From Tilak´s Substack

By Tilak Doshi

‘If it bleeds, it leads’ is the oldest rule in the newsroom. Its climate-era corollary is that if it floods, burns or sinks, it sells. Wednesday’s Telegraph ran the headline ‘Next financial crisis “to be triggered by uninsurable homes”‘, warning that climate change is making British homes harder or even impossible to insure, that mortgages will become unobtainable and that properties will become unsellable. Readers are reminded that the undermining of the mortgage market drove the 2008 crash, and informed that a wave of uninsured, high-risk homes could do the same.

There is no surer way to unsettle a reader than to tell him that his home, almost always a family’s largest asset, is about to become worthless. That is precisely the point. For 15 years the climate story has been sold as “the science” that threatens the reader’s own front door: your house will burn (‘global warming’), your street will flood (‘rising sea levels’), your foundations will crack with land subsidence. In May 2013 Barack Obama’s Twitter account told its 31 million followers that 97% of scientists agreed climate change was “real, man-made and dangerous”. The study behind the tweet said nothing about danger; that word was added by Obama’s team. “Real, man-made and dangerous” has nonetheless been the house style of the legacy media ever since, and the uninsurable home is simply its latest product line.

Whistleblowers, or a campaign?

The Telegraph describes its sources as senior City figures represented by “a whistleblowing organisation called Inside Track”, which has written to Ministers, the Financial Conduct Authority and the Bank of England claiming that insurers are under-pricing climate risk. The paper adds, almost in passing, that the group is backed by climate charities including the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, one of Britain’s largest grant-makers, whose 2020 strategy explicitly targets “the causes and impacts of climate change”.

Inside Track Campaigns Ltd was incorporated in March 2025 as a company limited by guarantee whose registered business is public relations and communications. Its first accounts are not due until December, so the public cannot yet see who pays for it; its own FAQ says only that it has been funded by trusts and foundations. Nor does it deal in leaked documents, the stock-in-trade of genuine whistleblowers. Its website says plainly that it is not looking for confidential documents. It recruits anonymous senior professionals, collects their views on common industry practice, and then advises on which stakeholders should hear the message and how best to deliver it. That is a description of an advocacy campaign, as my colleague Paul Homewood describes. The template has been used before: an Inside Track group of food-industry executives issued a similar memo warning of climate risk to Britain’s food supply.

The anonymous insiders’ own words undercut the alarm. One former reinsurance executive complains that the industry does not care about climate risk more than a year ahead because it can “keep repricing cover”. That is not a scandal; it is how property insurance works. As Warren Buffett told Berkshire Hathaway shareholders in his 2015 letter, policies are written for a year and repriced annually, so a rising possibility of loss shows up promptly in premiums rather than in insolvency. An insurer that reprices every year is not quietly accumulating a 2008-style time bomb on its balance sheet.

The 2008 analogy fares no better. Stanford economist John Cochrane put it plainly in his testimony to the US Senate Banking Committee in March 2021: “Climate change poses no measurable risk to the financial system.” As he explained, “‘Risk’ means unforeseen events. We know exactly where the climate is going over the horizon that financial regulation can contemplate.” The financial crisis was a sudden, unforeseen collapse in the value of leveraged mortgage securities; a slow, observable drift in weather statistics, repriced every year, is its opposite. Cochrane also warned that climate goals were being pursued through financial regulators “by regulatory subterfuge rather than aboveboard legislation or transparent agency rulemaking”. A memo campaign aimed at the Bank of England and the FCA, rather than at voters, fits that description well. I made the same arguments last month about Brussels’s plans for an EU-backed “climate insurance” pool – a climate protection racket as it were – the very model the Telegraph now commends to Britain.

The “uninsurable town” that isn’t about homes

The article’s lead photograph shows flood water in Tenbury Wells, Worcestershire, “dubbed Britain’s first ‘uninsurable town’”. But the Tenbury story is not about homes, and it is not new. What lost cover there were the town council’s civic buildings and local businesses: Zurich withdrew flood cover from the Pump Rooms and the Regal Cinema in October 2025. Homes are a different matter. As the local MP Dame Harriett Baldwin pointed out to the Treasury Committee, the Flood Re scheme exists to help homeowners in flood-prone areas get insurance; what it does not cover is businesses.

Nor is the cause a sudden shift in the climate. As long ago as 2009 the Audit Commission flagged the lack of progress on Tenbury’s flood defences as one of only two red flags for Worcestershire, noting that some businesses already could not get insurance and that the national funding formula ranked the scheme low. Seventeen years later the Environment Agency has put the full scheme on hold. Tenbury is a monument to unbuilt flood defences, not to a broken climate. Even the Telegraph concedes that “scrapped flood defence investment” played its part.

Flood Re itself shows how the system is meant to work. Homes built after January 1st 2009 are excluded from the scheme, a cut-off designed to discourage developers from building on flood-prone land; owners of such homes buy cover at whatever price the risk commands. That is the price signal doing its job. Even the Association of British Insurers, quoted by the Telegraph, asks only for the obvious: more investment in flood defences, an end to building on flood plains and better building standards. None of that requires a climate emergency. It requires engineers, planners and premiums that are allowed to tell the truth.

Fifteen years of RCP8.5

Behind many of the headlines lies a single scenario. The high-emissions pathway known as RCP8.5 with projected catastrophic outcomes, and for over a decade journalists and regulators treated it as ‘business as usual’. As early as 2020, Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peters warned in Nature that this framing was misleading. In April this year the scientists who design the scenarios feeding the IPCC’s next assessment went further, declaring the old high-end emission levels “implausible” and dropping RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0 from the new framework. Even the European Commission’s climate website now concedes that RCP8.5 is no longer considered plausible.

Yet the numbers built on these scenarios live on in the property pages. The Telegraph tells readers that one in 10 homes could be affected by subsidence by 2070. That figure matches the British Geological Survey’s projection under RCP8.5: 11%, or 4.2 million properties. Under RCP4.5, the pathway the BGS itself says current emissions are closest to, the share is around 5%; under the Paris-aligned scenario, about 500,000 properties. The BGS’s earlier, widely cited subsidence maps used RCP8.5 alone. The scariest number, as ever, is the one that reaches the reader.

The Telegraph’s August data feature on climate threats to homes, which the paper recommends at the foot of this week’s article, follows the same formula. Its interactive map finds that fewer than one in 20 British properties is spared high exposure to at least one of five threats: drought, heat, wildfires, flooding and coastal erosion. A measure that captures 95% of the country tells you about the threshold, not the risk. Read further and the threats shrink. Some 10,000 properties are at risk from coastal erosion over the next 80 years, out of a national stock of tens of millions. Wildfires, the article concedes, are mostly started by human hands, from barbecues and campfires to discarded cigarettes – a point I made about Britain’s wildfires this summer.

What the loss data actually show

The insurance figures are presented in the same way. The Telegraph’s chart shows domestic claims for subsidence and weather damage rising from about £437 million in 2021 to just over £1 billion in 2025. That is five years of raw totals in nominal pounds, with no adjustment for inflation in repair and rebuilding costs or for the growing number and value of insured homes. A short window of unadjusted claims is not a climate signal.

The longer, global record tells a different story. Roger Pielke Jr’s analysis of Munich Re data shows that total economic losses from weather and climate disasters have fallen as a share of world GDP, from about 0.25% in 1990 to under 0.2%. Insured losses do grow, by 5-7% a year in real terms according to Swiss Re, but the reinsurer names the main driver as rising exposure: economic and population growth, building in hazard-prone areas and construction-cost inflation. Nor is the market buckling. Swiss Re’s sigma report says reinsurers can absorb even a one-in-10 peak year of $300 billion or more in insured losses.

Swiss Re’s own press release makes the point with Hurricane Katrina. A repeat today would still be very costly because of higher housing and construction costs, but improved flood defences and a 20% fall in the local population along the storm’s path have significantly reduced exposure. Adaptation works. That is the lesson of Tenbury too.

Swiss Re’s Chief Executive Andreas Berger tells a different story when he goes on television. In a CNN interview last summer, against footage of European wildfires, he declared that the frequency and severity of natural catastrophes are increasing, that conventional measures are no longer sufficient, and that governments, the public and industry must “come together” in a tripartite arrangement. His host opened with the firm’s claim that around 480,000 people a year die from extreme heat. Those are modelled mortality estimates, not insured losses, and say nothing about whether a home in Kent can be insured. A reinsurer whose business grows with perceived risk has every reason to talk the risk up on CNN while its research department attributes the rising bill to exposure. Readers may weigh the two accordingly. Of course, it does not occur to Berger to mention cheap air-conditioners as an appropriate mitigation option for households in summer heat.

Who benefits from fear?

If the facts are this thin, why the drumbeat? Partly because fear is the product. A postcode map of personal peril, published in the money pages, travels further than a chart of losses relative to GDP. As we found during Covid, fear has avid customers. Every ‘protection gap’ story strengthens the case for a public-private scheme in which taxpayers backstop risks that premiums ought to price: a bigger and longer-lived Flood Re, the EU’s new “climate insurance alliance” that the Telegraph holds up as a model, or the EU-backed catastrophe protection racket I criticised last month. It strengthens the hand of central bankers who have doubled down on climate regulation even as green finance collapses. And it sustains a foundation-funded campaign ecosystem that turns anonymous testimony into memos to ministers and government regulatory authorities such as the FCA.

There is a final irony. The industry’s real failing, according to Inside Track’s insiders, is that it has gone quiet: fewer people, one complains, are now prepared to stand up and say they are scared by what they are seeing. In the climate debate, fear is no longer a by-product of the evidence; it has become the evidence. As I argued in a recent piece on the so-called Planetary Health Check, doom never goes out of fashion.

The homeowner in Worcestershire or Kent deserves better than a map telling him that his house sits beneath five climate threats at once. He deserves flood defences that are actually built, planning rules that stop new estates going up on flood plains, and insurance priced honestly, year by year, as it always has been. The Telegraph’s readers were offered a financial crisis in their homeownership instead. Fear sells, but the scenario on which 15 years of it were built has now been retired. As with Covid, so with climate: sooner or later, truth will out. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first inaugural speech, delivered in March 1933 on the East Portico of the US Capitol at Washington DC, was called “The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Fear Itself”. Truer words have seldom been spoken.

A version of this article was first published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/10/18/no-climate-change-is-not-making-your-home-uninsurable/

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic’s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former (cancelled) contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.