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climate denial
Climate Denier Lee Raymond Left the World Hotter Than He Found It
I don’t believe a loving God consigns people to eternal damnation. But I do believe that Raymond, Exxon, and Chase have helped send the rest of us to a kind of hell.
Jun 12, 2026
Here’s how Lee Raymond’s hometown paper, the Houston Chronicle, remembered him Thursday morning.
The Texas paper was more direct, and more accurate, than anyone else covering the story. The Times obit gave top billing to the fact that he led the acquisition of Mobil and “cut costs relentlessly;” the Wall Street Journal waited till paragraph six to note that he was “openly skeptical” of climate science (much like The Wall Street Journal). But the Chron had it right—when people think back in a hundred years or a thousand or ten thousand, the one thing worth remembering about him will be the crucial role he played in holding back action on climate change.
I’m going to recount the lowlights of the story here, and add one that gets very little notice in the obituaries, but that ties directly to the ongoing crisis.
Raymond was a research engineer who spent his whole career at what was then the world’s largest company. He joined its board in 1984, already a leading candidate for CEO, which means he was near the top during the 1980s, the period when (as we now know thanks to great investigative reporting) the company’s scientists correctly identified the dangers of global warming and linked them directly to Exxon’s products. That research, as Inside Climate News reported in 2015,
laid the groundwork for a 1982 corporate primer on carbon dioxide and climate change prepared by its environmental affairs office. Marked “not to be distributed externally,” it contained information that “has been given wide circulation to Exxon management.” In it, the company recognized, despite the many lingering unknowns, that heading off global warming “would require major reductions in fossil fuel combustion.”
Unless that happened, “there are some potentially catastrophic events that must be considered,” the primer said, citing independent experts. “Once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible.”
This was, of course, the same decade when Jim Hansen was carrying out his groundbreaking research at NASA (and I was writing The End of Nature). Exxon, as it turns out, was on precisely the same wavelength. Here’s, to me, one of the great historical what-ifs: Imagine that, on the night that Hansen made his remarks to Congress, an Exxon exec like Raymond had gone on the evening news and told Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, or Peter Jennings that “our research shows pretty much the same thing.” No one would have accused Exxon of climate alarmism; instead, we would have gotten to work as a civilization.
Instead, they chose denial. And it was Raymond who played a lead role, as Exxon helped form the Global Climate Coalition, first of the obfuscation fronts. He became the spokesman for anti-science in many ways: In 1997, as the world approached the first global climate talks in Kyoto, he gave what may be a speech second only in importance to Hansen’s original testimony. Speaking in Beijing to the Worl Petroleum Congress, he contended that the world was cooling, that there was no way to know if carbon dioxide was to blame, and that in any event “it is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now.”
These, of course, were exactly the things Exxon’s scientists had told them were not true. Indeed, they’d been explicitly warned that
man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.
And Exxon had believed its scientists. As a 2015 Los Angeles Times report made clear, they’d begun building drilling rigs higher to counteract rising sea levels, and plotting out what parts of the Arctic might be prime for oil drilling once they’d helped melt the ice.
Exxon, more than any single force on Earth, made sure that the planet didn’t address climate change while it had time. Given what it knew in the 1980s Exxon could have had a head start on building and owning the solutions like sun and wind. But, as one of Raymond’s successors said two years ago, that didn’t happen because “we don’t see the ability to generate above-average returns for our shareholders” with clean energy. And he was right. You can make money putting up solar panels, but you can’t make Exxon money, because the sun delivers energy for free. It doesn’t offer the same scope for greed.
And greed was the word here. For his role in helping wreck the Earth’s climate system, Exxon paid him $686 million, or $144,573 a day, during his tenure as CEO. His retirement package was $400 million.
And even when he finally left Exxon in 2005 he continued on doing damage—this is the often overlooked part of his story. He was the lead independent director at JP Morgan Chase, which had been the Exxon house bank, and which, as I chronicled for Rolling Stone in 2020, became the fossil fuel industry’s biggest lender—the “doomsday bank.”
Many of us ginned up a campaign to get him off that board (along with Rev. Lennox Yearwood and other protesters, and with Jane Fonda looking in through the glass windows, I was arrested at a DC Chase branch to help kick off that fight in 2020). It was eventually successful—that summer he was demoted as lead director, and left the board in December.
But Raymond’s legacy lives on. Just as Exxon has gone on pumping out oil (and climate nonsense), Chase has kept pumping out money. As the brand new edition of the Banking on Climate Chaos report pointed out last week, Chase remains the No. 1 financier of fossil fuels around the world, besting Mitsubishi, Citigroup, and Bank of America; since 2021 they’ve pumped a quarter-trillion dollars into this effort. Asked by The Guardian for a comment, a Chase spokesman said, “As one of the world’s largest financiers of energy, we support the full range of energy solutions and technologies, with a focus on reliability, affordability, security, and long-term resilience.” That kind of bland corporate-speak hides an almost unimaginable multitude of sins.
Like a great many Christians, I don’t believe a loving God consigns people to eternal damnation. But I do believe that Lee Raymond, Exxon, and Chase have helped send the rest of us to a kind of hell. As Jeff Masters just reported:
The world recorded its highest burned area for any January-May during the past 15 years, with more than 150 million hectares burned globally—22% higher than the previous high set in 2020 and about double the recent average for this period. In the US, the burned area so far in 2026 has been the highest for at least the past 10 years—about double the 10-year average—according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
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The Fight Over Worst-Case Climate Scenarios Reveals a Science Communication Failure
When articles imply a scientific model was wrong when it was merely updated to reflect new data, they sow unfounded distrust in science and create space for climate disinformation.
Jun 02, 2026
After a new scientific paper advanced a climate modeling framework that replaced an old extreme climate scenario with a less severe one, President Donald Trump posted to social media that climate scientists had admitted to being “WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” But it wasn’t a science mistake. It was a communication one.
Climate scenarios are not predictions. They are tools to understand how the climate would respond to different human actions, from rapid emissions cuts to current policies to backsliding into more fossil fuels. The most extreme widely-used pathway, called RCP8.5, studied a world with no climate policy and exceptionally high fossil fuel use through the rest of the century. Though always meant as an unlikely outlier, RCP8.5 has become far less plausible after a decade of accelerated clean energy deployment, to the point that this new paper proposed replacing it in future research. That should have been a climate win: Humans avoided the worst pathway and scientists revised models accordingly.
That this story could be so easily recast as scientific failure should be a wake-up call for science communicators. For years, journalists have favored alarm over nuance and problems over solutions, leaving the public poorly equipped to understand how uncertainty works or how climate action has improved future prospects. Without that context, every averted disaster can be mistaken for proof that the danger was made up at the outset.
Contrary to the president’s post, this pathway revision did not originate at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It came from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), which convened an international group of scientists to devise an updated set of climate scenarios for future study. The group didn’t just toss RCP8.5. It published a new framework that removes implausible outliers at both extremes, includes more pathways where the world uses carbon removal technologies, and centers human emissions decisions more explicitly. In a news release, the IPCC clarified that CMIP is not under their umbrella, though the research will likely appear among the tens of thousands of studies analyzed for the IPCC’s next major report.
RCP8.5 is not wrong science. Rather, science provided a map of perilous futures, people changed course, and the map refreshed accordingly.
Yet in addition to Trump, the New York Post and Daily Caller falsely presented this shift as an IPCC scandal. The New York Times and Washington Post also implied in their headlines that scientists got something wrong. These framings defy the logic of climate scenarios. Scenarios are not future predictions. Rather, they consider several possible human actions and study how the climate system would respond to each.
The uncertainty in these scenarios is a feature, not a bug. To scientists, uncertainty does not mean knowing or not knowing, but rather how well something is known. In the case of a climate model, scientists know pumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will warm the planet, but they cannot know exactly how much humans will emit; how strongly clouds, water vapor, surface reflectivity, and other feedbacks will amplify or dampen additional warming; or how oceans, forests, permafrost, and other natural systems will absorb or release carbon as the planet changes. Knowing this, scientists use ranges, error bars, assumptions, and confidence levels to communicate what a model can and can’t assert.
Like scientists, journalists seek the truth. However, journalists must hit far shorter word counts with far tighter deadlines. As such, they prefer hard facts and snappy quotes from authorities to convey information. They may see “uncertainty” as describing something unknown and thus irrelevant, not realizing how this thought process diverges from scientists'. Editors even less familiar with the topic may use the most conflict-charged framing or the scariest number in a range when they write headlines, favoring clicks over accuracy.
Typically, these issues are not nefarious. But when articles imply a scientific model was wrong when it was merely updated to reflect new data, they sow unfounded distrust in science and create space for climate disinformation.
In this case, changed human behavior is the new data point. When the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, the world was projected to warm by nearly 4°C, not much better than the RCP8.5 nightmare scenario. Today, based only on current policies, that projection is down to 2.6°C. While that trajectory still presents major cause for concern, these improvements are substantial, drastically reducing the risk of reaching several tipping points this century including East Antarctic glacier collapse, northern permafrost collapse, and a West African monsoon shift.
If journalists want audiences to trust science, they must tell the whole story: the danger, the uncertainty, the progress, and the paths forward.
That progress comes largely from the fact that solar costs have fallen about 90%, onshore wind about 70%, and batteries by more than 90% in the last decade, now routinely besting fossil fuels on price. Several other clean technologies have emerged and scaled, many businesses have adopted more sustainable practices, and thousands of climate policies have been enacted globally. With these achievements, what was once a plausible outlier in RCP8.5 no longer makes sense as the upper bound for climate scenarios.
Had Americans encountered frequent climate solutions reporting over the past decade, scientists setting aside RCP8.5 would have made complete sense. Yet solutions journalism remains a growing but still niche practice. Many editors worry solutions stories could look like advocacy, garner less readership, or fail to qualify as news. Evidence demonstrates the opposite: Audiences view, share, and trust solutions stories more than problem stories, and climate solutions stories specifically increase readers’ self-efficacy relative to problem-oriented alternatives.
Journalists play an essential role in showing which solutions are driving progress, where they fall short, and how best practices can be replicated. Without that news, audiences are more likely to believe climate deniers were right than understand that substantial climate progress has been happening for years, just without the sustained attention it merited.
None of this reduces the urgency of climate change. A 2.6°C world would still be incredibly costly, unjust, and catastrophic. But urgency without context leaves communities unable to assess risk and recognize which actions work. RCP8.5 is not wrong science. Rather, science provided a map of perilous futures, people changed course, and the map refreshed accordingly.
If journalists want audiences to trust science, they must tell the whole story: the danger, the uncertainty, the progress, and the paths forward. Otherwise, every hard-earned climate win risks being twisted into a scandal.
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How Climate Denial Greased Trump's Ascent to Fibber-in-Chief
Where the GOP learned to lie as a matter of course is an interesting question, and as a long-time climate activist I’ve had a front row seat: It’s the climate fight, more than anything else, that taught them to regard reality as optional.
Feb 03, 2026
The past stretch of days—say, since the murder of Renee Good—has been marked by brutality, but also by a dishonesty so deep and stupid that it’s begun to finally turn on the liars. Following the execution of Alex Pretti, for instance, various White House officials were quick to start just plain lying: He was an “assassin” and a “domestic terrorist” who "wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement."
As many videos emerged in the course of the day, those lies were shown for what they were. Pretti was, at worst, trying to help a woman who was being unnecessarily gassed; for his pains he was executed once he’d been disarmed; the only “weapon” he’d “brandished” was a cell phone. Oh, and instead of being a domestic terrorist he was a VA nurse who treated former soldiers with compassion and dignity.
Politicians, it goes without saying, have sometimes engaged in dishonesty, often with hideous consequences. The Gulf of Tonkin “attacks” that gave America an excuse for war in Vietnam were at least in part fabrications; the “weapons of mass destruction” weren’t in Iraq and there was no compelling reason to think they were. Hell, we had a president—Richard Nixon—known as Tricky Dick for the smears and fibs that marked his whole career, from his first congressional race to the last days of Watergate. But the presidents who told those lies generally attempted to manufacture cover stories or cloud them in enough shadows that they might pass for mistakes. By now, however, we’ve reached a point where the president and his party just recite up-is-down lies constantly. Consider this reckoning of President Donald Trump's first term:
When The Washington Post Fact Checker team first started cataloguing President Donald Trump’s false or misleading claims, we recorded 492 suspect claims in the first 100 days of his presidency. On Nov. 2 alone, the day before the 2020 vote, Trump made 503 false or misleading claims as he barnstormed across the country in a desperate effort to win reelection. This astonishing jump in falsehoods is the story of Trump’s tumultuous reign.
By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency—averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day. What is especially striking is how the tsunami of untruths kept rising the longer he served as president and became increasingly unmoored from the truth. Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in this third year—and 39 claims a day in his final year.
Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and an additional 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later.
The second term, obviously, is far worse than the first. At this point, it would be far easier for the Post to assign a reporter to list the true things the president says—a list as short as his… temper. (And of course the second-term Post wouldn’t do this, since its owner has castrated one of America’s great papers in an effort to curry favor with the fibber-in-chief). Every lie he tells is then repeated by his satraps in the administration and Congress—the closest they come to shame is when they lie and say that they haven’t heard his latest lies so they don’t have to publicly swallow them. Here at home we’ve gotten so used to this that the lies often barely register—but when Trump went to Davos and gave a speech literally filled with whoppers, European leaders were astonished. He was telling them things that they knew to be absurd—that China has no wind farms, say—and expecting them to go along.
Where the GOP learned to lie as a matter of course is an interesting question, and I’m afraid I’ve had a front row seat. I think it’s the climate fight, more than anything else, that taught them to regard reality as optional. And I think this because I remember the start of it all. When Jim Hansen first testified before the Senate that global warming was real, it caused a society-wide stir; running for the White House, the sitting vice-president George Herbert Walker Bush said he would combat the greenhouse effect with “the White House effect.” He made no attempt to deny it, or pretend it wasn’t a problem; it was reality, he wanted to lead the world, he had to at least pretend to deal with it.
And of course he could have—he could have resurrected Jimmy Carter’s plans (only eight years old) for a rapid solar research and development program, for instance. He seemed like he might; during the campaign he promised to convene a "global conference on the environment at the White House" during his first year in office. That didn’t happen, and it’s fairly easy to figure out why.
At about this same time—1989-1990—the fossil fuel industry was making a fateful decision. They were well aware that global warming was real; as a series of archival documents and whistleblowers have now laid out in excruciating detail, the big oil companies had conducted their own research programs, and reached conclusions just like Hansen’s. (Indeed, Exxon’s internal estimates of how hot the world would be by 2020 turned out to be even more accurate than NASA’s). We know that the executives of these companies believed their scientists—Exxon, for instance, began building drilling rigs higher to compensate for the rise in sea level they knew was coming, and plotting which corners of the Arctic to lease for drilling once it had inevitably melted.
It always has seemed to me that the worst fate would be to walk over this cliff without knowing it was there. Dignity demands understanding.
But they decided, across the industry, that the price of telling the truth would be too high. Inevitably it would mean having to leave at least some of their reserves of coal, gas, and oil in the ground, and those reserves were valued in the tens of trillions of dollars. And so they started forming the coalitions and councils, hiring the veterans of the fights over tobacco and asbestos and even DDT—they started lying.
Their lies were, at first, made concessions to some notion of plausibility. The science was “uncertain.” It was mostly China’s fault. Climate always fluctuates. Computer models are “unreliable.” And so on—these were never good-faith objections, they were always the arguments from selfishness. And as time went on they became more and more outlandish. Before the 1990s were over, the CEO of Exxon was telling a key crowd of Chinese leaders that the Earth was cooling and that it would make no difference if we waited a quarter century to start phasing out fossil fuels. Again, his scientists had assured him that this was nonsense years before.
It took a while for this to filter down through the entire GOP ecosystem. George W. Bush actually ran for president in 2000 promising to officially establish that carbon dioxide was a pollutant and to regulate its emissions. Shortly after taking office, however, his vice-president—oil-patch CEO Dick Cheney—held a series of private meetings with his industry brethren, and before long W. announced that he had made a mistake and that CO2 was not in fact a problem.
That was the signal for the rest of the Republican party—save for a few iconoclasts like John McCain—to fall in line, and by the time he ran for president even McCain had pretty much given up talking about global warming. The biggest donors by far to GOP campaign funds were the Koch brothers and the vast network they had assembled of right-wing billionaires—and the Koch brothers were the biggest oil and gas barons in America, owners of an unrivaled fleet of pipelines and refineries. The efforts of this group of oil-adjacent cronies became ever more extreme—eventually they were funding groups to put up billboards equating climate scientists with Charles Manson.
And eventually, inevitably, it produced a president who felt no compunction about just saying that climate change wasn’t real, and using all the power he could muster to kill off both the scientific effort that had alerted us to the crisis, and the policy effort to do something about it. His crew assisted in this cover-up in all the usual ways—we learned January 30, for instance, that a federal judge had ruled that the Department of Energy’s effort to produce a report pooh-poohing climate danger had violated all manner of federal law.
Judge William Young of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts said the Energy Department did not deny that it had failed to hold open meetings or assemble a balance of viewpoints, as the law requires, when it created the panel, known as the Climate Working Group.
“These violations are now established as a matter of law,” wrote Judge Young, who was nominated to the bench by Ronald Reagan. He said the Climate Working Group was, in fact, a federal advisory committee designed to inform policy, and not, as the Energy Department claimed, merely “assembled to exchange facts or information.”
What makes this campaign of deception all the more remarkable is that it’s happened even as the actual facts of global warming have become painfully clear. Back in 1988 it was still pretty much theory; now it’s flood and fire, storm and sea-level rise. We live on a planet losing the ice at its poles, and the vast coral reefs in between, where tens of millions of humans are already on the move because their homes can no longer support them. It’s also remarkable because in 1988 the solutions were hard—solar power was still the most expensive energy on Earth. Now it’s the cheapest. Most of the world has recognized these truths, coming together if fitfully to try and least talk about it. But whenever America is in the hands of Republicans it just walks away.
Perhaps, given this long history, I can offer a few hard-earned ideas about how to try and deal with Trump’s many assaults on the truth. They won’t do all that we might hope, but they’re nonetheless important.
- Don’t give up. Telling the the truth repeatedly actually can work. Because more than 80% of Americans saw the video of Alex Pretti’s execution, the lies backfired. And at least in part because 95% of Americans live in counties that have had a federally declared disaster since 2011, it’s hard to convince most people that there’s not something afoot. Indeed, polling demonstrates that public concern and understanding of climate change has held relatively stable for the last 30 years, with about two-thirds of Americans acknowledging that we’ve got trouble. And since it’s clear that about one-third of America is beyond the reach of fact or feeling, that’s not bad.
- More than ever we need to support independent media. Throughout Trump’s second term, it’s been as much Substackers, YouTubers, and others of this breed who’ve been keeping things straight as it has the ‘legacy media.’ (As one small example, check out this epic—in both content and length—rant about renewable energy’s benefits that appeared on YouTube over the weekend). That legacy media is increasingly craven and corrupted (see, for instance, CBS News), or just simply out of business—we now have big cities in America without daily newspapers. The administration clearly recognizes this trend—that’s why they’re trying to prosecute Don Lemon, Georgia Fort, and others covering the Minnesota debacle. Many of these independent journalists have a point of view—I certainly do. And I can tell you that, though I continue to work for and love brave institutions like the New Yorker, I’m also very grateful for things like Substack that are increasingly taking up the slack. (Tips on how to support Lemon and Fort here)
- Even on days when one despairs (and that’s an awful lot of days) it’s good to remind oneself that the truth has real value in and of itself. I’ve written more words than anyone else on the climate crisis—one motivation was to try and spur action, but another was simply to record and spread this news. It always has seemed to me that the worst fate would be to walk over this cliff without knowing it was there. Dignity demands understanding.
I have no idea if I’ll live to see the day when the truth regains a strong footing in our culture, but I do have a certain amount of faith it will happen eventually, if only because reality reality ultimately trumps (not Trumps) political reality. Physics and chemistry are functional truth, despite their liberal bias. I remember the week after Hurricane Sandy hit New York shutting down the financial district, and the cover of Business Week magazine was simply a big block of text: “It’s Global Warming Stupid.” Eventually that message will get through; our job is to see if we can make that happen before the damage is any worse than it has to be.
Oh, and word on the street is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is going after Springfield Ohio this week—home of the biggest lie of the last election campaign. Haitians are not eating cats and dogs. ICE is killing good people. The last three years are the hottest on record. Pass it on.
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'Attack on Independent Science': Trump EPA Removes All Mention of Human-Caused Climate Crisis From Public Webpages
Climate scientist Daniel Swain called it "a deliberate effort to misinform."
Dec 09, 2025
The Trump administration has removed all references to human-caused climate change from Environmental Protection Agency webpages, as well as large amounts of data showing the dramatic warming of the climate over recent decades and the resulting risks.
According to a Tuesday report from the Washington Post, one page on the "Causes of Climate Change" stated as recently as October that "it is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land," a statement that reflects the overwhelming consensus in peer-reviewed literature on climate.
That statement is now nowhere to be found, with those that remain only mentioning "natural" causes of planetary warming like volcanic activity and variations in solar activity.
"The new, near-exclusive emphasis on natural causes of climate change on the EPA's website is now completely out of sync with all available evidence demonstrating overwhelming human influence on contemporary warming trends," explained Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, who posted about the changes on social media.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which examines tens of thousands of studies from around the globe, found that virtually all warming since the dawn of the industrial era can be attributed to human carbon emissions.
This can be confirmed using the Wayback Machine's last snapshot (from Oct 8, 2025). At some point between Oct 8 & Dec 8, major changes were made to this and other EPA climate change content. Information has either been removed completely or "adjusted" to emphasize natural causes.
[image or embed]
— Daniel Swain (@weatherwest.bsky.social) December 8, 2025 at 12:50 PM
Pages about the catastrophic results of climate change have also been scrubbed: One of them allowed users to view several climate change indicators, like the historic decline of Arctic sea ice and glaciers and the increased rates of coastal flooding due to rising sea levels. That page has been deleted entirely.
Another page, which answered frequently asked questions about climate change, now no longer includes questions like, "Is there scientific consensus that human activities are causing today’s climate change?” "How can people reduce the risks of climate change?" and "Who is most at risk from the impacts of climate change?" The page provides no indication that climate change is a human-caused phenomenon, instead only discussing natural factors.
That page links to another that has since been deleted. It once provided extensive information about the risks climate change poses to human health, "from increasing the risk of extreme heat events and heavy storms to increasing the risk of asthma attacks and changing the spread of certain diseases carried by ticks and mosquitoes." Another deleted page discussed the impacts of climate change on children's health and low-income populations.
“This is, I think, one of the more dramatic scrubbings we’ve seen so far in the climate space,” said Swain. "This website is now completely incorrect regarding the changes in climate that we’re seeing today and their causes... It’s clearly a deliberate effort to misinform.”
During his 2024 campaign for reelection, President Donald Trump and his affiliated super political action committees received more than $96 million in direct contributions from oil and gas industry donors, according to a January report from Climate Power. Since retaking office, he has moved to dramatically expand the extraction and use of planet-heating fossil fuels while eliminating investment in clean energy and electric vehicles.
Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director for the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said, "Deleting and distorting this scientific information only serves to give a free pass to fossil fuel polluters who are raking in profits even as communities reel from extreme heatwaves, record-breaking floods, intensified storms, and catastrophic wildfires."
Cleetus said that the purging of climate information from EPA sites was a prelude to "the likely overturning of the endangerment finding, a legal and scientific foundation for standards to limit the heat-trapping emissions driving climate change and threatening human health."
In July, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin unveiled a proposal to rescind the 2009 finding, which determined that climate change endangers human life and serves as the legal basis for greenhouse gas regulations under the Clean Air Act.
Undermining climate science is core to that effort, which Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M, said at the time, "could unravel virtually every US climate regulation on the books, from car emissions standards to power plant rules.”
Shortly after Zeldin announced the rule change, the Department of Energy cobbled together a “Climate Working Group” comprising five authors handpicked by Secretary Chris Wright to produce a climate report that disputes the IPCC's findings and the scientific consensus on climate change.
The report did not undergo peer review and omitted around 99% of the scientific literature the IPCC relied on for its comprehensive findings. A group of climate scientists that independently reviewed the paper found that it “exhibits pervasive problems with misrepresentation and selective citation of the scientific literature, cherry-picking of data, and faulty or absent statistics.”
Cleetus said Tuesday that “EPA is trying to bury the evidence on human-caused climate change, but it cannot change the reality of climate science or the harsh toll climate impacts are taking on people’s lives... This isn’t just about data on a website; it’s an attack on independent science and scientific integrity.”
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The ‘COP of Truth’ Just Normalized a New Kind of Climate Denialism
The new denialism no longer bellows about hoaxes; it asks for more studies, more modelling, more consultations, always in the service of delay.
Dec 02, 2025
Belém promised a “COP of truth.” What unfolded was a courteous unravelling of ambition, as denialism left global climate action wobbling at the moment it needs steel.
As the Chair of the UK’s COP30 youth delegation, I realized within hours that this United Nations climate conference would be defined by its optics—not its outcomes. The venue teemed with political hopefuls more interested in cameras than commitments, and with a record 1,600 fossil fuel and 531 carbon-capture lobbyists, 1 in every 25 attendees served commercial interests.
Then came the negotiations, where delegates quietly diluted the science. References to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), long regarded as the global lodestar of climate knowledge, were either softened into ambiguity or dropped altogether. Several companies went even further, trumpeting improvements in emissions intensity as if they were genuine reductions.
It was greenwashing par excellence, a polite fiction to excuse keeping emissions exactly where they are.
After the failures of COP29 and COP30, the process will only matter again if governments are finally pushed toward honesty and supported by tools that can hold them to it.
So it was no surprise when the negotiations titled toward erasure, governing not just the deal but the language that framed it. The term “fossil fuel” vanished from the final Belém Political Package, replaced with sweeping and unenforceable vows to renewables and adaptation funding.
We should have foreseen how settled climate science would be twisted and spun. After all, one investigation found more than 14,000 pieces of COP-related disinformation in just the three months before Belém. Much of it was generated by AI, including a widely shared fake video that showed the host city swallowed by floods.
This version of climate denialism reveals the moral credibility of climate action is being leveraged to keep emissions frozen in place. It no longer bellows about hoaxes, except by Donald Trump who has happily dragged America back into isolationism. In the diplomatic world it asks for more studies, more modelling, more consultations, always in the service of delay. It is denialism wearing the mask of governance, and it is far more corrosive than the loud bluff it replaced.
The timing could hardly be worse. The IPCC’s carbon budget for a 50% chance of staying below 1.5°C will vanish by 2029 if emissions continue at today’s pace. This is also the first year after the Global Stocktake that mandates governments to draft national plans that will set our course until 2030.
And what happens now determines the shape of the decisive decade. Crossing 1.5°C sharply raises the risk of irreversible cryosphere collapse—rapid ice loss in Antarctica and Greenland which will lock the world into meters of sea-level rise that imperil coastal megacities across every hemisphere. At 2°C, another billion people will face severe water scarcity—especially in the Global South where adaptation capacity is lowest and exposure is highest. This reality is why the deliberate sidelining of climate science is not just exasperating but catastrophic.
And COP30’s lone nod to honesty—the Declaration on Information Integrity—feels painfully thin. The declaration, which promises to counter climate falsehoods, was only signed by 12 countries. And with no sanctions or accountability, it is a gesture at truth in the exact moment truth needed teeth.
We need a global firewall for climate truth: binding rules for climate information, a UN body capable of verifying data with transparent AI, and legal duties on platforms to curb the algorithmic spread of lies. Climate inaction is becoming a matter of legal liability. That burden should fall equally on those who deliberately twist the science.
There must be a counterweight capable of tracing disinformation, naming the culprits of confusion, and dragging the debate back to the science that anchors it. Only then can we hope to restart global climate momentum. And in an irony worthy of our age, the technology that helped generate the mess—AI—may be the only thing sharp enough to cut through it.
According to Sachin Dev Duggal, Britain’s foremost expert on applied artificial intelligence and EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year in 2023, the internet is now a space where reliable information sits beside convincing fabrications, and no amount of earnest climate communication will fix this without tools that can separate accuracy from invention at scale.
AI is already showing what those tools might look like. It can review millions of words in seconds and test claims against established climate data with a consistency no human team can match. We are already seeing this in practice. For example, the machine-learning model ClimateBERT has analysed corporate reports and exposed misleading emissions claims. Another model, CLIMINATOR, has also been trained to hold political and corporate actors to account by checking whether their climate statements align with the evidence or contradict it. And the FactCrisis project, cofounded by the EU, has used AI during heatwaves to track false statistics and identify accounts pushing them, offering a glimpse of what becomes possible when AI and international bodies finally start reinforcing one another.
Duggal argues that the next step is a decentralized verification model. Climate data from satellites, sensors, and national inventories would sit in a shared public ledger that no ministry or corporation can quietly revise. When a government or company makes a claim about progress, anyone could check it against a record that does not bend to convenience. It would make the small acts of creative reporting that feed climate denialism far harder to get away with.
Yet today’s AI carries a flaw that limits its usefulness. Large language models are fluent but ungrounded, reproducing the language of climate science without retaining the facts that give it weight, which makes them unreliable referees in a space awash with motivated distortions. Duggal sees that any serious AI tool must reconnect claims to their evidence, trace where the data came from, and reveal the steps that turned information into a conclusion. This is the direction of his SeKondBrain project, which concentrates on how to build these evidential scaffolds so that an AI system can point to the exact documents, numbers, or assumptions that shaped its judgement. That kind of traceability matters because it gives climate negotiators and regulators something concrete to interrogate. And without systems built to preserve and expose the evidence behind their outputs, AI will remain too opaque to play any serious role in protecting science.
After the failures of COP29 and COP30, the process will only matter again if governments are finally pushed toward honesty and supported by tools that can hold them to it. Without that basic partnership, we may have reached the point where another COP has nothing left to say.
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Property Insurance Is the Canary in the Climate Coal Mine
We too have a little bird trying to call our attention to a major problem. That bird is the insurance industry with its army of actuaries.
Nov 18, 2025
As the cost of insuring our houses escalates around the United States and the world, it appears that property insurance is acting like a canary in a coal mine.
Canaries used to be taken into coal mines because they served as an early warning system if dangerous gases were building up. Since the canaries were more sensitive to these gases than people, they protected the miners from life-threatening conditions. When the canary dropped dead, the miners could still get out.
Like the canaries, the actuaries who interpret data for insurance companies are more sensitive than most individual people to changes going on in the world. Actuaries earn big salaries because the financial health of their employers depends on them.
Things have already gotten so bad that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) recently sponsored a webinar panel discussion: "Extreme Weather Events and Insurance: Households, Homeowners, and Risk." (This link will take you to a video of the event.)
Any coal miner who refused to evacuate a mine when the mine’s canary keeled over—perhaps saying, “I don’t believe there is any real danger here”—would not have been long for this world.
The panelists were located in the United States (Washington, DC and Madison, Wisconsin) and England (London and Cambridge). Climate changes are not limited to the United States, nor is awareness that we need to do something about them if we can.
The panelists were not grinding particular political axes. They were discussing the measured fact that an increasing number of extreme weather events are destroying valuable property—housing, commercial buildings, streets, bridges, etc.—requiring insurance company payouts to policyholders.
These insurance payouts must be financed by the premiums charged to people who are insuring their property. As damages increase, the premiums also have to increase. Although premiums may be regulated by state regulators, if they do not allow the needed increases insurance companies will pull out of doing business in that state.
As insurance companies pull out, it may become more and more difficult—perhaps even impossible—for people to insure their houses. But if a house cannot be insured, banks won’t finance a mortgage on it, and if it cannot be financed the owner may be unable to sell it.
For many people, their home is their primary investment, and they cannot afford to live in it if they cannot insure it. If it burned down or was otherwise destroyed, they would be wiped out financially. But if they cannot sell it, then the homeowner is a real pickle.
Disrupted housing markets can produce disastrous results for a country’s economy in general, as we Americans discovered during the recession beginning around 2008.
The impact of a world that is heating up is not being felt as much in the United States as in many other countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia which are suffering from unusually long bouts of very hot weather, flooding downpours alternating with extreme droughts, forest fires, etc. Some island nations may be literally wiped out as melting icebergs and glaciers increase sea level, putting them underwater.
But enough extreme weather events are already occurring in the United States that the insurance companies must make major increases in their prices.
Any coal miner who refused to evacuate a mine when the mine’s canary keeled over—perhaps saying, “I don’t believe there is any real danger here”—would not have been long for this world.
Americans who continue to politicize discussion of global warming—either denying its existence, its extent, its speed, or its seriousness—will be like that coal miner. We too have a little bird trying to call our attention to a major problem. That bird is the insurance industry with its army of actuaries. We ignore that warning at our own risk, and at the risk of our children and grandchildren.
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Hurricane Melissa Was a Third More Powerful Due to Human-Driven Climate Chaos
The more carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, the more we heat up the planet, and the fiercer we make the hurricanes and cyclones.
Nov 01, 2025
Hurricane Melissa is the most devastating storm to hit Jamaica in recorded history, CNN reports. It rapidly intensified over the past few days, with its winds reaching 185 miles per hour at the time of landfall. This intensification is a feature of hot water, and the Caribbean in that area is hot, at about 86.1°F or 30.1°C, much higher than it would have been 50 years ago.
Hot water also puts more moisture into the atmosphere, which the storm dumps when it makes landfall, causing massive flooding. Jamaican reporters trying to cover the maelstrom reported being unable to get to affected areas because the roads are flooded.
Only three other such Atlantic storms have reached 185 m/h, and only one has exceeded it. This is the first such monster to sweep into Jamaica. Of course, it is hardly the island’s first big hurricane. Category 4 Beryl hit last July. But this one was a Godzilla, a Category 5.
President Donald Trump calls climate change a “hoax,” and 51% of Americans still say in polling that climate change is not a serious threat. The slightly good news is that Gallup reports that an unprecedented 48% of Americans now say that global warming will pose a serious threat to their way of life sometime in their lifetimes, up from 44% last year. The reason that everybody doesn’t say this (since it is manifestly true) is that a vast apparatus of propaganda by Big Oil, the Republican Party (there, I’ve repeated myself), and Saudi Arabia and Russia floods the airwaves and social media constantly. Even news outlets that don’t deny our climate breakdown seldom make the connection between people-caused climate change and the billion-dollar natural disasters that increasingly strike us annually.
Without people-caused climate breakdown, the winds instead would have been about 168 miles per hour.
Oneal Robinson of St. Elizabeth Parish said the houses were full of water, according to the Jamaica Star: “Beryl was terrible, but this is about three times worse than Beryl. I have never experienced anything like this. Melissa is giving St. Elizabeth a flogging. Some persons have lost their roofs here in Mountainside, and I know Treasure Beach is also getting a beating.”
Indeed, in many parishes all the buildings lost their roofs.
Beryl knocked out electricity for weeks, and Melissa will, too. Already, 77% of Jamaica Public Service customers are without electricity, some 530,000 people.
Half of the utility poles that hold up electrical wires in Westmoreland were knocked down by the winds.
The Jamaica Star says that fierce winds ripped off roofs, sent debris hurtling through the air, and caused significant damage to four big hospitals. When a natural disaster hits, you need hospitals, but what if it hits them, too? The Black River Hospital was completely destroyed.
Eminent climate scientist Michael E. Mann points out that burning coal, fossil gas, and petroleum heated up the water, which then increased the peak wind speed by 10% above what it would otherwise have been. That is, without people-caused climate breakdown, the winds instead would have been about 168 miles per hour.
Here’s the trick. The destructive potential of an increase in wind speeds is exponential, not serial. It doesn’t go 1, 2, 3, 4. It jumps. So 185 m/h winds are fully 33% more destructive than than 168 m/h winds are.
Why were this hurricane’s wind speeds so high? Because hot water generates hurricanes, and the hotter it is, the more powerful the storm it generates. People, by burning fossil fuels, have added 1°C. (1.8°F) to the temperature of the oceans since about 1750 before the Industrial Revolution.
The more carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, the more we heat up the planet, and the fiercer we make the hurricanes and cyclones. The hurricanes’ intensity has necessitated the creation of a new Category 6 storm because the old scale is inadequate to our climate breakdown reality.
Michael E. Mann and his colleague Peter Hotez have explained the climate change denial scam, its origins, and its threat to humanity in their book Science Under Siege.
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The Trump Admin's Climate Denial Proposal Contradicts Science, Law, and Public Opinion
The world’s highest court recently affirmed that climate action is a legal duty and that governments must regulate greenhouse gas emissions.
Aug 24, 2025
When US Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, Administrator Lee Zeldin announced last month his official proposal to rescind the agency’s foundational determination that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health and welfare, he insinuated that previous administrations (under former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden) had “twisted the law, ignored precedent, and warped science” in order to achieve their regulatory agendas. And the regulations of these planet-warming emissions, not the emissions themselves like carbon dioxide, are “the real threat to Americans’ livelihoods,” Zeldin suggested.
EPA’s greenhouse gas endangerment finding, established in 2009, serves as the basis of its legal obligation under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from sources such as motor vehicles and power plants. The finding was based on an extensive review of the scientific record, which has gotten even more robust over the last 16 years, and has survived all legal challenges brought against it.
The Trump administration’s move to do away with the finding contradicts the overwhelming scientific evidence that greenhouse gas emissions are driving dangerous climate change impacts. There are also arguments to be made that it is unlawful. And, it goes against the pleas of the hundreds of Americans who have spoken out this week in opposition to Zeldin’s sweeping deregulatory proposal. In other words, contrary to Zeldin’s assertion, it is actually the Trump administration that is twisting or ignoring the law and public sentiment and warping science.
Let’s start with the science. The world’s premier body of climate scientists—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—has stated that it is “unequivocal” that human activities are warming the planet and causing rapid and widespread changes, such as more extreme weather, that are unprecedented over millennia. The US Fifth National Climate Assessment report observes that “harmful impacts from more frequent and severe extremes are increasing across the country” and notes that “climate changes are making it harder to maintain safe homes and healthy families; reliable public services; a sustainable economy; thriving ecosystems, cultures, and traditions; and strong communities.” These are authoritative statements from reports involving hundreds of scientists and extensive peer review.
What the Trump administration is doing with repealing the endangerment finding and all GHG regulations that flow from it, therefore, could be a violation of international law under the ICJ’s recent advisory opinion.
But to support its proposal to rescind the endangerment finding, Trump’s EPA relies instead on a new report issued by the Department of Energy (DOE) that rejects the scientific consensus on climate change and claims that GHG emissions and climate impacts are not harmful. The report, hastily written by five climate skeptics over a period of just two months, recycles many climate denialist talking points and, according to one analysis, includes over 100 false or misleading statements. As science historian Naomi Oreskes puts it, “Climate denial is now the official policy of the US government.”
“What the Trump administration and the Department of Energy did is pull together this small hand-picked group of people to work in secret to write this report that questions that mountain of scientific evidence that climate change is harming people,” said Erin Murphy, a senior attorney at Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).
“In and of itself, the conclusions of that report are inaccurate and inconsistent with the vast, vast majority of scientific findings and the consensus across the scientific community,” she added. “But also, the report is inconsistent with federal law.”
EDF and the Union of Concerned Scientists have filed a lawsuit against the DOE, the EPA, and the group of five climate skeptics arguing that the secretive manner in which the report was pulled together violates the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which mandates transparency and opportunities for public engagement in government advisory proceedings.
The report has not gone through formal peer review, and although it is currently open to public comment, the time window for commenting is limited to just 30 days (closing on September 2) during a month when many people take vacations or might otherwise be unavailable. And until this week, none of the hundreds of comments that have come in were publicly visible. That hiding of the comments, Murphy said, “further underscores the government’s efforts to do this in secret.”
The lawsuit aims to block the Trump administration from using this report in its efforts to rescind the endangerment finding.
It was clear to me that the speakers—from environmental groups, the medical community and scientists to municipal and state governments and private citizens—were overwhelmingly united in their disapproval of the nixing of EPA’s foundational finding that GHG emissions endanger our health and welfare.
Even if EPA plows ahead and finalizes its move to eliminate the finding, that action will certainly be challenged in court. It remains to be seen what legal arguments environmental groups and other challengers will put forth.
One thing that is clear is that climate action is no longer optional, but rather a legal obligation, as several international courts have affirmed in recent landmark climate change advisory opinions. The International Court of Justice, considered the world’s highest court, delivered its opinion on July 23. The ICJ clarified that states have obligations under multiple sources of international law to reduce emissions and that governments must regulate the emissions of private actors. The customary law duty to prevent significant environmental harm to the climate system, which applies to all countries regardless of whether they are parties to specific treaties, includes putting in place “regulatory mitigation mechanisms” to reduce GHG emissions, the court said. Such rules “must regulate the conduct of public and private operators.” According to the court, failure to act in good faith to regulate emissions could be considered an unlawful act.
What the Trump administration is doing with repealing the endangerment finding and all GHG regulations that flow from it, therefore, could be a violation of international law under the ICJ’s recent advisory opinion. And while the opinion itself is nonbinding, it may be invoked in domestic court proceedings around the world, including in the US.
Zeldin’s endangerment finding rescission also seems to be untenable in the court of public opinion. “In repealing the endangerment finding, the Trump administration is stepping far out of line with public opinion, as voters across partisanship are in strong agreement that greenhouse gas emissions are a threat to public health and should be regulated,” Data for Progress says in reference to new poll results it released last week.
EPA held virtual public hearings last week on its proposal, and almost everyone who testified spoke in opposition to eliminating the endangerment finding. Out of the roughly 200 people who spoke on Tuesday, fewer than 10 voiced support for EPA’s rollback, Inside Climate News reports. I tuned into some of the hearings on Wednesday and Thursday, and it was clear to me that the speakers—from environmental groups, the medical community and scientists to municipal and state governments and private citizens—were overwhelmingly united in their disapproval of the nixing of EPA’s foundational finding that GHG emissions endanger our health and welfare.
“The EPA has a responsibility to regulate greenhouse gases for what they are—a clear, present, and growing threat to the health and well-being of every American,” Kim Cobb, a climate scientist, told the EPA panel in concluding her testimony.
Tiffany Covarrubias Lyttle, a registered nurse and mother of seven children, said during her testimony that the father of her children recently passed away from cancer, specially an environmentally triggered adenocarcinoma.
“Repealing environmental protections and rescinding [the endangerment] finding will make stories like mine more common,” Lyttle said. “Clean air, clean water, and a stable climate aren’t just environmental issues. They are in fact a matter of life and death.”
This piece was originally published on Dana Drugmand’s Substack One Earth Now on August 21, 2025.
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Sanders Says Trump Is Prioritizing Profits for 'Fossil Fuel Executive Friends' by Gutting Climate Office
"He just fired the last remaining State Department employees who work on climate change, which is undoubtedly one of the greatest threats to our national security," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Jul 14, 2025
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Sunday condemned President Donald Trump's decision to terminate all remaining federal employees at the State Department office that works on international climate policy, a move that came as the administration hired prominent climate denialists and continued to boost the industry primarily responsible for the planetary crisis.
In a statement, Sanders (I-Vt.) accused Trump of "putting the planet and future generations at risk for the short-term profits of his fossil fuel executive friends." The president has repeatedly described climate change as a "hoax" and a "scam" and has moved aggressively to silence researchers and suppress data that contradict his false position.
Grist's Kate Yoder wrote Monday that "this isn't climate denial in the traditional sense."
"The days of loudly debating the science have mostly given way to something quieter and more insidious: a campaign to withhold the raw information itself," Yoder added.
Sanders' statement came days after the U.S. State Department fired all employees still at the Office of Global Change, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio is moving to eliminate at Trump's behest. Most of the office's staffers, who were tasked with engaging in international climate negotiations, had already departed voluntarily amid Trump's sweeping withdrawal from global climate initiatives and talks.
From May 2024 to May 2025, 4 billion people (half of the world’s population) experienced at least one extra month of extreme heat due to climate change.
And what is Trump’s response? He just fired the last remaining State Department employees who work on climate change. pic.twitter.com/IOlH9MImHU
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) July 13, 2025
Sanders highlighted the context of Trump's assault on climate science and diplomacy, pointing to "flooding in Texas this past week and in Vermont and Brazil last summer, recent wildfires in Canada and Los Angeles, and heatwaves in the United States, Europe, India, and Pakistan"—extreme weather made more intense by fossil fuel-driven climate change.
"The past 10 years have been the warmest 10 years on record," the senator noted. "2024 was the warmest year in recorded history. January 2025 was the hottest January on record. Western Europe just had its hottest June on record. The recent heatwave in the United States put nearly 190 million Americans under heat advisories and broke heat records in more than 280 locations. Over the past 60 years, the frequency of heatwaves in the United States has tripled. According to a new study from Yale University, 64% of Americans think global warming is affecting the weather in the U.S. and almost half say they have personally experienced its effects."
"And what is President Trump's response? He just fired the last remaining State Department employees who work on climate change, which is undoubtedly one of the greatest threats to our national security," said Sanders.
While removing federal climate staffers and experts en masse, Trump's administration has hired prominent climate denialists and moved to expand planet-warming oil and gas drilling—a gift to the fossil fuel giants that poured nearly $20 million into the president's inaugural fund and helped bankroll his White House campaign.
"Every month that Donald Trump has been in power, we've seen a raft of anti-climate measures come out which are music to the fossil fuel industry's ears," said Nicu Calcea, senior data investigator at Global Witness. "From plans to steamroll through dirty new coal plants, to the attempted quashing of 'polluter pays' laws that would hold oil giants accountable, it's clear where his political priorities lie."
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Trump's NOAA Will Stop Tracking Costliest Climate Disasters
"Their philosophy is, if we ignore it, it's not a problem," said one meteorologist.
May 08, 2025
On the heels of the news that higher-than-average temperatures continued globally in April, one of the United States' top science agencies announced Thursday that it will no longer update a database that tracks climate disasters that cause billions of dollars in damage.
As of Thursday, the Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) website was replaced with a message saying there have been no such events in 2025 through April 8.
That flies in the face of an analysis by the National Centers for Environmental Information, which has maintained the database and said before it was taken down that six to eight billion-dollar climate disasters have happened so far this year, including the wildfires that devastated parts of Los Angeles in January and caused an estimated $150 billion in damage.
The World Weather Attribution said in late January that planetary heating, fueled by greenhouse gas emissions, caused weather conditions in Southern California that made the fires 35% more likely.
Hundreds of people have been laid off from NOAA in recent weeks as the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire tech CEO Elon Musk, has pushed to slash government spending, and those who have lost their jobs include scientists who helped maintain the database.
NOAA spokesperson Kim Doster told The Washington Post that in addition to staff changes, "evolving priorities" were also partially behind the retiring of the database, which will now show disasters that occurred only between 1980-2024.
Between 2020-24, the number of billion-dollar disasters averaged 23 per year, compared to just a few per year in the 1980s.
"This Trump administration move is the dumbest magic trick possible: covering their eyes and pretending the problem will go away if they just stop counting the costs. Households across the country already have to count these costs at their kitchen table as they budget for higher insurance costs and home repairs. Families and retirees dipping into their savings or going bankrupt to recover from wildfires and hurricanes know what disasters cost," said Carly Fabian, senior insurance policy advocate with Public Citizen's Climate Program. "Hiding the national tallies will only undermine our ability to prepare and respond to the climate crisis. Deleting the data will exacerbate the devastating delays in acting to slow climate change, and the impacts it is having on property insurance and housing costs."
NOAA's "evolving priorities" have also included decommissioning other datasets, including one tracking marine environments and one tracking ocean currents.
Without NOAA's Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database, Jeremy Porter, co-founder of the climate risk financial modeling firm First Street, told CNN that "replicating or extending damage trend analyses, especially at regional scales or across hazard types, is nearly impossible without significant funding or institutional access to commercial catastrophe models."
"What makes this resource uniquely valuable is not just its standardized methodology across decades, but the fact that it draws from proprietary and nonpublic data sources (such as reinsurance loss estimates, localized government reports, and private claims databases) that are otherwise inaccessible to most researchers," he said.
Chris Gloninger, a meteorologist who resigned from an Iowa news station after receiving threats for his frank, science-based coverage of climate disasters, said the retiring of the database suggests the Trump administration is "okay with spending billions of dollars on disasters."
"Every dollar that we spend on mitigation or adaptation saves $13 in recovery costs," said Gloninger. "But their philosophy is, if we ignore it, it's not a problem."
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