Washington DC (ContentDesk) September 8, 2005 — Action Fund Management LLC (AFM), an investment advisory firm, warned the property and casualty insurance industry not to be fooled by environmental activist efforts to link natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, with global warming.

Sep. 8 by Ceres, a coalition of environmental and investor activists, alleges that insurance companies are at financial risk from manmade global warming.”Insurance companies aren’t financially exposed because of any supposed global warming,” said Steve Milloy of AFM. “They’re exposed because they’ve spent decades writing policies for risky coastal development and not charging sufficiently high premiums,” added Milloy.Although there has been a dramatic increase in hurricane damage in the U.S., virtually all of this is due to more people building and living in coastal, hurricane-prone areas.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology hurricane research Kerry Emanuel wrote in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that, “For U.S.-centric concerns over the next 30-50 years, by far the most important hurricane problem we face is demographic and political. Consider that Katrina, as horrible as it was, was by no means unprecedented, meteorologically speaking. More intense storms have struck the U.S. coastline long ago. The big problem is the headlong rush to tropical coastlines, coupled with federal and state policies that subsidize the risk incurred by coastal development.

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