Economy

The Cost of Climate

1895— present

NOAA's continuous U.S. temperature record — the baseline the costs are measured against.

The U.S. has measured its own temperature since 1895 — and the bill for what's changed shows up on a balance sheet before it shows up in a forecast. Billion-dollar disasters (tracked since 1980) have grown more frequent, insurance markets are buckling in exposed states, and energy prices ride on top. This reframes climate in concrete dollars: the long temperature record, disaster costs, insurance and electricity bills, the transition's price tag — where the costs fall and who pays.

U.S. warming since 1895

+1.8°F

contiguous-U.S. annual avg (NOAA NCEI)

Billion-$ disasters / year

2020–24 avg, up from 3.3/yr in the 1980s

Disaster damage, 2024

$183B

27 events; $2.9T total since 1980 (NOAA)

Home-insurance premiums

+24%

U.S. avg 2021–24; far steeper in exposed states

Electricity from renewables

24%

2024, up from ~10% in 2010 (EIA)

The baseline, and what it shows

NOAA has measured the temperature of the contiguous United States continuously since 1895 — one of the longest, most consistent national climate records anywhere. Against that 130-year baseline, the signal is unambiguous: the Lower 48 has warmed about 1.8°F since 1895, a trend of roughly 1.45°F per century. The warming is not smooth — the 1930s Dust Bowl produced a genuine early-century spike, and individual years swing with El Niño and La Niña — but the recent decades sit clearly above the 20th-century mean of 52.0°F.

2024 was the warmest year in the entire record at 55.5°F — about 3.5°F above the 20th-century average. The point of starting in 1895 is precisely that it predates the warming: the long baseline is what lets the change of the last few decades stand out as something other than ordinary year-to-year noise. Whatever one concludes about policy, the measurement itself is not in dispute.

Contiguous-U.S. average temperature · °F · 1895 — 2025dashed = 20th-century mean (52.0°F)

Source: NOAA NCEI Climate at a Glance, contiguous-U.S. January–December average temperature, full record from 1895. Yellow dots mark notable years (1934, 1998, 2012, 2024).

From temperature to dollars

A temperature chart is an abstraction; a balance sheet is not. The rest of this dot follows the warming into the places it shows up as money — the disaster ledger NOAA has kept since 1980, the insurance markets repricing risk in real time, and the electricity grid that both drives emissions and carries the cost of changing them. The temperature record is the cause; the next tabs are the bill.