My Climate Change House Hunt (2026 Update)

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Dear reader - if you aren’t familiar with this series where I wrestle with global warming as part of my move from Oregon to Colorado, I encourage you to read previous posts, which can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

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I am getting a little concerned about wildfires.

Here in Colorado, we’re experiencing perhaps the worst snow levels on record. Take a look at the little squiggly black line in the chart below:

That line is a measure of our snowpack for the 2025-2026 winter, and it’s not a good story. It doesn’t just affect skiers, a lack of snow has multiple downstream impacts (literally and figuratively) that determine how the rest of our year is going to go.

As you should know by now, global warming intensifies things like drought and temperatures, and I can attest that this winter has been abnormally warm. Without healthy snow levels, water becomes a scarce commodity across the Western United States. The Colorado River basin relies on snow melt to bring water to the agricultural industry of the Southwest and major cities like Las Vegas, Phoenix, and more.

Closer to home, a dry snow-free mountain landscape brings a greater risk of wildfires.

This is not surprising to me - we knew this moving here, but it weighs on the mind. As noted in previous posts, my home’s primary risks from global warming are due to drought and wildfires. So as the year progresses, look for news and alerts on these hazards and general macro-economic stress brought on by a lack of snow. (Unless something changes dramatically).

I’ll be watching as well, and will provide updates here.

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The climate risk modeling industry marches on, and I recently got access to two new datasets. So as you can imagine I ran my house through each to see what those models showed. The first is through Munich Re, the German insurance giant:

This reinforces what know about my home’s exposure to wildfires and drought risk, but also highlights the risk to precipitation events, heat stress, and interestingly cold stress. It may be counter-intuitive that global warming can cause winter calamities, but when you read more into the science it actually makes sense. Without going into detail, essentially a changing climate causes the jet stream to get weakened. When that happens, it can get locked and point cold weather your way like a fire hose - for days and weeks at a time, thus bringing unusually long and deep winter events.

The second climate model I recently tried out was a new publicly available model by Carbon Plan. Their initial focus is a wildfire model that visually shows your home’s exposure to wildfire risk. Dialing up my neighborhood shows that we are at a 4 out of 10 risk score…not terrible but above the average. Again reinforcing what we have already suspected.

Wildfires are a real threat, and something that I will continued to monitor and report on.

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As I noted in my last post in this series, in 2024 Zillow had made this type of information - climate risk scores - available as part of its website, allowing home shoppers to get their own sense of global warming risks.

Well, no more. In a particularly lame way, last November Zillow removed the scores after a lot of complaints from people standing to lose money. To be specific, the pushback was from the real estate industry and the Multiple Listing Service (MLS)…which are incentivized to get deals done. Consider this quote from a MLS flack regarding the climate risk scores:

“Displaying the probability of a specific home flooding this year or within the next five years can have a significant impact on the perceived desirability of that property…”

Duh. That’s the whole damn point. By providing buyers with better data on the future risks of a property, the industry could bring transparency to a market and - maybe even - wake people up to the risks of global warming. But no….one can’t get in the way of Karen from Topeka earning a commission…

Another quote:

“When we saw entire neighborhoods with a 50 percent probability of the home flooding…especially in areas that haven’t flooded in the last 40 to 50 years, we grew very suspicious…”

Good God. Again this dude misses the point entirely. The danger of global warming is that it changes the atmospheric conditions and invalidates historical records. Just because your home has never flooded in the past…or never faced wildfires, or drought…doesn’t mean it won’t. Climate change breaks the models. The risks are new and off the charts.

I’ll be the first to admit that climate risk models are not perfect and can be over-emphasized, but in our capitalist marketplace, some information is better than none. And the net effect of this decision by Zillow is to re-introduce information asymmetry that favors the real estate industry, not home buyers or the public at large.

It’s a move to put profit over intelligence…and reinforces an all-too common reality in America today….that ignorance is a choice.

Likely the real estate industry is behind the curve here. Home insurance costs - a leading indicator of climate risk - are rising across the U.S. See the chart below:

Further, more and more people are taking climate risk considerations into account when moving, with nearly half of homeowners want to relocate because of climate concerns.

It’s like a game of musical chairs combined with a ticking time bomb, set against a hostile federal policy apparatus that makes one want to punch something.

We know how to fix the problem. The political will is simply not there, or is hiding behind moral and economic cowardice.

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Lastly, I’d like to share a paper I wrote for my job digging into climate risks faced by the apartment rental sector. I analyzed climate risk data on over 3,000 apartment buildings across the U.S. and quantified the $$$ at stake to real estate investors and building owners.

Suffice it to say that not a single property was immune to potential risks due to global warming, and most properties faced 4 or more hazards.

We’re coming to a place where owning real estate is a game of ‘whack-a-mole’ where the winners will be able to anticipate and address climate risks while losers will get caught stranded with unsellable assets and/or operational challenges that permanently alter the profitability of the investment.

Working on this paper was a passion project for me, really digging into a marketplace to examine understand future risks. I hope to do more of this work, because banging the alarm bell and putting better information in front of real estate decision makers has been a through-line of my career.

Ignorance may be a choice. But I choose to try and educate those around me as best I can. Thus this series on ‘My Climate Change House Hunt.”

You can access the paper here.

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Disclaimer:

All content and opinions are solely those of the author (Jack), and not representative of my employer, former employers, clients, anyone in Congress, my family, former college roommates, Baptists, the good citizens of Colorado, or my dog Mabel.