[californiadisasters] Silicon Valley Invests in Extreme Weather Insurance

Climate change: Silicon Valley invests in extreme weather insurance

By Edwin Chan/Reuters
March 1, 2011 |  4:47 pm

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and Google Ventures have invested $42 million in a start-up run by former Google employees, which helps insure farmers against losses from increasingly volatile global weather.

Khosla Ventures and Google Ventures join Allen & Co, NEA and other investors in WeatherBill, whose team of software engineers and climatologists collates weather data from various sources, then sells insurance based on statistical analysis.

WeatherBill -- founded by ex-Google employees David Friedberg and Siraj Khaliq -- argues that the $3 trillion in annual global agriculture production is increasingly at risk from wild and unpredictable weather fluctuations. The year 2010, during which extreme weather caused devastating floods in Pakistan, China and Australia and a heatwave in Russia, was the warmest on record alongside 1998 and 2005, the United Nations says.

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