Climate, Markets and the Limits of Insurability with Dave Jones

In the last episode of Risky Science, we examined skepticism around climate-conditioned catastrophe models with Roger Pielke Jr.—questioning how much weight long-range climate assumptions should carry in near-term insurance and capital decisions.

Today’s discussion is a direct counterpoint.

My guest is Dave Jones, former California Insurance Commissioner and now director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley Law. His recent article argues that insurance itself has become the clearest early-warning signal of climate risk—describing property insurance as the “canary in the coal mine,” and warning that the canary is already dying.

This conversation is timely because the stress is no longer theoretical. Catastrophe losses are accelerating, insurers are pulling back from high-risk regions, and residual markets are expanding rapidly. Jones argues that neither deregulation nor rate increases will be enough if the underlying drivers of loss continue to intensify.

We’ll examine California and Florida as live case studies, what mitigation and modeling can realistically achieve in the near term, and where the practical limits of insurance may already be coming into view.