Various insurance schemes are increasingly considered as part of a comprehensive set of responses aimed at adapting the world to future climate change. Insurance is believed to provide resources needed to rebuild societies following adverse effects of extreme weather events, and do so in a way that encourages preventive, risk-reducing action. After investigating the idea of climate insurance from a normative standpoint, it is argued that when understood conventionally - i.e. commercially - climate insurance is a highly unattractive idea. There are more defensible models of reactive adaptation that retain aspects of insurance, including, in particular, a model that is more reminiscent of a (global) social insurance model