On the eve of hurricane season, we ponder what would happen if an irresistible force met an immovable object.  To make this concrete, we consider the effect of a Hurricane Katrina-like storm impacting Florida's property insurance program, the centerpiece of which is the actuarially unsound, tax-exempt, non-profit corporation, and insurer of last resort, Citizens' Property Insurance Corporation. The Atlantic hurricane season begins tomorrow. The forecasters at the University of Colorado Hurricane Center predict 16 named storms.  Historically, that is an above average crop. Their meth...

Last Thursday Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and other prominent diplomats signed the first ever treaty under the auspices of the Arctic Council; specifically, the member nations addressed Arctic search and rescue, made necessary by the increasing traffic in the formerly ice-locked realm caused by the reality of Arctic warming. Less noticed, perhaps, was the release of a report by the Council's Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP).  Among other things, the report, Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic, forecasts up to a 5-foot rise in sea level by the turn of th...

When we wrote last month concerning the implications of the upcoming decision by the Supreme Court in American Electric Power v. Connecticut, we were fully expecting to wait for the decision to test our powers of prognostication.  We were very wrong.  In a collection of lawsuits and regulatory filings across the nation, environmentalists have joined the climate change litigation fray in a very big way.  Here is what we wrote:  "[A dismissal of Connecticut] says nothing about state law nuisance claims, nor new theories that have not yet been tested, nor even thought up....