THE SET-UP: La Niña was supposed to give us a break. At least, that’s what years of experience and analysis indicated. Along with El Niño, it’s one half of a climactic “Yin and Yang” that generates predictable weather patterns along the western half of the Pacific Rim.
And what should one expect from La Niña?
Since Elon’s Tech Bro Goon Squad hasn’t yet—and that’s a big “yet”—unplugged NOAA’s website or triggered the privatization of its work, let’s let their experts explain it:
During La Niña events, trade winds are even stronger than usual, pushing more warm water toward Asia. Off the west coast of the Americas, upwelling increases, bringing cold, nutrient-rich water to the surface.
These cold waters in the Pacific push the jet stream northward. This tends to lead to drought in the southern U.S. and heavy rains and flooding in the Pacific Northwest and Canada. During a La Niña year, winter temperatures are warmer than normal in the South and cooler than normal in the North. La Niña can also lead to a more severe hurricane season.
It’s that “cooler than normal” thing that led scientists to anticipate the end of a streak of ever-hotter Januaries.
But guess what?
That’s right, the climate “hoax” is hoaxing extra hard right now and it came through with another record-breaking January … in spite of La Niña’s cooling presence. But not to worry. President Trump signed Executive Orders that eliminated climate change! It effectively doesn’t exist anymore, at least as far the US Government is concerned. We can all relax now that God’s anointed savior has swept away the record-setting heat, the record-setting storms, the record-setting droughts, the record-setting floods and the record-setting disasters with record-setting price tags … all with the stroke of a Sharpie.
Speaking of Sharpies, he’s also brought back Neil Jacobs to run NOAA (or to run it into the ground). If that name doesn’t ring a bell, he was the *scientist* who came to Trump’s rescue in 2019 when he infamously used a Sharpie to alter the projected course of Hurricane Dorian on a map. He issued a demonstrably bogus statement supporting the Glorious Leader’s fantasy after scientists at the National Weather Service pointed out that Alabama was not in danger.
As ABC News pointed out, the “NOAA Science Council subsequently investigated Jacobs, saying that he violated the organization's scientific integrity policy.”
In other words, he jettisoned science fact for Trump’s fiction. And that fact alone makes him a perfect choice to lead the one agency where the dangerous (and costly) reality of a changing climate should trump Trump’s hoax. - jp
TITLE: Climate Change Could Erase $1.47 Trillion in Property Values by 2055, Study Says
https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/climate-change-insurance-property-values-study/
EXCERPTS: Growing risks triggered by climate change are projected to erase a staggering $1.47 trillion in U.S. home values and cause the displacement of tens of millions of people in the next 30 years, according to a new study from First Street.
The climate risk assessment company’s novel analysis published on Monday projects that, by 2055, more than 70,000 neighborhoods across the country may see local home values dramatically diminished by climate risks, resulting in the jaw-dropping eight-figure property value loss.
A combination of various factors could set off the potential plunge in real estate values in the coming decades, including skyrocketing insurance costs associated with increasingly frequent and devastating natural disasters, and climate-related migration caused by changing demand.
In other words, chronic climate changes, such as rising sea levels or drought, combined with wildfires, like the ones that overwhelmed Los Angeles County last month, hurricanes, and tornadoes—are expected to cause insurance premiums to rise.
Rising insurance costs, in turn, will encourage people to leave high-risk areas and move to more climate-resilient locations.
First Street's 44-page report estimates that home insurance premiums will surge by 29.4% in the next 30 years. Meanwhile, over 55 million Americans will "voluntarily relocate" within the U.S. to areas less susceptible to climate risks by 2055, beginning with 5.2 million this year alone.
The counties that are expected to be hit the hardest by climate-related population exodus are Fresno County, CA (-45.8%), Ocean County, NJ (-33.3%), and Monmouth County, NJ (32.4%), according to First Street's detailed analysis.
The Sun Belt—the U.S. region stretching across the Southeast and Southwest—is expected to bear the brunt of the climate-related migration.
This marks a sharp reversal from a decades-long trend that saw Americans head to the Sun Belt in search of a better quality of life, more affordable and larger homes, better weather, and often, lower insurance costs.
But climate change is fundamentally disrupting this dynamic by making once-desirable parts of the Sun Belt both riskier and more expensive. Since 1980, the three largest Sun Belt states—Texas, Florida, and California—have absorbed more than 40% of the nation’s $2.8 trillion in natural disaster costs.
Homeowners in the Sun Belt are already feeling the squeeze, with insurance premiums rising faster than mortgage payments. Between 2013 and 2022, insurance as a share of mortgage payments jumped from 7%-8% to over 20% of total mortgage costs.
The five largest metros facing the most dramatic insurance premium spikes are all located in that sun-drenched part of the U.S., with Miami facing an eye-watering 322% increase, followed by Jacksonville, FL, with 226%, Tampa, FL, with 213%, New Orleans with 196%, and Sacramento, CA, with 137%.
Despite the growing insurance costs, some locations, including counties in the Miami and Tampa areas, as well as in Houston, are expected to continue to experience population growth on the strength of the local economies and other amenities, which make those regions attractive to homeowners despite the risks.
Houston in particular is an example of how strong economic fundamentals can override climate risks, according to the First Street report.
Despite experiencing multiple large-scale natural disasters, with Hurricane Ike in 2008 and Hurricane Harvey in 2017, which cost the metro a combined total of more than $200 billion, Harris County, which is home to Houston, has grown by 1.3 million residents since 2000.
And the median home values in the area shot up 58% from 2017 to 2022, outpacing national averages.
However, experts warn that this climate resilience in high-risk areas is likely temporary.
TITLE: How much is your Texas home worth? If you pay a lot for insurance, less than you might think.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/home-insurance-texas-20023425.php
EXCERPTS: Higher home insurance premiums are threatening to destabilize the housing market, as buyers back away from increasingly uninsurable homes and homeowners struggle to keep up with payments in areas more prone to the impacts of climate change.
Real estate analysts and academics are concerned that insurance hikes will crater property values in some communities, sending a shock wave through the country’s economy that, as a U.S. Senate Budget Committee report concluded late last year, could “trigger a full-scale financial crisis similar to what occurred in 2008.”
“Insurance is the primary mechanism by which climate change is pricing its way into the real estate market,” said Jeremy Porter, the head of climate implications at First Street, a company that models climate risk.
In Texas, where home insurance has spiked only recently, there’s little data on how property values are being impacted.
But real estate agents and mortgage brokers on the coast say the early signs are there – and not just because of higher interest rates, which have slowed down the market nationally. Buyers are increasingly backing out of contracts because they can’t afford the cost of insurance. Homes are sitting on the market for longer, and sellers are dropping list prices.
Homeownership has been the primary way that Americans build wealth for nearly a century — paying roughly the same amount on a fixed-rate loan every month for 30 years and retiring with an asset to pass along to their kids.
Climate change upends that bargain.
“The whole notion of a 30-year mortgage is now in question,” said Toni Moss, the founder and CEO of AmeriCatalyst, a real estate research company based in Austin. “You originate a loan for 30 years and you assume the environment is stable, and that’s no longer true.”
A report released on Monday by First Street found that mounting insurance costs and increased climate risk could erode the value of residential real estate by $1.5 trillion over the coming decades.
Home insurance costs make up a greater percentage of a monthly mortgage payment than ever before – more than 20%, compared to 8% in decades prior, according to the research.
Over the next three decades, almost every county in Texas will see property values erode because of the rising cost of insurance and people moving away from areas of high climate risk, First Street found, with some of the highest losses concentrated in North and West Texas.
“For years the severity and frequency of these events have been increasing,” Porter said. “But insurance changes have just started to catch up in the last three, four, five years. So we built up this uneven climate debt that we’re just trying to pay off.”
The impact of the home insurance crisis on real estate can already be seen in Florida, where homes are taking longer to sell and often for less than the list price, Porter said.
“After years and years of the Florida market being really resilient …. We're starting to see sellers not hold the upper hand anymore,” Porter said.
In Texas, many sellers are dropping list prices to factor in the cost of insurance, said Troy Cothran, a real estate agent and the secretary-treasurer of the Houston Association of Realtors. He estimated that list prices in some coastal communities are being reduced by 5 to 15%.
Numerous studies have found that when climate risk is communicated to prospective home buyers — either through the price of insurance or flood disclosure laws — the value of homes in high-risk areas drops.
That type of information is only becoming more accessible to home buyers.
Last year, Zillow incorporated First Street Foundation’s climate risk data into some of its home listings, following other listing sites including Redfin and Realtor.com. Home buyers can now see how an individual property rates on five risk factors — flood, wildfire, wind, heat and air quality.
In 2019, Texas lawmakers tightened up disclosure requirements for sellers located in moderate flood zones. As a result, thousands of homeowners had to start disclosing their homes were at risk of flooding — and in the years after, one study found home prices in 500-year flood zones fell 4.2%.
New flood maps from FEMA are expected this year, which will change the boundaries of where people are required to carry flood insurance — and disclose their flood risk.
Mostly, people are not leaving Houston and moving to Duluth, Minnesota, Porter said. Instead, people are moving within metropolitan areas from areas of high climate risk to areas with lower risk, often because they’re anchored to the place through their jobs and families.
“They still want to live in Houston and they still want to live in Miami,” he said. “They just maybe would try to pick a home that has a flood factor of six instead of a ten.”
First Street mapped Census blocks across the country where the population has already declined due to flood risk. Property values in these so-called climate abandonment areas will fall by 6.2% over the next three decades, researchers found, with most of that loss attributable to the rising cost of insurance.
The contours of climate-related home value depreciation are still emerging, said Toni Moss of AmeriCatalyst. But what is clear, she said, is that there will be uninhabitable areas. And as property values decline, so will tax revenues and public services.
“Unless we deal with the root cause of climate change, we're buying time,” Moss said. “In a sense, we're all renting certain parts of the country that are livable for now.”
TITLE: LA wildfires highlight need for solutions to US insurance crisis
https://greencentralbanking.com/2025/02/06/la-wildfires-highlight-need-for-solutions-to-us-insurance-crisis/
EXCERPTS: Climate change has increased risks in the insurance industry, said Jérôme Crugnola-Humbert, a former sustainable finance policy expert at the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA).
“The risk has gone up, the exposure has gone up. So you have some sort of exponential explosion of the costs, which means insurance will become either unaffordable or won’t even be offered anymore,” he said.
Insurance premiums in the US have recently skyrocketed, and some homeowners in areas exposed to climate disasters have forgone insurance altogether, a report from the Department of the Treasury found. Homeowners living in areas with the highest expected annual losses from climate-related events paid up to 82% more for their insurance.
Insurance rates in California are cheap compared to other climate-risk prone areas like New Orleans and Miami, partly due to hurricane risk in the south, but also because of California’s regulatory market, said Ben Keys, an economist and real estate finance professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Annual property insurance coverage costs in California are among the cheapest in the US, falling below $3 per $1,000 of coverage in some areas.
For decades insurers could not model future catastrophic risks like wildfire for pricing purposes. In December, California insurance commissioner Ricardo Lara issued a regulation to expand insurance access, including mandatory increased coverage in high-risk areas and allowing insurers to use wildfire catastrophe modelling if they increase offerings in underserved areas of the state. But those requirements do not extend to underwriting.
Insurance premiums for California homeowners could increase in the next year due to Lara’s changes and the LA fires, said Joel Laucher, a former California Department of Insurance commissioner and consumer advocate at United Policyholders.
The risk changes are “likely to result in pretty significant rate increases given the insurers fervor for using them, we know they wouldn’t want to use them If it was going to result in lower rates,” he said.
But the regulation changes may not increase access, as “insurance companies don’t have to incorporate those wildfire resilient investments into determining whether or not to write policies in the first place in riskier regions,” said Haedtler.
Insurance policies are set annually, which means there’s no guarantee that the new regulations will help long term. State Farm, California’s largest private insurer, has already asked for a 22% emergency rate hike due to the LA fires.
Laucher says it is likely insurers will be careful to not be concentrated in areas too prone to risk.
“That’s kind of an old insurance standard to guard against over risk, meaning writing too many homes or businesses, such that the cumulative values of all that coverage subject to a single catastrophe could do financial damage to the insurer,” Laucher said.
Ultimately, Haedtler says states need to take matters into their own hands and address the insurance crisis holistically, as the federal disaster relief system is unlikely to be reformed anytime soon under US president Donald Trump.
“The trend of states making decisions about how to fund climate resilience and then incorporating those climate-resilient land planning and investment decisions into their insurance regulations rules is going to be a pattern going forward.”
Shrinking the insurance protection gap in California and other states goes beyond just raising rates and regulation. It also “encompasses not just insurance regulation, but land use, building codes, affordable housing” said Haedtler.
Homeowners and regulators across the US should think about the longer-term effects of resilience measures instead of just building as quickly and cheaply as possible because those structures might become damaged again.
“Invest more at the start for more resilient building materials or other prevention measures, knowing that it’s an investment, but it will be recouped not in one year, but over five or 10 years,” Crugnola-Humbert said.
In the end he worries that insurance is becoming more individualised and more like self-insurance, where money is kept aside or put in a safe, as insurers increase their risk selection and become over-reliant on precise risk diagnostics. This trend could ultimately make insurance only available to those who are not so much at risk and can recover from disasters more easily.
SEE ALSO:
Climate disasters lead to billions in insurance losses. Could they trigger a financial crisis?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/climate-disasters-financial-crisis-1.7449907
Insurance companies continue to invest in oil and gas despite climate fears
https://www.1012industryreport.com/oil-gas/insurance-companies-continue-to-invest-in-oil-and-gas-despite-climate-fears/
Directive From New Interior Secretary Weakens Public Land Protections to Push Fossil Fuels
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/05022025/new-interior-secretary-weakens-public-land-protections-fossil-fuels/
‘The Ocean is coming’: Antarctic ice may be sliding into the sea faster than we know
https://www.businesstoday.in/visualstories/news/the-ocean-is-coming-antarctic-ice-may-be-sliding-into-the-sea-faster-than-we-know-207809-06-02-2025
Can geoengineering plans save glaciers and slow sea level rise?
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/glacier-engineering-to-slow-rising-sea
Nice writing in your "Set-up". Living on a fixed income in our own beautiful home right across from a tinderbox regional park, we're just waiting for the bad news from our insurer. When we bought this house 25 years ago, the plentiful rainfall made fire risk very small.