Climate Change
Climate change has become a politically polarized subject in the United States, spawning a cottage industry of politically biased (in both directions) news and analysis around its likely pace and consequences. The dynamics of climate change are complicated by the impossibility of isolating and adjusting for specific data within the context of 2+ billion years of heating and cooling cycles and volatile global weather.
The existence of a global warming trend is no longer controversial in mainstream circles, but there is still considerable debate around the speed at which the climate is changing, our ability as humans to adjust to those changes, and the likelihood of solving or mitigating the effects of a warming earth through a combination of technology and conservation (a.k.a. changing human behavior, a notoriously difficult aspiration).
Inherently complicated science and widespread ideological and confirmation bias combine to make climate change challenging to integrate into a CRE investment strategy-oriented world view. This section will help the reader create a neutral fact-based framework to understand and incorporate existing and new information related to the earth’s climate in context.
Key Data Sources & Research
www.ncei.noaa.gov - Billion-dollar weather and climate disasters; historical storm and temperature data
www.fema.gov - National Flood Insurance Program data, flood zone maps, disaster declarations
www.eia.gov - Electricity demand, cooling degree days, grid capacity and generation data
www.iii.org - Property insurance market data, rate trends, carrier solvency
droughtmonitor.unl.edu - Weekly drought severity maps and historical drought data
firststreet.org - Property-level climate risk scoring for flood, fire, heat, and wind