contrary to popular belief, global warming has not stopped nor has the rate of warming even slowed down in the past decade (Figure 21).
The paper predicts a new record 12-month global temperature record, and says the calendar year (2010) is likely to set the global surface temperature unless “El Nino conditions deteriorate rapidly by mid 2010 into La Nina conditions” [as happened in 2007]. NASA notes: This new record temperature will be particularly meaningful because it occurs when the recent minimum of solar irradiance (http://www.pmodwrc.ch/ pmod.php?topic=tsi/ composite/ SolarConstant) is having its maximum cooling effect.

The ClimateProgress blog contains the link to the NASA article should you wish to read the entire draft paper.

NASA and Climate Change

Pondering Syncrude's potential legal liability  for despoilation of the commons brought greenhouse gas emissions and climate change to mind.  I wondered what, if anything, NASA had to say about the nasty winter the east is suffering through.  Is is proof that climate change is not happening?  No such luck.
http://climate.nasa.gov/news/index.cfm?FuseAction=ShowNews&NewsID=270

Hansen explains that the 5-year and 11-year temperature averages, i.e. the planet's annual average temperature, averaged over 5 or 11 years, are valuable because they place less emphasis on single-year variability. These running averages show a consistent rise in the Earth's temperature over the past 30 years.  Allowing for this variability, global warming theory does not posit a linear, year-to-year increase in temperatures. Nor does it say that harsh winter weather will simply end. What it does say is that increasing concentrations of gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, with unchecked growth, will contribute a greater and greater warming influence on the world's climate.

Climate change is happening as I write.  Please send a letter to the Right Honorable Stephen Harper asking him to implement science based reduction targets for greenhouse gas emissions.  Ask him to invest in clean energy and green technology a la Germany if  he wishes to stimulate the economy and get people back to work.
UPDATE:  NASA found water on the moon!

Using data from a NASA radar that flew aboard India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, scientists have detected ice deposits near the moon's north pole. NASA's Mini-SAR instrument, a lightweight, synthetic aperture radar, found more than 40 small craters with water ice. The craters range in size from 1 to 9 miles (2 to15 km) in diameter. Although the total amount of ice depends on its thickness in each crater, it's estimated there could be at least 1.3 trillion pounds (600 million metric tons) of water ice.  "The emerging picture from the multiple measurements and resulting data of the instruments on lunar missions indicates that water creation, migration, deposition and retention are occurring on the moon."

I wonder if climate change deniers will also deny that water exists on our moon....