Ages ago I worked in property insurance and I really don't think that a 100 year actuaraial expreience/loss rating gouges the insured. In my experience Flood Zones that regularly cost insurers a lot of money tend to be in areas that flood more than once every 100 years. Look at some of the areas around the Russian River that flood with some regularity every decade.
Then there's the unexpected like New Orleans (or the dust bowl), though that technically wasn't a flood (from an insurance perspective)but the failure of levees.
One of the issues with Hurricanes and global warming (and I don't think it is all hysteria - Scientific American has had a few very good articles on this topic as of late). Using hurricanes as one loss variable, we encounter the problem that we didn't start keeping detailed data about hurricanes until (if memory serves) slightly before or after WWII -- by which I mean a time period of 1940 - 1947. I think the war actually stopped the earlier attempts to collect this data, and it was picked up again in 1947. So when we are discussing Hurricane data we don't even have a reliable 100 year period to draw conclusions from. So when we say there are more hurricanes we are really using a base measurement of roughly 40 years.
I am sure somewhere some grad student is collecting this historic data.
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Date: 2007-08-17 05:59 pm (UTC)Then there's the unexpected like New Orleans (or the dust bowl), though that technically wasn't a flood (from an insurance perspective)but the failure of levees.
One of the issues with Hurricanes and global warming (and I don't think it is all hysteria - Scientific American has had a few very good articles on this topic as of late). Using hurricanes as one loss variable, we encounter the problem that we didn't start keeping detailed data about hurricanes until (if memory serves) slightly before or after WWII -- by which I mean a time period of 1940 - 1947. I think the war actually stopped the earlier attempts to collect this data, and it was picked up again in 1947. So when we are discussing Hurricane data we don't even have a reliable 100 year period to draw conclusions from. So when we say there are more hurricanes we are really using a base measurement of roughly 40 years.
I am sure somewhere some grad student is collecting this historic data.