Science agencies around the world, including NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, report 2024 was the hottest year ever in recorded history.
Global temperatures in 2024 were 2.30 degrees Fahrenheit (1.28 degrees Celsius) above NASA’s 20th-century baseline (1951-1980), which tops the record set in 2023, according to the space agency.
There might not be hurricanes in Michigan or wildfires at the scale of what’s happening in California, but we are seeing increased prices, in part, because of climate disruption.
"The number of storms, the severity of storms is going up. Insurance payouts are going up. Insurance solvency around the country, the number of insurance companies that have gone bankrupt in Florida and California is alarming for state officials,” said Andrew Hoffman, a Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the Ross School of Business and the School for Environment & Sustainability at the University of Michigan.
Some states have had to fund their own insurance programs, costing taxpayers.
You can read articles by Hoffman about insurance costs rising here and here.
There have been increasingly severe storms, causing flooding in Michigan. And last year there was a spate of wildfires. Experts say climate change is fueling more intense weather events.
Often, though, people don’t see or recognize a significant change in their lives.
“If you really want people to care about climate change, put a dollar sign on it and then it hits them personally because the typical line among scientists (is) people will deny climate change. Either it will happen to somebody else, someplace else, or in the future. And it remains abstract,” Hoffman said.
He added that a lot of insurance companies in certain regions are sometimes refusing to renew policies, or putting more exclusions in, or raising deductibles, all in an effort to keep the system solvent as payouts continue to go up across the nation.
Increased demands on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) also costs taxpayers across the whole country.
Insurance companies buy policies too. Re-insurers have increased rates as they calculate the long-term effects of climate change on buildings, forests, water shortages and more on a world-wide scale.
Hoffman said those increased prices you’ve been seeing at the grocery store are partly due to inflation, but also because of crop damage caused by a changing climate.
