Climate, Heat & Insurance
Climate projection is usually either a century away or a headline from yesterday. These sit in the middle distance where they can actually be graded, and the insurance entry is the one that turns physics into a price somebody pays.
The ledger — hash-sealed, scored in public
CORRECT if NASA GISTEMP or NOAA NCEI declares any of 2026, 2027, 2028 or 2029 the warmest calendar year on record in their annual analyses, published by 2030-06-30. Record holder at sealing: 2024, ≈1.55°C above pre-industrial (WMO) — the first calendar year above 1.5°C.
Resolves by 2030-06-30. Status: PENDING.
CORRECT if IEA, BloombergNEF or SolarPower Europe reports global annual PV additions above 900 GWdc for any calendar year through 2030, with final figures published by 2031-06-30. Baseline at sealing: ≈599 GWdc installed worldwide in 2024 (BloombergNEF).
Resolves by 2031-06-30. Status: PENDING.
CORRECT if the annual 2026 analyses from BOTH NASA GISTEMP and Copernicus ERA5, published January–February 2027, rank 2026 first or second among all calendar years on record. Either analysis ranking it third or lower scores INCORRECT. This is the fastest-resolving seal on the ledger.
Resolves by 2027-02-28. Status: PENDING.
Live projections
Insured natural-catastrophe losses hit $137B in 2024 and the January 2025 LA fires added ~$40B more, while California's insurer-of-last-resort exposure has swollen past $500B. Insurance is how climate risk becomes a price; when the price becomes unpayable or unavailable, mortgage markets — and then home values — do the repricing insurers no longer will.
Wrong if: through 2030, no major metro area experiences sustained 15%+ home-value declines attributable to insurance withdrawal, and state backstop plans (FAIR/Citizens) shrink rather than grow.
Window: 2026-2030.
2024 was the first calendar year above 1.5°C, and 35°C wet-bulb — the physiological limit where sweating stops working — has already been touched briefly in the Persian Gulf and Indus Valley. The lethal scenario is mundane: a week-long humid heat dome over a South Asian megacity coinciding with grid failure; Europe's 2022 summer killed 61,000+ with air conditioning and functioning infrastructure.
Wrong if: through 2032, no single heat event causes 10,000+ deaths within a two-week window, and no station sustains 33°C+ wet-bulb for over 6 daytime hours in a populated area.
Window: 2026-2032.
The ladder to beat is precise: 2024 holds the record at ≈1.60°C over pre-industrial, 2023 sits second at ≈1.48°C, 2025 came third at 1.47°C (Copernicus ERA5). 2026 opened only fifth-warmest in January, then climbed the table every month — fourth in March, joint-third in April, second in May and June — exactly as a new El Niño built toward a forecast November-January peak (NOAA CPC: ~65% odds of strong or very strong). Top-two requires the annual mean to clear roughly 1.48°C, so the year now hinges on how hard the El Niño pushes the back half. This is the fastest-resolving claim on the platform: the annual analyses land in January 2027.
Wrong if: the annual 2026 analyses from both NASA GISTEMP and Copernicus ERA5, published January 2027, rank 2026 third or lower among all calendar years on record.
Window: 2026-2027.
Two "final" negotiating rounds have already failed — Busan in December 2024 and Geneva in August 2025 — and the February 2026 resumed session did no substantive work at all: one day, a new chair elected (Chile's Julio Cordano), everything else deferred. The fault line is unchanged: a majority of states want binding limits on plastic production; petrostate and producer delegations will accept only waste-management language. Cordano's March 2026 roadmap points to one more formal session in late 2026 or early 2027 — realistically a single adoption window before this claim's deadline. Deadlocked treaties do sometimes close on the third attempt (the High Seas Treaty did), but the sealed base case says the production-cap divide keeps the text unsigned through 2027.
Wrong if: by 2027-12-31 the INC plenary or a UNEP diplomatic conference formally adopts an agreed global plastics treaty text — adoption of text is the bar, not signature or ratification. If that happens, this entry is WRONG (it is sealed as base-case NO).
Window: 2026-2027.
Other subjects on the record
Every claim above is also listed in the full projection registry and the calibration ledger. Scoring is explained in how a prediction is made.