Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Hurricane Fears Cost Homeowners Coverage
Paul Vitello, New York Times
…In the last three years, more than three million homeowners have received letters like the Grays’ [cancelling their homeowners insurance] as insurance companies, determined to avoid another $40 billion Katrina bill, have essentially begun to redraw the outline of the eastern United States somewhere west of the Appalachian Trail.
Public officials in Southern states from Florida to Texas have been fighting insurance carriers for years over rising rates and withdrawal of services, but officials in the Northeast have only recently joined the fray.
…An independent insurance agents’ group puts the Grays among about 50,000 residents of the New York metropolitan area – and about one million homeowners in the Mid-Atlantic and New England states – whose policies have been canceled since 2004. While most homeowners have been able to find coverage with other major insurers, or with smaller companies, in most cases it is at higher rates and with larger deductibles.
The companies say they are obliged to avoid undue risks where they see them, and to remain solvent. “Considering what happened between 2003 and 2005,” said Robert P. Hartwig, president of the Insurance Information Institute, an industry lobbying group, “and considering that the best meteorological minds are telling us that for the next 15 to 20 years hurricane activity will be heavier than normal, if we didn’t do something to reduce our exposure, we’d be out of business.”
(16 October 2007)
Drought-Stricken South Facing Tough Choices
Brenda Goodman, New York Times
For the first time in more than 100 years, much of the Southeast has reached the most severe category of drought, climatologists said Monday, creating an emergency so serious that some cities are just months away from running out of water.
In North Carolina, Gov. Michael F. Easley asked residents Monday to stop using water for any purpose “not essential to public health and safety.” He warned that he would soon have to declare a state of emergency if voluntary efforts fell short.
Officials in the central North Carolina town of Siler City estimate that without rain, they are 80 days from draining the Lower Rocky River Reservoir, which supplies water for the town’s 8,200 people.
In the Atlanta metropolitan area, which has more than four million people, worst-case analyses show that the city’s main source of water, Lake Lanier, could be drained dry in 90 to 121 days.
The hard numbers have shocked the Southeast into action, even as many people wonder why things seem to have gotten so bad so quickly.
(16 October 2007)
Climate scientists paint grim coastal picture
Peter Boyer, Tasmania Mercury
EARLIER this year, a report representing the thinking of the world community of climate scientists — the distillation by several hundred scientists of thousands of scientific papers — advised that by 2100 our seas will probably have risen 18-59 centimetres.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which provides independent advice to help the world’s leaders develop climate change policies, based its finding on the results of 27 separate computer models, crunching an enormously complex array of data.
But there’s a catch. In releasing the full text of its 2007 report, the IPCC advised that its predictions for sea-level rises did not take account of “processes related to ice flow”. If you’re thinking a sea-level rise of, say, 40cm over the next century or “processes related to ice flow” don’t amount to much, think again.
In the first instance, the rule of thumb widely accepted by coastal scientists is that to get an idea of the likely lateral effect of sea-level rise, you multiply the vertical rise by 100. So the effect of a 40cm rise would on average extend 40 metres back from today’s coastline.
But it’s not just low-lying land that will be affected by rising seas, as geologist Chris Sharples has found in a detailed report on coastal vulnerability for the Tasmanian Government.
(16 October 2007)
