A standard complaint people have about economic data, especially inflation data, is that it doesn’t reflect their own experience and is therefore wrong. This might annoy the economists, politicians and policymakers who are trying to use these numbers to make big decisions about the economy, but every now and then the complaint is spot-on.

In fact, some of those policymakers just pinpointed a big blind spot in inflation data. The price measure the Federal Reserve watches when deciding how to set interest rates catches only about half of the increase of home-insurance premiums in recent years, according to a new study by the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank. This raises the risk the Fed might not take that inflation seriously enough.

And because climate-related disasters play such a big role in making insurance expensive, this disconnect also reinforces complaints many people have about the Fed’s approach to growing climate chaos – which is, lately, to plug its ears and ignore it.

The personal consumption expenditures index for household insurance rose 35% between 2019 and 2024, the Dallas Fed points out. That may sound like a lot, but the actual rise in home insurance during that time was 62%, according to ICE McDash, a mortgage-data provider cited in the Dallas Fed’s study.

At least the PCE, the Fed’s favored inflation measure when crafting monetary policy, registers some of that inflation. The consumer price index, which gets cited in the media much more often, says insurance prices rose by just 5% during those five years. There are wonky reasons for this, but it’s exactly the kind of gulf between data and real life that makes normal people think the government is trying to gaslight them.

Of course, 35% inflation should be more than enough to catch the Fed’s eye. Certainly Chairman Jerome Powell has noticed, saying more than a year ago that insurance losses will make finding a mortgage, or even an ATM, impossible in some parts of the country in 10 or 15 years.

But even that warning undersells the problem. Affordable home insurance is becoming harder to find, and not only in the usual disaster zones of the Florida shore and the California wildland-urban interface. Between 2019 and 2024, premiums rose faster in Utah, Arizona, Idaho and Colorado than they did in Florida, according to ICE McDash.

In only one state, West Virginia, was home-insurance inflation less than the 35% shown by the PCE index. In most states, the gains were more than 50%, while 15 of them suffered increases of 70% or more.

In most states, home-insurance inflation grew at twice the pace of income, according to the Dallas Fed study. In several states you don’t usually think of as being on the front lines of climate change, such as Minnesota, Illinois and Maryland, premiums rose four times faster than income. And across the country, home insurance has inflated nearly three times faster than mortgage principal and interest and property taxes, according to a recent study by Intercontinental Exchange, which collects the ICE McDash data.

All of this is to say that, when Powell suggests the natural-disaster impact on home insurance is a problem that will manifest itself in a few unlucky places sometime in the 2030s, he seems dangerously out of touch. It’s consistent with his general hands-off approach to climate, which has only become worse since President Donald Trump’s return to office.

In congressional testimony last year, Powell boasted the Fed was doing “the bare minimum” and “much less than I think people understand” about climate. He has fought global rules on bank climate risks and ditched the Network for the Greening of the Financial System. His potential successor, former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh, will likely be worse, having publicly called climate change a “fashionable” and “fleeting” issue cared about only by suckers riding a “bandwagon.”

To be sure, climate change isn’t the only reason home insurance is expensive. Broader inflation has made rebuilding after disasters much more expensive, and people for decades have been unable to resist building new houses in weather-disaster zones.

But climate is an issue that almost every other top central bank in the world takes seriously to at least some extent. As they should: Heat and drought drive up food and other prices and hurt worker productivity. Disasters disrupt supply chains and cause political instability.

In the U.S., soaring premiums and stagnant policy have left an estimated $2.7 trillion insurance gap in flood and wildfire coverage alone. Weather disasters have cost the U.S. economy $7 trillion in the past dozen years, a bigger hit than the Great Depression, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.

These are threats to price stability, full employment and the soundness of the financial system, all of which fall under the Fed’s job description. It can’t blame faulty data for shirking that duty.

Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.