Neither Tim Wagner nor Mike Kreidler imagined how climate change would intrude into state insurance regulation. Wagner, the director of the Nebraska Department of Insurance, said the reality is literally pelting him.

"While you can't correlate it directly, in the Plains states we've had severe droughts," Wagner, 63, said over the telephone. "We've had fires in Texas and Oklahoma. There's a terrible drought in Arizona right now. When we get rain, we seem to get more and more severe hail. I just drove to Kansas City. My nephew is in Iraq and we went to see his family. Our brand-new car got pummeled while it was parked in north Kansas City. We didn't lose any glass, but plastic parts of the car rack and a piece of the bumper was hanging off. I don't think I remember being in a hail storm like that in my lifetime."

How bad is it?

Ceres says that insured losses due to weather have grown 10 times faster than premiums since 1971, and the percentage of total economic losses from catastrophic weather has grown from a "negligible fraction in the 1950s to 25 percent in the past decade."

And speaking of weather...

Gulf platform damage is still being assessed

It's unlikely that the full extent of damage to oil and gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico will be known, let alone repaired, before the start of next hurricane season.

Earlier this month, fewer than half of the 3,050 platforms that were in the paths of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita had been fully evaluated for damage, said Don Howard, regional supervisor for field operations for the Minerals Management Service.