Global warming profiteers infect inurance business in US and abroad--governments roll over and give taxpayer dollars

"Over the past year, Australian insurance companies increased their rates to cover the damage costs from predicted "extreme weather events".

• Note that we're not talking about any extreme weather events in particular, or events predicted to occur at any precise time or location.
  
• Just, you know, extreme weather events. Due to, um, climate change.

Everyone's talking about it, so, like, it's bound to happen. Better jack up those rates. The climate change is upon us.

• Rate increases for household and car insurance were practically industry-wide.

As my Daily Telegraph colleague Andrew Carswell reported last week, some companies blew things out by as much as 10 per cent, driven by insurance industry claims that "severe weather events ... are

• now no longer unusual events, and the pricing models of the insurers must reflect this".

Insurance rates are usually based more on history

• than prediction.

If you've had your car broken into several times, your insurance costs will rise accordingly. But climate change is yet to damage a single house or car.

• No matter; you're going to pay for it anyway.

And Australians did. One company alone, Insurance Australia Group, the owners of NRMA, increased rates to cover an expected $166 million in payouts for "natural peril" claims. As Carswell reported, however, payouts fell $45 million short of that sum.

• Why? Because catastrophic climate change events didn't happen. Therefore, that $45 million became profit.

Insurers Suncorp-Metway, QBE and Allianz also enjoyed similarly massive payoffs thanks to climate change's no-show. You've got to hand it to them; in the middle of a global financial crisis, these businesses turned nothing into gold.

• Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is hot for regulating big-business profiteers.

This case is almost perfect for him. Check it out, Kev. You've got your fear mongering, your industry collusion, your poor blameless consumers being shaken down. What's holding you back?

• At a guess, one thing. Rudd and his Government have led the climate change panic that these insurers are cashing in on.

In January 2009, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong warned that "the number of heat-related deaths in our capital cities is projected to double to about 2300 a year" by 2020. As well, infectious diseases, bushfire-related injuries, food-safety related illness and dengue fever would all soar.

• With Australia becoming a toxic, burning fever-swamp littered with boiling corpses, it's only reasonable to expect some slight increases in property damage along the way.

Someone driving to the dengue clinic could catch fire and crash into a house, if it hasn't already been burned to the ground by Peter Garrett's roving incineration installers.

• That's a bunch of payouts right there. Insurance companies have got to be alert to these issues. They're also awfully worried about how much they'll be charging people to insure beachside properties. Lots, probably, on account of the sea-level rises that will wipe out coastal Australia. The Government is fond of talking about this, too.

Strange thing, though. While insurance rates increase, so do beachside property values. If these places are such death traps, why are they so expensive?

• If the government-insurance complex is convinced that coastal Australia is just a holding pen for the doomed, how come there isn't a rush for the inland?

It's not as though high property prices in, say, Orange are holding anyone back. There's a nice little three-bedroom place available right now in North St for just $140,000, which is just slightly less than you'll pay in Sydney for a mailbox. And, by virtue of its inland location, it's completely safe from climate change. Sadly, however, even Orange isn't safe from universal climate change-related insurance increases.

• And if you think insurance is where is ends, consider where your taxes are going.

In Britain, a report recently found that the Government's taxpayer-financed Climate Challenge Fund had spent nearly $A16 million on idiotic stunts intended to alert citizens about global warming and the like.

• Not only were these stunts stupid, they didn't work. Public opinion in the UK, as everywhere else, is trending against climate change alarmism.

The same capers are under way here, beginning with the Department of Climate Change. Your money is being stolen by artists of the con variety. And unless an elderly German fag-bandit is somehow responsible for all of this, you're never getting any of it back."

• 3/1/10, "Merciless pirates of disaster run amok" The Daily Telegraph, AU, Tim Blair via Tom Nelson