The Disastrous Future of the US

The insurance industry is fighting back against the kind of articles which accuse it of price-gouging, especially when it comes to natural disasters in general and hurricanes in particular. Yesterday Munich Re held a webinar for journalists, and wheeled out a lot of statistics relating to natural disasters in the first half of 2008. And they're pretty compelling when it comes to the hypothesis that natural disasters are getting more frequent and more damaging. Here, for instance, is a chart of H1 natural disasters in the US going back to 1980. While the number of geophysical disasters has remained very low, the number of climatological disasters has more than doubled. And it's still growing fast: the number of disasters in just the first half of 2008 was bigger than the number of disasters in any of the full years between... [read full story]