Foreign Influences: Weather or Not?

INSURANCE COMPANIES MAY HAVE TO SAVE THE CLIMATE TO SAVE THEIR BOTTOM LINE

There hasn't been a hurricane in London since last, oh, ever. But there has been an insurer there, Lloyd's, since 1771. And because it's an outfit that historically insured ships, weather is never too far from its mind. Last year Hurricane Katrina turned heads at Lloyd's. The storm didn't just flood New Orleans; it also swept away the insurance industry's trust in its catastrophe modeling, the tool it depends on to evaluate bad-weather risk. The model assumed that a hurricane like Katrina couldn't happen in the same year as two other superstorms. Nor did it envision the off-the-scale damage caused by Katrina--275,000 houses...

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