Flux continu

Melting glaciers, coastal areas wiped off the map and regular 40C heat in Europe. Climate experts warn the gloomy predictions of long term environmental change are no longer the future - they are already here. Last year was the third hottest on record, with the World Meteorological Organization this week warning that 2025 continued a run of “extraordinary” global temperatures. The EU has said the Paris climate agreement of 1.5C could be broken before 2030, a decade sooner than expected.

Back in 2018, Yale economist William Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize for his work on his Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy (DICE) model. The idea was to set up a picture of the global economy, add on some estimates of the economic costs of warming with a “damage function,” plus estimates of what climate policy would cost, and all adjusted with a discount term to account for how people value current production more than future production (according to economists, at least). That way you can calculate an “optimal” climate policy in the form of a carbon tax that would precisely compensate for warming damages without burdening the economy too much.

The 29-year-old was arrested by City of London police after activists said they had cut the cables to insurance company offices in London, Leeds, Birmingham and Sheffield on Monday. In a press release, the group, which calls itself Shut the System, said it had targeted insurers “due to their critical role underpinning the fossil fuel economy through underwriting contracts and investments”.

Insurance costs are rising quickly across much of the country. Hurricanes are part of the reason, but it’s the other perils common across the Midwest and Great Plains that complicate costs.

A town hit hard by two hurricanes, downpours and a deep freeze, all in the midst of a pandemic, offers crucial lessons for everyone’s disaster planning and recovery.

Waves of severe thunderstorms in the U.S. during the first half of this year led to $34 billion in insured losses, an unprecedented level of financial damage in such a short time as climate change contributes to the frequency and severity of violent meteorological events. The reinsurer Swiss Re Group said Wednesday that damages from convective storms in the U.S., which can come with hail, lightning, heavy rain and high winds, accounted for nearly 70% of the $50 billion in global catastrophic damages so far this year. The storms in the U.S. were so severe, there were 10 that resulted in damages of $1 billion or more, almost double the average over the last decade.

State Farm will almost entirely stop issuing new policies in California – with climate-exacerbated wildfires and bad public policy a large reason why

Hundreds of students and graduates vow not to work for ‘climate wreckers that insure those responsible for the climate crisis’

A United Nations-convened climate alliance for insurers suffered at least three more departures on Thursday including the group's chair, as insurance companies take fright in the face of opposition from U.S. Republican politicians.

Most expensive storm cost $100bn while deadliest floods killed 1,700 and displaced 7 million, report finds