Spend enough time talking about climate change, and you’ll eventually get pulled toward this question: What would have to happen for global warming to strike most people as an urgent crisis?

There are many candidates: More extreme heat domes hitting major American cities, coupled with widespread blackouts. Extended droughts across America’s farmland, on top of the decades-long depletion of groundwater, leading to food shortages. A two-foot rise in sea levels caused by the collapse of the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica, putting entire coastal regions in the United States underwater.

Those scenarios seem a long way off to many Americans (even if they might not be). But what if the thing that will make climate change feel like a crisis to most everyone is already underway across the country? What if it’s the erosion of something entirely mundane, even a little boring, but also essential to modern life?

My colleague Mira Rojanasakul and I have spent most of this year digging into how climate shocks are hitting America’s home insurance industry. What we’ve found looks an awful lot like the early stages of a crisis.

As climate-fueled disasters get worse, home insurance is becoming a money-losing business in more of the country. Without insurance, you can’t get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can’t buy a home.

Last year, insurers lost money on homeowners coverage in 18 states, up from 12 states five years ago and eight states in 2013. Nationally, over the past decade, insurers paid out more in claims than they received in premiums, and, since 2018, more than 1.9 million home insurance contracts nationwide have been dropped.