Risk, Re-/Insurance and Future Thinking
From the category archives:
Water—or the scarcity of it—is not something people give a lot of thought to. But consider these facts:
Demand for clean water will rise by 100% between 2007 and 2040.
Irrigation for farming uses 60% of all water taken from rivers and aquifers globally.
While the world produces twice as much food as it did 25 years [...]
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Building Blog has a good piece on the recent mudslides in LA, which in turn followed the denuding of the hills by raging bush-fires.
As one commenter notes, how anybody could think that a few concrete barricades would hold back a 50mph mudslide, embedded with boulders and other large debris, is hard to fathom.
(pics by [...]
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The FT had an interesting piece about flooding on 16 December. The surprising thing to me was that about 40-60 per cent of flood-related claims are from damage to properties in areas away from main rivers and involve surface flooding and questions of drainage.
Insurers are hampered in analysing this area as closely as they might [...]
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AON are warning that fraud is on the rise and that insurance is going to face increasing claims from environmental threats, terrorism and product recalls.
They also think nano-tech is going to bite insurers.
I’d agree with fraud.
Longer term, I think the environment is going to be an issue — it already is, obviously — [...]
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Just when the financial world is giving us severe grief, it looks like we are going to get bitten by Peak Oil, after all.
The International Energy Agency is shortly to publish its annual World Energy Outlook (12 Nov) but the FT has a sneak preview.
Basically:
1. without investment, the natural annual rate of output decline is 9.1%
2. even [...]
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Looking down from my hotel on the rooftops of Houston, I can still make out the debris that must have been left behind by Ike.
It reminds me of the time that I was in New York about 7-8 weeks after 9/11. We were staying in the Waldorf-Astoria and when I crawled under the table [...]
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A lecture given by Dr Lawson Brigham
*At the Institute of Marine Engineering Science & Technology (IMarEST)*
*8 September 2008*
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*Please note that these are not authorised notes, but simply the result of my jottings at great speed during this fascinating talk. I may not have taken certain things down entirely accurately, though I think the broad thrust [...]
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Amazing shots of hurricanes, taken from up in space.
This is Ivan, one of the strongest hurricanes on record, taken on Saturday, Sept 11th, 2004 from an altitude of about 230 miles by Astronaut Edward M. Fincke, NASA ISS science officer and flight engineer, looking out the window of the International Space Station. At the time, [...]
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Infectious prions–the things that cause BSE–can not only jump species barriers, but can also create new, potentially harmful prions in the infected host.
That is the finding of recent research at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.
Nature reports that
>Generally, prions are limited to a specific host and a few related species. But prions sometimes [...]
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Excellent LRB article this week from Michael Kare, “professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College”[1] all about the world’s continuing, in fact growing dependence on oil – “the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that global consumption will rise from 86.9 million barrels a day in 2008 to 94.1 million in 2013.”
Professor Kare [...]
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