By Nicholas Christen and Craig Miller

Craig Miller / KQED

Even tomatoes can only take so much heat. A belt from Bakersfield to the northern Sacramento Valley produces a third of the nation's canning tomatoes.

Autumn is here, so says the calendar. Living on the coast, it might be easy to think that California escaped the heat wave suffered by much of the nation this summer. While that may be true for most of the large coastal population centers, it was a different story for much of the state’s interior farm belt.

Throughout June and July, even Central Valley spots escaped much of the heat felt by the Great Plains, though Cal Expo officials blamed the heat, in part, for tamping down attendance at the state fair. Then things heated up quickly — especially in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys — through August and into September.  Valley towns including Redding, Red Bluff, Sacramento, Merced, Madera, Fresno, and Bakersfield, have been on the order of three-to-five degrees above normal for the duration of August and September.

Fresno saw 27 days above normal during August and most of those days were at least three degrees above normal, a string one meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Fresno called, “pretty amazing.”

Even Central Valley farmers, who are used to triple-digit days, were taken aback.

“Yeah, this summer has been one of the hottest that I remember,” said Don Cameron, who runs 7,000 acres of crops for the Terranova Ranch, southeast of Fresno. He’s been farming the Valley for 30 years.

“Our tomatoes have taken a little bit of a beating from the 110 degree weather we’ve had, but with the drip irrigation we’re able to keep them a little fresher, a little cooler when it does get hot like that.”

On the day we visited Cameron, the fever seemed to have broken. “Yeah, we’re in the low 90s today,” he snorted. “It’s like — like a spring day.”

“We had just a couple of weeks on end where we were 109, 110, 111 degrees. Just brutal. The nights don’t cool down, it’s hard on the plants, it’s hard on the people.

There has been a plus side to all this.

“I can remember we used to get a lot of real severe frosts during the spring growing season,” recalled Cameron. “I can’t remember the last time we had one that was actually a killing frost during April.” That’s created an opportunity of sorts for growers. “We’ve been able to plant our tomatoes earlier in the year for earlier harvest, which extends the, the season for the cannery.”

The roast continued well into September, bringing with it an unusual late-season streak of 90-plus-degree days in downtown Sacramento. This year could eclipse the September record of 20 days, set back in 1899.

August was more than four degrees above average in Sacramento.

See more on how climate change is challenging California farmers on the documentary, Heat and Harvest. It premieres Friday evening on KQED TV.

High temperatures in the Central Valley are expected to last through the end of the week.

America’s heat wave has caught up with California — at least the inland areas.

Sacramento has had six consecutive days above 100 degrees; an excessive heat warning is in effect from Merced to Bakersfield; and on Saturday Modesto tied its record for highest temperature for the date, at 105 degrees.

“In general, we’re about ten-to-fifteen degrees above normal for this time of year,” Holly Osborne, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Sacramento told me. “Today will be our sixth day of 100 or above in Sacramento, and we’re looking at temperatures being 100 or above for the rest of the week.” Osborne expects things to cool off, “moving into the weekend.”

The record number of consecutive days over 100 degrees in Sacramento is eleven, set in 2006. If the current heat wave holds up, it could tie for the second longest stretch, at nine. Temperatures like this may become more common in the future. In the California climate assessment released by the California Energy Commission last month, one projected outcome of climate change is an increase in the number of “extremely hot” days. In Sacramento, the number of days hotter than 105 degrees could inch up from four or five, to about 20 every summer, if global emissions of warming gases continue on their present course.

Osborne says overnight lows in the Sacramento Valley have been closer to normal, which is important, because cooler nighttime temperatures give people a chance to cool off. The southern San Joaquin Valley hasn’t seen much relief, though, according to Kevin Durfee, a meteorologist with National Weather Service in San Joaquin Valley.

“Overnight lows in Fresno and Bakersfield have been staying above 80 since the weekend,” he said. “One reason why this weekend we had an excessive heat warning in effect for the San Joaquin Valley is, when nighttime lows do not get below 80 and daytime highs are well over 100, very close to records, that is pretty extreme.”

Cooling centers are open today in Kern County. They open when the temperature is predicted to be 105 degrees or higher. Different locations have different triggers for opening cooling centers. Sacramento County tracks nighttime lows, rather than daytime highs. If the temperature at night doesn’t dip below 75 degrees for three consecutive days, and if they’re hearing from area hospitals that people are coming in or calling in with heat-related issues, they’ll open cooling centers.

Chris Andis from the Sacramento County Office of Emergency Services says this week, they probably won’t (a local TV station points out that people tend to use shopping malls as informal cooling centers).

“We have hot weather. That’s what July and August are in Sacramento,” she said. But she also emphasized that it’s important in weather like this to keep an eye on others who may be feeling the heat. “Check on loved ones,” she said. “Especially people who are chronically ill, seniors and pets.”

And it’s not only living things that get hit by the heat. The California Independent System Operator, or Cal-ISO, which manages the state’s power grid, is asking customers to conserve electricity wherever possible until 6:00 p.m., and is issuing a Flex Alert for tomorrow.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

1. “Drought’s Footprint” — The New York Times

In June, more than half of the U.S. was experiencing moderate to extreme drought. How does that compare to other years? The Times’ graphic lays it out.

2. “Dried Out: Confronting the Texas Drought” — NPR, KUT and KUHF

The drought began in Texas in October of last year. Watch it grow over time, and explore a timeline that explains the root causes of the drought and how communities are responding.

3. “Flash Drought in U.S. Explained in 14 Seconds” — Climate Central

Watch an animation showing the spread of the drought, from Texas and Georgia in March, to most of the Midwest and West by June.

4. Drought Impact Reporter — The National Drought Mitigation Center

This is “the nation’s first comprehensive database of drought impacts.” Submit reports of how the drought affects you, and search for drought impacts by state, whether they’re to agriculture, industry, public health or wildlife.

5. “Historic heat wave in hindsight: Hottest on record in Washington D.C., hotter than 1930″ — Washington Post

From the Post’s weather blog, a local, numbers-heavy analysis of the heatwave that hit Washington. With stats like “Longest period at or above 100: 7 hours on July 7 (tie with July 6, 2010 and July 21, 1930),” it’s like a Guinness Book of World Records for D.C.’s summer, and holds my usually California-focused attention.

By Andrew Freedman

Scott Olson/Getty Images

A cow feeds in a drought-damaged pasture as temperatures climb near 100 degrees on July 17, 2012 near Princeton, Indiana.

Driven by a combination of natural climate variability, manmade global warming, and plain old bad luck, drought conditions are so widespread in the U.S. that it’s possible to take a cross-country flight from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco — a distance of approximately 2,400 miles — without once overflying an unaffected area. With about 81 percent of the lower 48 states experiencing at least abnormally dry conditions, and 63 percent mired in moderate-to-exceptional drought, it’s becoming harder and harder to find an oasis. And the dog days of August are yet to come.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) already ranks this drought as one of the worst on record, comparable to the drought events of the 1950s. The last time there were such widespread drought conditions in the corn-growing region of the country was in 1988, and that drought cost at least $40 billion.

Given this summer’s punishing 1-2 punch of dry weather and heat, this drought is also being compared to the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s.

According to Richard Seager, a professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University and a prominent drought researcher, this drought has one key thing in common with the Dust Bowl and the 1988 drought events: its origins can be traced to the tropical Pacific Ocean, where a periodic cooling of sea surface temperatures — a phenomenon known as La Niña — helped reconfigure global weather patterns during the past two years.

Seager’s research has shown that La Niña is closely tied to many historical drought events in the U.S., since it shifts weather patterns in a way that favors a northern storm track, bypassing the southern tier of the country and depriving the already arid Southwest of much-needed moisture. Even though La Niña conditions are no longer present in the tropical Pacific — in fact, there is talk of a coming El Niño, with warmer sea surface temperatures — the weather pattern in the tropical Pacific is still behaving in a manner that is more consistent with La Niña. This may be giving the 2011-12 La Niña an extended lifespan in the U.S., Seager and other climate scientists said.

“La Niña conditions are perfect for getting drought in the southern parts of the U.S. There is absolutely no doubt that that has been a large part of what’s been going on here,” Seager said.

Seager and other experts noted that factors besides La Nina are also playing a part in this drought, however.

Unlike the droughts of the 1930s, this one is occurring in a much warmer climate, a byproduct of manmade global warming. Seager said that although it most likely didn’t trigger the drought, it’s possible that global warming is making this drought worse than it would otherwise be.

“I think what we’re seeing is largely a naturally occurring event, but it’s occurring against the background of a warming environment,” Seager said.

Global warming may be affecting the feedbacks that take place between dry soils and the atmosphere. When soils dry, very little evaporation occurs and very little moisture is released from vegetation to the air. This can accelerate warming, making droughts hotter, and therefore even drier. Mark Svoboda, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center in Lincoln, Neb., said this phenomenon is known as drought “feeding on itself.”

Such feedbacks have helped the current drought rapidly balloon in size, overtaking some regions so quickly that it’s referred to as a “flash drought.” At the start of the year, just 28 percent of the contiguous U.S. — mainly the southern tier — was in at least moderate drought. Between mid-April and mid-July, the moderate to exceptional drought area went from 37 percent to 63 percent, a clear indication of the toll that the hot, dry spring and summer have taken.

Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said global warming helps make droughts hotter, and therefore drier, than they would be without a human influence. Manmade global warming, he said via email, “. . . means more energy that has to go somewhere. In dry conditions it amplifies drying and goes into heating, creating heat waves. It is small on a day-to-day basis, but is always in one direction and it creates stronger, more intense, and longer-lasting drought. No doubt about it.”

Seager pointed to the lack of snow cover from the 2011-12 winter as another key factor in the drought’s expansion. In Colorado, for example, there was an unusually thin snowpack that melted earlier than average. This primed the state for destructive wildfires and record warm temperatures during June. The thin snow cover and early melt across the High Plains also may have helped dry soils in that region, and may have affected larger-scale weather patterns.

According to Svoboda, the below-average snowpack was one of the factors, along with a dry and warm spring, that made the U.S. more vulnerable to drought come early summer. “We had two strikes against us before even getting to the summer or the heat wave that would follow,” he said in an email conversation.

“I don’t attribute this drought to global warming, but we do see what increased temperatures can do to exacerbate droughts, and if higher temperatures become a more persistent feature in some regions not used to it, then this isn’t a good combination,” Svoboda said.

There is some evidence that this is already happening. A recent study found that global warming made the Texas drought and heatwave 20 times more likely to occur than under similar large-scale climate conditions 50 years ago. Other research shows that warming driven by human activities made the same heat wave and drought more severe than it otherwise would have been. As for whether global warming made the current drought more likely to occur, such “climate attribution” studies can take several months to complete, and the drought is still underway.

If indeed we’re already seeing more intense droughts as a result of global warming, it doesn’t bode well for the future, judging from what climate studies show. For example, climate research consistently shows the Southwest U.S. will become much drier as the climate continues to warm.

Seager’s own research has revealed a disturbing history of North American “megadroughts” that have lasted for decades, making the current event look quaint by comparison. And one study published in 2011 found evidence for a global warming-induced increase in aridity over global land areas since the 1970s, and noted that climate models project a huge expansion of drought areas in the coming decades, depending on whether and by how much greenhouse gas emissions are reined in.

In other words, if you think this drought is bad . . . just wait.

A version of this post also appears at Climate Central, Climate Watch’s content partner.

By Andrew Freedman

Sasha Khokha/KQED

As soil dries, more of the sun’s energy goes into heating the air directly, rather than evaporating moisture from the ground.

Droughts such as the one currently gripping a majority of the U.S. may dramatically increase the odds of extremely hot days, a new study found. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, explores a dynamic that is playing out right now across the country, particularly in the Great Plains, where the severe drought is priming the atmosphere in favor of an above-average number of extremely hot days.

This occurs because of feedbacks between the ground and the air: as the soil and vegetation dry, more of the sun’s energy is able to go into heating the air directly, rather than going into evaporating moisture from plants and the soil.

With drought conditions intensifying during mid-summer, the study suggests that the U.S. may be in for particularly brutal Dog Days of August.

The study is the first to take a global look at the potential for weather forecasters to use precipitation data to help predict the likelihood for heat extremes. With heat killing more Americans per year than any other weather hazard, advance notice of heat hazards could help save lives.

The study looked at the relationship between dry periods and heat extremes that occur during the following month. They found that for much of the U.S., when precipitation falls below a certain threshold, there is a 70 percent likelihood of an above-average number of hot days during the following month.

The study indicates that drought not only increases the odds for the following month to have an above-average number of hot days, but it also makes extremely hot days more likely as well.

“. . . the occurrence probability of an above-average number of hot days is high after dry conditions and low after wet conditions” in certain areas, the study said. The study found that the drought and heat connection was clearly involved in intensifying the Texas drought of 2011, when the Lone Star State suffered through a brutal combination of heat, drought, and wildfires.

In an email conversation, lead author Brigitte Mueller of the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science at ETH in Zurich, said the current drought falls well below the study’s precipitation threshold, “which implies an even higher likelihood for an above-average [number of hot days] to occur.”

“Predicting the exact number of hot days would be difficult,” Mueller said, “because dry conditions can lead to both a high number of hot days or a low number of hot days . . . However, the prediction could include a probability for a high number of hot days.”

On the other hand, the study found that wet conditions help limit the occurrence of hot extremes in many parts of the world, and may even prohibit the occurrence of extremely hot days.

In addition to the U.S., the study found that precipitation may help forecasters anticipate heat extremes in Europe and a large portion of the Southern Hemisphere, too.

A version of this post also appears at Climate Central, Climate Watch’s content partner.

Craig Miller/KQED

California has not experienced the extreme heat much of the rest of the country has this summer.

For more than a week, record-breaking temperatures have been baking the Midwest and East Coast. But while cities in other parts of the country broke and tied records for the hottest Fourth of July, in San Francisco I bundled-up in a couple sweaters and watched the fireworks through the fog. Which is typical. Overall, it’s been an average summer here in California, at least temperature-wise.

“At June around the state, most places were fairly close to normal, or a degree and a half below normal, so not any real extremes,” Jan Null, a meterologist with Golden Gate Weather Services, told me. “We’ve stayed in the mild, in-between area. It was not a particularly cold winter, and not a particularly hot summer.”

Western Regional Climate Center

While the rest of the country suffers from record-breaking heat, the West Coast has had average and below-average temperatures this summer.

The jet stream moves high- and low-pressure systems around the world, like huge waves. In the summer, the pattern slows down. This summer, it’s stalled out completely, locking a high-pressure system over the eastern part of the U.S.

“Any time you have extremes, whether it be flooding or any other pattern, the atmosphere gets locked into a state of equilibrium,” Null said.

As long as that high pressure is parked in the East, a low-pressure system, with its lower temperatures, will stay locked in place on the West Coast.

“This isn’t unheard of or necessarily that unusual,” Kelly Redmond, a climatologist at the Western Regional Climate Center, said. “It’s not necessarily the case that the West Coast is obliged to go along with the rest of the country, just the way California is different in almost all of its features.”

The extreme heat in the rest of the country gives us clues into what scientists say climate change could bring. So what does that mean for California, and this — so far — mild summer?

“That has been an ongoing discussion in the state of California,” Redmond said. “The way it’s looking now, if the state were to warm up, the interior, let’s say I-5, would warm faster than Highway 101 or Highway 1.”

So for the coast, at least for the next few decades, this summer could be what climate change looks like, too.

“We’re going to end up some degrees warmer a few decades in the future, but how we get there, it may not be a straight line,” Redmond added. “Think of it like a play, like you’re watching a play in so many acts. Eventually you get to some kind of conclusion, but what makes it interesting is how you got there, the way it unwound. That’s what I find so interesting.”

By Andrew Freedman

weatherunderground

Path of the jet stream on March 21, 2012.

By showing that Arctic climate change is no longer just a problem for the polar bear, a new study may finally dispel the view that what happens in the Arctic, stays in the Arctic.

The study, by Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University and Stephen Vavrus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, ties rapid Arctic climate change to high-impact, extreme weather events in the U.S. and Europe.

The study shows that by changing the temperature balance between the Arctic and mid-latitudes, rapid Arctic warming is altering the course of the jet stream, which steers weather systems from west to east around the hemisphere. The Arctic has been warming about twice as fast as the rest of the Northern Hemisphere, due to a combination of human emissions of greenhouse gases and unique feedbacks built into the Arctic climate system.

The jet stream, the study says, is becoming “wavier,” with steeper troughs and higher ridges. Weather systems are progressing more slowly, raising the chances for long-duration extreme events, like droughts, floods, and heat waves.

“[The] tendency for weather to hang around longer is going to favor extreme weather conditions that are related to persistent weather patterns,” said Francis, the study’s lead author.

One does not have to look hard to find an example of an extreme event that resulted from a huge, slow-moving swing in the jet stream. It was a stuck or “blocking weather pattern” – with a massive dome of high pressure parked across the eastern U.S. for more than a week – that led to the remarkable March heat wave that sent temperatures in the Midwest and Northeast soaring into the 80s. In some locations, temperatures spiked to more than 40 degrees above average for that time of year.

The strong area of high pressure shunted the jet stream far north into Canada. At one point during the heat wave, a jetliner flying at 30,000 feet could’ve hitched a ride on the jet stream from Texas straight north to Hudson Bay, Canada. In the U.S., more than 14,000 warm-weather records (record-warm daytime highs and record-warm overnight lows) were set or tied during the month of March, compared to about 700 cold records.

According to the study, Arctic climate change may increase the odds that such high-impact, blocking weather patterns will occur. The study cites examples of other patterns that led to extreme events that also may bear Arctic fingerprints, including the 2011 Texas drought and heat wave, which cost the state’s agricultural sector a staggering $7.62 billion – making it the most expensive one-year drought in that state’s history.

NOAA/ESRL

Surface temperature departures from average during the March heat wave.

In addition, the study also mentions jet stream configurations that led to heavy snows in the Northeast and Europe during recent winters. Such events are also “consistent” with the study’s findings, according to the paper.

The reasons why the Arctic is heating up so quickly, a phenomenon known as “Arctic amplification,” has to do with factors that are unique to the Arctic environment, involving feedbacks between sea ice, snow, water vapor, and clouds. As the area warms in response to manmade greenhouse gases, melting ice and snow allow exposed land and water to absorb more of the Sun’s heat, which melts more ice and snow, and so on. A relatively small amount of initial warming can be greatly magnified in the Far North.

The temperature contrast between the frigid Arctic and the milder mid-latitudes is what drives the powerful jet stream winds, which are so important for determining day-to-day weather conditions.

In addition to making the jet stream have more pronounced north/south swings, the reduced temperature gradient between northern and southern areas is causing the westerly component of upper-level winds to slow, especially during the fall when extra heating in the Arctic is exceptionally strong.

The westerly component of upper-level winds during the fall has weakened by about 14 percent since 1979, the study found.

A slight slowdown in the jet stream may not sound like a big deal. After all, jet stream winds have been clocked at upwards of 200 mph. But it turns out that slowing of the jet stream influences its shape and the motion of individual storm systems.

Weaker westerly winds causes the big north/south swings in the jet stream to move more slowly from west to east, making weather conditions in a given location more persistent than they used to be. “That means that whatever weather you’re experiencing now is going to tend to hang around longer because the passage of those waves is really what causes the weather to change,” Francis said.

The study contains a stark warning about future weather patterns, given projections showing that Arctic climate change is likely to accelerate in coming years. “As the Arctic sea ice cover continues to disappear and the snow cover melts ever earlier over vast regions of Eurasia and North America, it is expected that large-scale circulation patterns throughout the northern hemisphere will become increasingly influenced by Arctic amplification,” the study reports.

In other words, rapid Arctic warming is expected to exert a growing influence on the weather far beyond the Arctic Circle, for many years to come.

A version of this post also appears at Climate Central, a content partner of Climate Watch.

David McNew/Getty Images

People cited their experience of warmer temperatures as a major influence in their views of climate change.

Most Americans now say that the climate is changing, according to the National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change (PDF). Nearly two out of three people (62%) answered “yes” to the question, “Is there solid evidence that the average temperature on Earth has been getting warmer over the past four decades?” The primary reasons they gave for that answer? About one in four said it’s because they’ve observed warmer temperatures, and an identical 24% because they’ve observed weather changes — and the survey was taken last fall, before this year’s generally mild winter in the U.S. had entered the national chatter (we recall a recent tweet from NOAA saying that Midland, TX had logged more snowfall this winter than New York, Boston and Philadelphia combined).

Nonetheless, the poll did follow a year of weird weather and suggests that belief in climate change is edging back up. This is the first time since the fall of 2009 that this particular survey shows public accord with the majority of scientists topping 60%.

Brookings

The survey, conducted by the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan and the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion, includes comments from some of the respondents. A sampling of those: “winters just aren’t as cold as they were in the past,” “this time of year is warmer than it is expected to be,” and “temperatures last summer that were awful,” and, on the other side: “winters were just as cold as when I was a kid,” and “we had more snow last year than ever.”

Even though plenty of people see the weather they observe as evidence for or against climate change, climate scientists are hesitant to do the same. At this point, it’s not possible to pinpoint the exact cause of any single weather event — or even to say, for example, “This winter was warm and dry, and that’s because of climate change.”

Other numbers worth noting from the poll:

• 78% of Democrats believe there is solid evidence, compared to 47% of Republicans, and 55% of Independents.
• People are generally concerned about melting glaciers and polar ice (56% who said the climate is changing cited that as a factor that has “a very large effect” on their views)
• 46% cited accounts of disappearing polar bears and penguins as a factor in their views

Though listed among the most influential factors, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change barely made the list. Just 13% cited the transnational group of scientists as a factor.

And (news flash): Faith in scientists and the media is thin. Of people who do say climate change is happening, 28% say scientists are overstating the facts for their own purposes, and 34% think the media are overstating the issue. Among those who don’t think it’s happening: 81% say scientists are overstating the facts, and 90% think the press is.

Julie Denesha/Getty Images

The tornado that tore through Joplin, MO in May was one of the worst of last year's extreme weather events. But tornadoes have one of the more tenuous connections to climate change.

As we’ve noted before, last year was packed with extreme weather events, but it’s difficult to out-and-out blame any particular one of them on climate change. Explanations are often along the lines of, “This is the kind of thing that could become the norm in the future.” The science just isn’t quite there to able to pinpoint any single event and say exactly what caused it.

To try to sort out what we know from what we don’t, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), a consortium of universities doing earth science research, has a new feature on its website, “In Depth: Weather on Steroids,” about that science: the science of attribution, as in, what can we attribute to climate change?

The site helps explain why attribution is so tricky, why it’s important, and how it’s improving.

It also has a handy video that compares the atmosphere to a baseball player, and climate change to steroids. If the player hits a home run, can you say that particular home run was due to the steroids?

The science is growing. As models get more specific, as computers get more powerful and can analyze more granular data, attributions–and predictions–will improve, too.

Insurers in California, Washington, and New York will be required to describe the steps they're taking to address climate change.

Insurance commissioners in three states, including California, are now requiring that insurers report on how they’re preparing for climate change. Insurers will fill out a survey, which was adopted by The National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) in 2009, but was never implemented by commissioners in all fifty states. Instead, it’s been a piecemeal approach. California administered the survey in 2009 and ’10, requiring all insurers that met a minimum size requirement and that were headquartered in the state to fill it out. Now California is expanding the initiative: all insurers that write premiums worth more than $300 million and do business in the state–not just those based here–will be required to fill out the survey. New York and Washington are doing the same.

The Climate Risk Survey covers general questions: does the company have a climate change policy with respect to risk management and investment management, has the company considered the impact of climate change on its investment portfolio, does the insurer have a plan to assess or mitigate its own emissions?  An example of California’s survey from 2009 is available as a PDF from the NAIC website.

“It’s very broad,” said Andrew Logan, who directs the insurance program at Ceres, a non-profit that focuses on making businesses more sustainable. “It covers everything from how insurers are building climate science into their risk models to how they’re thinking about climate change as investors, to whether they’re building products that encourage climate-friendly behavior. So it cuts across all the types of ways climate change could impact the industry.”

Ceres worked with NAIC to develop the survey. Logan said climate change has the potential to impact all sectors of the industry. Property, life, and health insurers all face risks from it. NPR reported last month that homeowners insurance rates will go up as much as 10% this year, following the series of natural disasters in 2011. NPR didn’t link those disasters to climate change, but Logan pointed, out it’s years like that that make the insurance industry vulnerable.

“They’re really on the front lines as we see the the physical impacts of climate change getting worse,” he said. “The fact that regulators who are responsible for overseeing the solvency of the biggest industry in the world are worried about climate change is a powerful statement about the urgency of this problem.”