Reuters Investigates

The hurricane guessing game

Unpredictable weather is making life difficult for insurers — see today’s special report: ”Extreme weather batters the insurance industry.”

By Ben Berkowitz

Every year forecasters at Colorado State University take their most educated guess as to how the next year’s hurricane season will unfold. It always draws headlines, but as history shows, that initial “best guess” is usually somewhat far off the mark.

An analysis of 10 years of first forecasts for the subsequent June-November storm season shows the number of tropical storms generally exceeds expectations, sometimes by a fair bit. As you go up the scale to full-blown hurricanes and on to the more intense “major hurricanes,” the disconnect remains the same.

In 2006, for example, the number of major hurricanes matched the predicted number of all hurricanes, period. In 2010 the number of hurricanes was greater than the expected incidence of all tropical storms. (In fact 2010 is considered by experts to have been a relatively heavy storm year, despite the fact none actually made a crucial U.S. landfall).

Though the predictions have a mixed track record, they serve a useful planning purpose. If insurers, governments and coast-dwellers have a reasonable guess as to what a storm season is going to look like generally, they can plan ahead. In hurricane country, planning ahead is often the only thing that separates inconvenience from disaster.

WikiLeaks, OpenLeaks, GreenLeaks and more leaks

A Reuters exclusive details the emergence of two anti-corporate, WikiLeaks-style websites in Europe, both called GreenLeaks. The sites promise to leak confidential documents regarding environmental abuses by a host of industries.

The report by Mark Hosenball also reveals the rise of other possible WikiLeaks copycats that would focus on specialized topics or regions — from Russia and the European Union bureaucracy to international trade, the pharmaceutical industry and the Balkans.

The two rival GreenLeaks sites were set up by Mads Bjerg (left) in Copenhagen (greenleaks.org) and Scott Millwood (below) in Berlin (greenleaks.com) — and neither is happy about the competition.

Over lunch in a Berlin sushi bar, Millwood told Reuters his group acquired the domain name GreenLeaks in 36 countries where it also has registered GreenLeaks internet addresses under the “.com” and “.biz” designators. Millwood said he also has applied to the European Union to register “GreenLeaks” as a trademark, but recently learned that Bjerg’s Denmark-based group had made a similar move within days of Millwood making his own application.

Millwood acknowledged that there was “one inactive domain name that we don’t own” –  Bjerg’s URL, “GreenLeaks.org.” By the same token he said, one of the URLs Millwood says he registered himself is “GreenLeaks.dk” — a domain name specifically related to Denmark. Millwood acknowledged the rivalry between the two groups could escalate into a “legal dispute.” 

The most closely watched rollout in the leak-hosting world was the launch on Thursday of OpenLeaks.org, a site whose principal creator, German transparency activist Daniel Domscheit-Berg, was once Julian Assange’s closest collaborator on WikiLeaks.

Weird weather and the Amazon

As scientists from around the world gather in Cancun for the latest U.N. conference on climate change, Stuart Grudgings reports from Caapiranga, in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, for his special report “Weird weather leaves Amazon thirsty.”

This year’s drought in the Amazon was the kind of thing experts call a ”once in a century” event. Unfortunately, it was the second one in five years.

It’s not just Brazil that is feeling battered by extreme weather. As this graphic shows, extreme events have become far more commonplace in recent years. 

To see the special report in multimedia PDF format, click here.