An Unsettling Climate Warning for Homeownership
Image by Breno Assis.
Earth’s climate system has suddenly shifted to a new phase of global warming acceleration that few saw coming. This ups the ante for risks of severe climate-related disaster scenarios following a record-shattering year in 2025. This directly impacts American homeownership, whether it is compatible with current U.S. energy/climate policies.
Global Warming Acceleration 2023-24-25 Set All-Time Records
“The last three years are indicative of an acceleration in the warming. They’re not consistent with the linear trend that we’ve been observing for the 50 years before that,” according to Robert Rohde, chief scientist at the Berkeley Earth monitoring group. (Scientists Call Another Near-Record Hot Year a ‘Warning Shot’ From a Shifting Climate, NPR, January 16, 2026)
Ever since 1850, commonly used as a starting point for global warming calculations, nothing compares to the sudden shift over the years 2023-24-25. Global warming is accelerating at a rate not experienced in 175 years of measurements. And it’s not a one-off event; it’s solid; it’s 36 months of acceleration. Five-t0-ten years ago nobody predicted this sudden lift off, but it’s happening.
Global temperatures have increased a brisk+42% since 2015. This is a record rate of increase. Interestingly, “Even as the United States languishes under a frigid cold snap, the rest of the world is still experiencing unusually warm temperatures. Nuuk, Greenland, for example, saw temperatures in January more than 20 degrees Fahrenheit above average. Parts of Australia, meanwhile, have seen temperatures push past 120 degrees Fahrenheit amid a record heat wave.” (Scientists Thought They Understood Global Warming. Then the Past Three Years Happened, The Washington Post, Feb. 11, 2026)
According to Samantha Burgess of Copernicus: “The overwhelming culprit is clear: the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.” Burgess made note of an extraordinary number of ‘heat waves’ in 2025 that broke local and national records for absolute temperatures. With a warmer world, every weather event turns more intense, e.g., atmospheric rivers with massive quantities of moisture bring devastating flash floods.
The U.S. had approximately 5,000 flash flood warnings in 2025, breaking all previous records. Eighty-three percent (83%) of warnings were for events lasting less than three hours indicative of rapidly developing very high-intensity flash floods. The three-year period 2023-24-25 set an historical record of unprecedented billion-dollar disaster events.
“For businesses and communities, 2025 serves as a stark reminder that ‘average’ weather is a thing of the past. Whether it is a supply chain disrupted by an ice storm in the Gulf Coast, livelihoods upended by fires in California, or assets threatened by a flash flood, vulnerability is everywhere.” (From Fire to Flood, how 2025 Rewrote the Records, Baron Weather, Jan.18, 2026)
The U.S. experienced a total of twenty-one (21) individual billion-dollar severe weather disasters in 2025. And the frequency of these U.S. billion-dollar disasters increased enough to send alarms screeching across the land. For example, over the past 50 years the average time between billion-dollar severe events has dropped from 82 days in the 1980s to 16-19 days during the last decade 2015-2024. In 2025 it was 10 days between billion-dollar disasters.
Insurance companies worldwide are nearly running out of patience and out of bullets to fight this global-warming-caused uprooting of society. Allianz SE (Climate, Risk, Insurance, the Future of Capitalism) the world’s largest insurer, has warned of impending financial disasters because of human-generated global warming, killing the golden capitalist goose that lays golden eggs turned rotten as severe weather events make properties nearly uninsurable. This is not a casual event; it’s happening coast-to-coast.
The Consumer Federation of America’s April 2025 report, Overburdened, found that U.S. homeowners spent $21 billion more on homeowners’ insurance in 2024 than in 2021. According to insurance.com: The outlook: “2026: Increasing Rates, Climate Change, and Consumer Frustration.”
As of the past few years, home insurance rates have become tied to the rate of global warming, which directly impacts severe climate conditions. According to National Mortgage Professional d/d Jan. 5, 2026, Home Insurance Market to be Shaped by Climate Risk and Tech in ‘26: “After several consecutive years of double-digit rate increases, national home insurance premium growth decelerated in 2025. Matic’s proprietary data show the average premium for a new policy reached approximately $1,950 by December, representing an 8.5% year-over-year increase. This moderation follows an 18% surge in 2024, and a 12% rise in 2023, signaling some easing in rate pressures.”
However, world-renown climate guru James Hansen’s outlook is not homeowner friendly: “We project a global temperature record of +1.7°C in 2027, which will provide further confirmation of the recent global warming acceleration.” (Global Temperature in 2025, 2026, 2027, Climate Uncensored, Dec. 18, 2025)
One of the great ironies, as well as tragedy, of the Trump administration favoring fossil fuels, destroying renewables, short sheeting the IPCC, and preaching climate hoaxes is Trump’s RE background. His presidency is working against his résumé. This warrants the biggest ‘DUH’ of this decade and seriously questions his judgement. After all, who understands the Greatness of RE better? And aren’t insurance executives whispering in his ear, speaking the truth about climate change slamming the insurance industry, rates skyrocket, coverage shrinks, RE fails, capitalism tumbles, hard. This is the public message from many insurance and banking executives over the past couple of years and supported by academic research: “Trump’s anti-climate policies are driving up insurance costs for homeowners, say experts,” Yale Climate Connections, Dec. 24, 2025.
Essentially, American homeownership becomes the sacrificial lamb for fossil fuel promotion that pays big bucks for rights and privileges to pollute and ignore the consequences. But homeowners know only too well the consequences. According to Urban .org: d/d Sept 25, 2026: “America’s housing and insurance markets faces a “perfect storm” of affordability challenges, climate risks, and supply shortages that threatens to displace millions of families, undermine economic stability, and push homeownership out of reach.”
A US Department of Treasury 2025 report states: “The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Federal Insurance Office (FIO) today released the most comprehensive data on homeowners insurance in history, along with a major report showing that homeowners insurance is becoming more costly and harder to procure for millions of Americans as the costs of climate-related events pose growing challenges to insurers and their customers alike.”
Climate Change – A ‘Systems Failure’ Already Underway
As for the 2026 outlook, according to Forbes d/d Jan. 12, 2026: “In 2026, climate change is no longer a theoretical risk. It is a measurable, compounding stress on the systems that underpin economies, public health and energy security. Strip away the rhetoric and climate change looks less like a future threat and more like a systems failure already underway, one that is now visible in temperature records, storm damage, rising seas and widening economic losses… Climate risk is now a planning variable, rather than a forecast uncertainty. The countries, companies and institutions that endure the coming decade will be those that stop treating climate change as a long-term scenario and start managing it as a present-day operational reality.” (In 2026, Climate Change Is No Longer A Theoretical Risk, Forbes, Jan. 12, 2026)
If global warming continues to accelerate like the past three years, deteriorating economics of homeownership will force the hand of the U.S. government to make a choice between the biggest promotion of polluting fossil fuels in American history, which is current policy, or saving American homeownership by choosing renewable energy over fossil fuels. Or will it be too late by the time this administration learns how RE crumbles when fossil fuel emissions totally disrupt the world’s climate system?
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