Lawsuits over climate are popping up. In 2011, the power company AES tried to draw on its contracts with Steadfast Insurance when an Inupiat Eskimo village in Alaska sued it, along with a bunch of coal-burning utilities, a coal producer and some energy companies, because sea ice that formerly protected the village from winter storms was melting.

The state Supreme Court of Virginia ultimately agreed that Steadfast could deny coverage. Other suits for damages have also failed. But that won’t hold liability at bay forever. Munich Re, for instance, says it believes policies covering corporate officers and directors may have to pay for damages stemming from their failure to consider the consequences of climate change in their professional activities.

“Lawsuits are an inevitable part of the American system for determining whether and how to compensate for damages,” the Ceres report noted. “The larger the alleged injuries from climate change, the greater the recovery efforts will be.”

They could quickly add up. In a 2011 report, the United Nations Environmental Program’s Finance Initiative concluded that the world’s 3,000 top public companies were causing about $1.5 trillion a year of environmental damage because of greenhouse gas emissions.

Fears of liability risks seem to be freezing insurers like deer in the headlights. Insurance companies that were already wary of the political risk of wading into the climate change debate have been further chilled by the potential legal liability.

If they start writing policies specifically excluding liabilities related to climate change, could that be interpreted as saying that previous policies did cover them? What if they don’t mention it at all?

“Discussions of liability disclosure occur more openly outside of the U.S.,” said Lindene E. Patton, the former chief climate product officer at Zurich Re, who was a co-author of the American Bar Association’s “Climate Change and Insurance” report two years ago. “In the U. S. anything you say can be interpreted in future litigation.”