Insuring Doubt on Global Warming

With hurricane season hard upon us and Al Gore’s new movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” in theaters, global warming dilettantes (and I include myself in this category) getting up to speed should sample the rancorous debate that gets triggered every time even a minor story appears on this topic. In today’s New York Times, John Schwartz reports on two new studies that support claims that warming oceans are increasing the intensity of hurricanes.

“Cherrypicking!” shouted Roger Pielke, Jr., a young University of Colorado professor whose Center for Science and Technology Policy Research is seeking to position itself as a “third way” in the global warming debate. (A quick perusal of his Center’s annual report and website shows it gets virtually all of its funding from government sources, although it co-sponsored a conference last week on projecting financial losses from climate change that was funded by Munich Re, the German insurance conglomerate.) Pielke’s posting on the Center’s Prometheus blog complains that Schwartz failed to reference other recent “peer-reviewed studies” that provide “important context” for these latest reports, which, while “certainly newsworthy,” were chosen because Times’ editors and reporters “have decided to pick sides in the political debate over climate change.”

One of the ignored studies recently appeared in an American Geophysical Union publication (the study was underwritten in part by a charitable arm of Lexington Insurance, an arm of the American International Group) while the other was co-authored by none other than Pielke himself (funding not disclosed, but his four co-authors hailed from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and spoke for themselves, not the government agency).

The former “study” was in fact a reevaluation of data that had appeared in a number of previous studies and involved a series of statistical manipulations that would take a better person with more time than me to dissect. Likewise, the “study” by Pielke et al in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society was not a study at all, but a review of a number of recent studies (with a generous dollop of media criticism) that concluded increasing hurricane damage had more to do with increased construction in vulnerable zones than global warming. Moreover, Pielke concluded, “the state of the peer-reviewed knowledge today is such that there are good reasons to expect that any conclusive connection between global warming and hurricanes or their impacts will not be made in the near term.”

I quote Pielke at length because it is too simplistic to say that all global warming skeptics are hacks on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry (an allegation that animated a Paul Krugman column last week). Indeed, the seriousness of Pielke’s arguments can be judged from the response he got. Within hours of his posting, the Times’ chief global warming reporter, Andrew Revkin, had written in to defend his colleague’s article (full disclosure: Andy and I went to journalism school together). “For you to assert that this one story is clear evidence of some editorial bent on the part of The Times is not that different than when an over-eager environmentalist asserts that a particular hurricane is clear evidence greenhouse gases must be curbed,” he wrote.

Today's brief side tour through global warming land leaves me wondering: Why is the insurance industry interested in funding scholars who question whether scientists have appropriately concluded that human activity-caused global warming is cause for concern? Clearly, insurance premiums for coastal properties (not to mention all of our rates) are going to dramatically rise if predictions of more intense storms due to global warming prove accurate. Moreover, when the really big one hits, it will probably be financially catastrophic for the insurance industry.

So, as they like to ask in the theater, what's their motive? It seems to me that companies who insure against acts of God wouldn't mind having humans to blame when the tide rolls in.