Weather Risk

The Heartland Institute and its insurance-centric Washington unit are negotiating a divorce, a process said to be accelerated by distress over the institutes now-suspended ad campaign linking support for global warming with serial killers.

Prompted by a lobbying group that supports efforts to reduce global warming, three insurance companies and the Association of Bermuda Insurers and Reinsurers have publicly renounced their support for the Heartland Institute, a libertarian research group.

Microinsurance is not an act of charity but a business model that can pay insurers real dividends while helping the impoverished climb back from natural catastrophes, says the Chairman of Swiss Re America.

Global warming is leading to such severe storms, droughts and heat waves that nations should prepare for an unprecedented onslaught of deadly and costly weather disasters, an international panel of climate scientists said in a new report issued Wednesday.

Insurance commissioners in New York, California and Washington State will require that insurance companies disclose their responses to the risks their insureds face from increasingly severe storms and wildfires, rising sea levels and other consequences of climate change.

Wildfires have grown from being regional or seasonal problems as the wildfire season throughout the United States often runs the entire year and in a variety of locations.