Ron DeSantis can deny climate change all he wants. In Florida, nature has the last word.

Without bad luck, Florida governor Ron DeSantis would have no luck at all.

After a Hindenburg of a presidential campaign, he is back to governing the only way he knows how — not by trying to help people, but by trying to get their goat.

In keeping with this curious public policy style, on May 15 he signed legislation wiping any reference to climate change from his state’s agencies and blocking a grab-bag of clean energy initiatives, from off-shore windmills to ensuring gas stoves would run on gas.

This, fresh off his bold move to block the commercial use of lab-grown meat, a circumstance that doesn’t exist and probably never will.

But, as bad luck would have it, on the day the governor announced his fealty to 19th-century fuel sources, the temperature in Florida began to climb. And climb. And continued to climb in the normally comfortable month of May to levels described by meteorologists as “crazy” and “insane.” In Key West, the old record was shattered by a full 17 degrees.

You would almost swear nature had a sense of humor.

Less funny, however, is what’s about to happen to Florida homeowners and taxpayers. At some point in, oh, say the next five years, the state will be devastated by a hurricane of record destruction, fueled by this climate change the governor insists doesn’t exist.

Why should we care? Because all of us will end up paying.

Ron DeSantis might not believe in climate change, but insurance companies sure do. Reflective of this, the average homeowners policy in Florida, according to industry numbers provided to USA Today, is $10,996 a year, compared with $2,377 for the nation as a whole. Even modest homes valued well below the state average can cost the owner $200 a month just in insurance. That’s if you can get it.

Farmers Insurance — which knows a thing or two because it’s seen a thing or two — has seen enough, and abandoned Florida altogether, along with a number of other insurers.

Without market insurance, Florida has entered the insurance business itself.

With well over 1 million policies, the state’s Citizens Property Insurance Corp. is the largest insurer in the state, which is making the state nervous. If (when) a major storm devastates Florida, some fear it could bankrupt the state.

More likely, the state would appeal to the federal government (in other words, the rest of us) for a bailout.

So the state is trying to “depopulate” its public insurance company, which is intended to be an insurer of last resort. Nudging homeowners back into the private sector has its own risks, mainly for the homeowners themselves. Some companies that have lowered their rates into the realm of affordability, it’s feared, can do that because their coverage is skimpy and rife with loopholes.

Nor are homeowners the only ones facing potential calamity. Businesses and croplands pay the costs as well, and in an age when everyone is worrying about inflation, they should be worried about insurance, which is responsible for an outsized share of the price-creep we see today.

And of course many people go to Florida to retire, which poses another problem: Assisted living centers and nursing homes are shutting down right and left because they can no longer afford insurance.

The elderly are Florida’s most dependable crop, but what happens when there is no place for them to go when they can no longer care for themselves?

Climate change is changing the insurance landscape not just in states like Florida, with its hurricanes, and California, with its wildfires. Even in Iowa, the insurance industry hasn’t made a profit in four years because of severe storms, and some insurers, convinced they never will again, are packing up and leaving the state.

Those insurers who continue to serve risky spots risk losing their own insurance from the massive reinsurance industry that protects retail insurers from massive, storm-related hits.

California, where insurance is still profitable, although less than in the past, is taking a different approach from Florida’s. Instead of pretending it doesn’t exist or symbolically protecting the God-given right of Americans to burn gas in their gas stoves, California is hardening itself against climate change, from burying power lines to bringing in herds of goats to eat away the underbrush around Los Angeles.

Naturally, burying a power line isn’t cheap, and ratepayers will feel the effects — just as all of us will in one way or another, our penalty for failing to act back when something might have been done to prevent planet warming.

Ron DeSantis can shake his fist at the clouds all he wants, but unlike politics, nature is indifferent to the bullies and the thickheaded.

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Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Ron DeSantis denying climate change will cost taxpayers in the end