Thursday, June 7, 2012

Oklahoma Wins

Oklahoma: 2011 Brought Hottest Summer on Record


Oklahoma and Texas have argued for years about which has the best college football team, whose oil fields produce better crude and even where the state border should be.
But in a dispute that no one wants to win, Oklahoma just reclaimed a crown. After recalculating data, climatologists have declared that Oklahoma last year suffered through the hottest summer ever recorded in the United States — not Texas as initially announced last fall.
In the new tally by the National Climatic Data Center, Oklahoma’s average temperature last summer was 86.9° F (30.5° C), while Texas finished at 86.7° F (30.39° C).  The previous record for the hottest summer was 85.2° F (29.56° C) set in 1934 — in Oklahoma. The swap became apparent after extra data trickled in from weather stations and as field reports were filed across both states.
Three States to Require Insurers to Disclose Climate-Change Response PlansInsurance commissioners in California, New York and Washington State will require that companies disclose how they intend to respond to the risks their businesses and customers face from increasingly severe storms and wildfires, rising sea levels and other consequences of climate change.

Up until this point, those states required about a third of larger insurers to turn over the information in a survey; for all others it was voluntary.
California, which has the ninth-largest economy in the world, has led the way on this push to make a traditionally backward-looking industry anticipate and respond to the business liability presented by a changing climate. These new state regulations will focus attention on the insurance industry’s role in mediating the country’s response to climate change.
Last year’s level of natural disasters was unprecedented, according to an August report by the A. M. Best Company, which rates the financial strength of insurers. By late June, the estimated $27 billion in losses suffered by the American industry was the worst loss performance in history.

Many insurance companies, particularly large international reinsurance firms, have been grappling with the issue of assessing risks that are not reflected in the historical record of insurance payouts.
The disclosure survey will be mandatory for companies writing policies worth more than $300 million nationwide. It was created by Ceres, a Boston-based nonprofit group that leads a coalition of investors and environmental groups in gathering information about business responses to climate change, and prods them to do more.
Roughly 25 percent of the industry’s large property, casualty and life insurance companies participated in an earlier version of the survey sent out by California and five other states last year. A rule change, combined with California’s partnership with New York and Washington, will mean that 300 of the larger insurers will have to comply. Companies that do not complete the survey could face fines, although it is highly unusual for companies to ignore such directives.