January 25, 2016
Forget about selfies. In California, residents are using smartphones and drones to document the coastline’s changing face. Starting this month, The Nature Conservancy is asking tech junkies to capture the flooding and coastal erosion that come with El Niño, a …
January 15, 2016
The National Weather Service says a small tornado touched down in Ventura County, Calif. during last week’s powerful El Niño-driven storms. Meteorologists conducting a storms survey determined the tornado swept through a half-mile swath of Fillmore during the morning of …
January 14, 2016
Global natural disasters in 2015 caused a combined total insured loss of $35 billion – 31 percent below the 15-year average of $51 billion and the lowest annual insured loss total since 2009, said a report issued by Impact Forecasting, …
January 5, 2016
The El Niño that disrupted weather worldwide last year has peaked. Now forecasters are predicting what may be next for the world’s climate. A number of El Niño-Southern Oscillation indicators suggest that the 2015-16 El Niño has peaked and weather …
January 4, 2016
Insurers paid out around $27 billion for natural disaster claims last year with weather causing 94 percent of incidents, underscoring the challenge posed by climate change, data from reinsurer Munich Re showed on Monday. While the climate phenomenon known as …
December 30, 2015
Goodbye to the news year 2015, and while there will be no shortage of headline-making topics to associate with the passing year, there was one subject that dominated Insurance Journal’s Western region news stories. Care to guess? No if fair …
December 23, 2015
If you think you heard a lot about climate change in 2015, wait till next year – or next week depending on how you want to look at it. Next year may be on track to the be warmest year …
December 9, 2015
In Buffalo, it hasn’t snowed yet this year. A Duluth, Minnesota, newspaper reported that the temperature was 40 degrees above zero, not below. And in Miami, beachgoers are staying indoors during what’s already the third-wettest December in local history. What’s …
November 25, 2015
The planet is halfway to dangerous levels of global warming, with the average temperature for 2015 set to eclipse last year’s record, the United Nations said. This year’s average temperature will be “approximately” 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above …
November 20, 2015
El Niño is the Earth’s hot, exhaling breath. At least, that’s one way of thinking about it. The blast of heat from deep within the Pacific Ocean will do more in 2015 than just disrupt weather worldwide. It will push …