the world's top scientific minds in hurricanes, severe storms and climate prediction, together with leading insurers, reinsurers and experts on risk analysis.

The company is sponsoring a presentation from November 1-4 by the Bermuda Biological Sataion-based Atlantic Global Change Institute, which studies the human dimensions of climate change.

The Marriott's Castle Harbour Resort conference will centre on several issues, including the topical subject, climate-related catastrophes: hurricanes and severe storms, natural cycles and climate change, relevance of changes in storm frequency to insurance practice.

Another topic, alignment between science and business communities, will explore the concept of how well the goals of the science and insurance industries match each other's needs.

The conference would also seek to find out what the insurance industry could do with improved climate prediction technology.

The meeting will also lay a framework for these discussions by looking at the predictability of the global climate system. General principles of climate variability and the El N ino cycle as a predictor of climate will be explored.

Centre Cat president, Mr. Charles Kline, said: "Although the formal invitations have not yet been sent out, we have had interest generated by a letter we have sent out to a number of people.

"There has been an awful lot of interest from those who have been watching this hurricane season develop as predicted -- a terrible season. They are wondering if it is time to take the issue off the weather channel and put it in their business plan, thinking about what the predictions mean and how they should deal with them.

"We were not trying to make this a huge conference, but already there have been predictions that it would be oversubscribed.'' The project coordinator for the event is the Whitfield Group. Mr. Bill Hunter, Centre Cat's chief technology officer, said: "The target number of people for this is fairly small. It is a selected conference, as opposed to a broad scale event. We are shooting for what could be 100 scientists.

"The attendance concept is not really to fill Bermuda with attendees, it's really to get the people we are shooting for, the people who the conference is custom designed for.

"We want to expose world class experts to those business people who are keenly interested in this subject. So we are looking at 200 to 250 people with the mix being evenly distributed between business and science participants.

"We are also telling people through our network that this is deliberately intended to be kind of a counterweight to some occasionally, dire sounding predictions.

"There is a lot of activity from Greenpeace and a contingent of global-change fans. So we want to have as close to the scientifically valid perspective as possible.''