Last week, Britain’s Prince Charles called climate change ‘the No. 1 risk in the world, ahead of terrorism and demographic change.’ But the prince, a long-time environmentalist, has some unlikely competition for the year’s most strident statement on global warming. In a Feb. 6 address to the United Nations Security Council, conservative Republican Sen. Richard Lugar called for action on global warming, citing recent advances in scientific knowledge on the subject: ‘The problem [of climate change] is real and caused by man-made emissions of greenhouse gasses, including carbon dioxide from fossil fuels.’ He went on to add that climate change could ‘bring drought, famine, disease, mass migration and rising sea levels threatening coasts and economies worldwide, all of which could lead to political conflict and instability.’ Lugar is not the only one reassessing global warming. Last week, insurers, bruised by a devastating 2005 Atlantic storm season that saw an all-time high of 14 hurricanes, announced plans to establish a climate-change task force under the auspices of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. Record insurance-industry losses of $30 billion from 2004’s hurricanes in the United States were dwarfed by the more than $60 billion in insurance losses […]