Union of Concerned Scientists Global Warming

In 2022 I visited Glacier National Park for the first time with two close friends. We spent five days backpacking through the backcountry, and I was enthralled by the park’s vastness and beauty and the chance to see glaciers for the first time in my life. While I loved camping out in the wild, as a trail runner I couldn’t help but think of ways to travel lighter, cover more territory, and see even more of this breathtaking landscape. After the trip, I found myself studying maps, plotting potential routes, and, eventually, conceiving an ambitious plan: a 75-mile route linking three of the park’s historic lodges. This route offered restocking points and a bed each night, but each leg of the route was about 25 miles long, with over 4,000 feet of elevation gain.

Proposed route through Glacier National Park, proceeding clockwise from the start/finish at the southwest corner. Blue dots indicate the lodges where we planned to stay along the way, and numbers indicate cumulative miles.

Having recently read several books on ultramarathon training, I began to incorporate their techniques into my routine. Like any engineer, I created a spreadsheet to plan my training, then booked the trip for Labor Day weekend.

Training presented its own challenges: I live in Madison, Wisconsin—great for many things, but not exactly mountainous. But Wisconsin does offer the Ice Age Trail, a 1,200-mile national scenic trail that winds through the state, tracing the terminal moraine of the North American Ice Sheet—a massive glacier that once covered much of the continent. The trail, characterized by rugged landscapes, narrow technical trails, and sections affectionately called “rollers” for their endless ups and downs, became my go-to training ground. It felt especially fitting to retrace the path of the last major glaciation while preparing to visit some of the last remaining glaciers in the lower 48 states.

In January, about two months into my training, I joined the Union of Concerned Scientists. This marked a career shift toward direct climate and equity advocacy, where I could use my background in electrical engineering to more directly tackle the climate challenges threatening our planet’s critical resources, including the glaciers I would soon visit. The connection felt profound: I was focusing my personal time on training for a chance to witness these glaciers up close, even as I was now working professionally to mitigate the emissions causing their rapid retreat.

Training on glacial terrain A picture taken on my way up the east bluffs in Devil’s Lake State Park, part of the Ice Age Trail, with Spirit Lake visible in the distance. Photo by Lee Shaver.

The Ice Age Trail zigzags across Wisconsin, and from where I live in Madison, I can access several segments of the trail within a short drive. During training runs, my thoughts were often practical: monitoring my water supply, fending off bugs, calculating carb intake, etc. But I also reflected on the nature of the landscape I was running across.

The trail gave me a unique perspective on how glaciers not only sculpted the land but also influenced human use of it. The flatter lands on one side became ideal farmland, supporting the dairy industry for which Wisconsin is known, while the rugged driftless terrain on the other side, harder to farm, has lower population densities. Even the Ice Age Trail itself follows the edge of these different land uses, often marking the boundary between neighboring farms.

The glaciation process played out over an incomprehensibly long timescale—the ice age that ended about 10,000 years ago had lasted over 100,000 years. By contrast, the glaciers in Glacier National Park are retreating at a disturbingly rapid pace. Some estimates suggest they could disappear by 2030 due to the climate change triggered by human fossil fuel use, which began less than 200 years ago.

The journey through glacier: running on borrowed time

Eventually, after logging over 1,000 miles in preparation, it was time to head to the park. For the trip, I was joined by my friend Brian, a fellow runner from Madison. We arrived in Glacier on Thursday afternoon, and with time to spare, booked a boat tour from our starting point at Lake McDonald. Our guide shared insights into the fragility of the landscape, pointing out the shrinking glaciers and evidence of recent forest fires.

Friday morning we set out on six relatively flat miles through thick forest, carpeted in moss and dense with cedars. We hiked this section to avoid startling bears, as Montana has the largest grizzly population in the lower 48. Next, we joined the Going-to-the-Sun Road for six miles, a necessary but unpleasant stretch due to the noise and fumes from traffic (a reminder of the carbon emissions that threaten the very glaciers we had come to see).

After leaving the road, we began the steep ascent up to Swiftcurrent Pass. Despite training on every hill in Wisconsin, we found ourselves unprepared for the altitude. Climbing during the hottest part of the day was grueling, and we began to feel the effects of the altitude. At the pass, we rested and refilled our bottles before descending into the valley, where we finally glimpsed Swiftcurrent Glacier. From a distance it was hard to grasp the scale of the glacier, but as we descended the pass the sights and sounds of immense waterfalls draining the glacial basin helped us understand just how massive it must be.

Bullhead Lake at the bottom of Swiftcurrent Pass. Swiftcurrent Glacier is visible just below the ridge above. Photo by Lee Shaver.

We followed the chain of lakes out of the valley to Swiftcurrent Lodge, where we enjoyed a much-needed rest after a dinner of mac and cheese. We ended up traveling nearly 28 miles that day, the longest day of the trip.

On Saturday we joined the Continental Divide Trail and made our way up to Piegan Pass. We saw only one other hiker all morning, underscoring how remote and isolated we were. As we climbed, the roar of a distant waterfall grew louder, coming in and out of earshot as we switched back up the mountain. Near the top, we encountered a snowbank across the trail and carefully made our way over. At the pass, we stopped for lunch, gazing out over snow-fed pools that sparkled in the afternoon sun.

After hearing glowing reviews from other hikers, we decided to take the more challenging Siyeh Pass route, adding another 1,500 feet of elevation gain but allowing us to run through a recent burn area with clear visibility. We covered about 21 miles that day, grateful to avoid vehicle traffic by catching a shuttle for the final few miles along the road.

The view from Siyeh Pass trail, with evidence of forest fire in the foreground. Photo by Lee Shaver. Up close and personal with a glacier

On the morning of day three, we experienced deus ex machina—or more accurately, ursus ex machina: Gunsight Pass, our intended trail for the day and the only path back to our starting point, had been closed by park rangers due to bear activity. We hitched a ride to our final hotel and opted for an out-and-back run up to Sperry Glacier instead—a chance to get closer to the ice than we’d anticipated.

After a 3,500-foot climb, we reached Sperry Chalet and paused for a refreshing lemonade. Another 1,500 feet of climbing led us over Comeau Pass to what we thought would be an easy half mile to the base of Sperry Glacier.

Instead, we were reminded of how glaciers shape the land around them. Sperry Glacier sits on the edge of a large basin which is constantly scraped and scoured by the ice that accumulates each year from snowfall, then melts and sublimates in the warmer season. As a result, the “trail” to the base of the glacier is actually a mostly unmarked traverse across a boulder field. Just a handful of cairns, rebuilt each year by volunteers, mark the path around the ridge that hides the glacier from view.

View from the edge of Sperry Glacier across the melt pools and boulder field. Photo by Lee Shaver.

On the other side of the ridge, we were rewarded with spectacular views of crevasses, melt pools, and Sperry Glacier itself. We picked our way over more boulders to reach a US Geological Survey weather station at the base of the glacier. We were completely alone at this point and could hear the constant sound of water dripping from the glacier, and the periodic sound of ice and boulders shifting in the field all around us: the soundtrack of quiet disintegration.

Sperry Glacier, with a USGS weather monitoring station in front. Photo by Lee Shaver.

Exhausted but exhilarated, we made our way back, covering a total of just over 20 miles and 5,400 feet of elevation gain—the most intense day of the trip, which we felt made up for the change in course that took five miles off our planned total.

DayMileageAscent (feet)Highest point (feet)Elapsed time127.84,9407,20310:21220.93,9818,0807:43320.35,4008,0618:42Total69.014,321 26:46Running through Glacier, by the numbers. Reflections on glacier loss and climate action

The weather just before the trip was marked by contrast: a few days earlier, a storm had dropped enough snow to close several miles of road inside the park, but by the time we arrived it had gotten hot enough to melt off nearly all the snow, except for a few lingering piles in the shade at higher elevations. I felt the same contrast as I stood at the foot of Sperry Glacier, feeling both the heat of the sun and the cool breeze blowing over the ice, and I was struck by the reality of the glaciers’ vulnerability.

The prediction that all of the park’s glaciers could be gone by 2030 felt painfully real as we looked out over the landscape. While snow accumulating and disappearing is an annual event as the seasons change, the trend over the last several decades has been a global net reduction in the mass balance of mountain glaciers like Sperry.

The feelings that accompanied this moment were bittersweet; I felt privileged to see something that may be gone in a few short years, but also a sense of guilt that I was seeing something that future generations may be robbed of the opportunity to witness. Glaciers, once thought of as static, timeless icons, have become a fleeting phenomenon, highlighting the urgent need for action on climate change.

The personal meaning of this journey intersected profoundly with my work at the Union of Concerned Scientists. My role focuses on developing solutions for cleaner energy systems and policies to reduce heat-trapping emissions, work that is closely tied to the survival of landscapes like the one I had just run across, as well as the people who inhabit and depend on those landscapes. In Montana and around the world, glaciers support ecosystems, serve as year-round water sources, and regulate the climate, among other important ecological functions. The trip reminded me that the impacts of climate change are not abstract—they are visible, tangible, and current. At home, I train on a landscape shaped by glaciers over a hundred thousand years, but human-caused climate change is re-shaping Glacier National Park within my own lifetime.

Moving forward with purpose

I carry two main insights after running through Glacier: first, the incredible value of experiencing and witnessing these landscapes firsthand; second, the motivation to actively protect and preserve them. My hope is that future generations will be able to visit places like Glacier National Park and stand in awe, as I did, of their beauty and the ancient forces that shaped them. But without meaningful, immediate action, these “icescapes” may not survive to inspire future generations, leaving behind only the evidence of their former grandeur.

This experience changed the way I view both my personal and professional goals. Every mile I ran reminded me of the resilience and adaptability required to face the challenges ahead. It underscored the importance of not only reducing carbon footprints, but actively working to reshape our policies, technologies, and societal structures to build a future where these irreplaceable wonders can endure, and where we can experience them.

As I continue my work with the Union of Concerned Scientists, I’ll carry this journey with me and use it to fuel my dedication to tackling the climate crisis. There’s still hope to protect places like Glacier, but that window of opportunity is narrowing. My experience has reaffirmed that the path forward requires not just awareness, but action—action that can make a difference, just as each small step in my training built toward something greater.

Another year, another legislative session. Much like a sine graph, this year had highs and lows. Also like a sine graph, Union of Concerned Scientists will keep moving forward no matter what (and backward technically, but I am political science major and way out of my depth here, so let’s pretend they only move forward, give me kudos for an awesome simile, and get to the recap!).

Bidirectional EVs Could Be the New Standard

Electric vehicles (EVs) should be a clean transportation and a clean energy solution. That is why we sponsored SB 59 by Senator Nancy Skinner which paves the way for California to require EVs to have the ability to export their power. This could let drivers use these batteries to power critical appliances during emergencies, their homes during power shutoffs, or even the grid when electricity demand is high. (More on this in my colleague Sam Houston’s latest blog.)

The bill made it all the way through the legislature and was signed by Governor Newsom. As exciting as this is, it is only the first step in making sure this capability is standard issue on all new EVs. The California Energy Commission now holds the power to set this requirement, but it will be up to us to make the case that they should.

 As fate would have it, UCS is working to analyze the potential benefits of widespread bidirectional capabilities in CA that will help inform the implementation of SB 59 in the coming year.

Special session takes on big oil and wins

The transition to clean transportation and away from fossil fuels is here. Earlier this month, we saw yet another California refinery announce plans to close its doors. While this is an inevitable part of the transition to clean transportation, and generally good news for the climate and impacted communities, the oil industry will not go down easily. ABX2-1 by Assemblymembers Hart and Aguiar-Curry illustrates this reality.

Over the last few years, California drivers have seen huge spikes in gasoline prices and big oil has seen corresponding, massive windfall profits. With authority granted by the legislature and Governor last year, the state discovered that when refineries did not store enough gasoline before maintenance, prices (and profits) spike. So, refiners were incentivized not to be prepared, and it was drivers who paid the price.

This year, we helped Gov. Newsom take on Big Oil by strongly supporting his special session that resulted in the passage of AB2X-1 allowing the state to require minimum gasoline storage at refineries, limiting refiners’ ability to manipulate the market.

Policies like this will be critical to ensure that the fossil fuels phaseout is equitable and Big Oil doesn’t squeeze every dollar out of California consumers on the way out the door.

A step towards getting water rights right

California’s water rights system is inequitable, unfair and just plain broken. The outdated system essentially allows “senior water rights holders” to use water with reckless abandon, even as the climate crisis worsens, and water supply becomes more constrained.

Over the past few years, we have been fighting to pass bills that would reign in some of the most powerful interests in the state and ensure that they are not using too much water when supply is limited.

This year, we took an important step forward by passing AB 460 by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, which increases the fines on entities that knowingly steal more water than they are allocated. This is a commonsense step and hopefully the first of many towards a more equitable, sustainable water rights system. 

EV battery end of life bill life ended on Governor’s desk

Due to the necessarily ambitious regulations we fought to pass, California will continue to see a huge increase in the number of EVs on the road. As these regulations drive down emissions, we will also see an increase in battery retirements.

When EVs do retire, it is critical that we can keep hazardous waste out of landfills and communities while limiting the amount of critical minerals (lithium, cobalt, nickel, etc.) that need to be mined for new batteries.

For two years, we worked on SB 615 with Senator Ben Allen to require all EV batteries to be repurposed or recycled. We negotiated hard with auto makers, recyclers and others for the bill to include robust reporting requirements, producer responsibly and environmental protections.

In the end, we won on all those issues and sent a strong bill to the Governor’s desk. Newsom ultimately vetoed it due to concerns with the cost of implementation in a tough fiscal year for the state.

We now have a roadmap for a strong bill and will keep at it next session. Rest assured, we won’t sleep until all EV batteries are repurposed or recycled at the end of their useful lives.

Clean cars not 4 all

UCS research found that cars that were manufactured before 2004 make up less than one fifth of the cars on California roads but account for more than two thirds of the smog-forming emissions of all cars. That is why we sponsored AB 2401 by Assemblymember Phil Ting to target the state’s limited “Clean Cars 4 All” clean vehicles incentive dollars towards replacing these older cars.

This bill was such a good, science-based, iron-clad idea that it made it all the way through the entire legislative process without a single “no” vote. In the end, the Governor vetoed it citing similar budgetary concerns.

The intention of the bill was to require the state to spend wisely with a pot of money we know is vanishingly small rather than increase costs as the Governor feared. Fortunately, we built momentum on this idea that clearly everyone in the legislature thinks is a worthwhile endeavor.

We will think creatively and work with the Governor to make sure our research results in a positive policy change next year.

Onward

Before the new legislative session begins in January 2025, we will take time to both celebrate our victories, work to support their implementation, and continue working on the bills that ended up on the wrong end of Newsom’s pen.

We will also work on new policy solutions to protect California’s values, combat the climate crisis, clean the air, improve access to water, overcome barriers to clean energy adoption, take on Big Oil, transition cropland to less intensive uses, and many, many other answers to the world’s biggest problems. 

I hope you aren’t tired from riding that sine wave, because next year we are going fully linear with a positive slope (I know I nailed that one).

The Trump campaign has made so many radical promises that it’s hard to know which will come to pass. Yet, we are tracking them knowing that the president-elect’s team is committed to broad and destructive reforms.  An early target of the transition team is the agency where I worked for nearly two decades: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). 

The EPA, like many federal agencies, is run by political appointees. While it’s true that federal agencies have always changed leadership from administration to administration, countless career employees have worked to fulfill their agencies’ missions, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office. Their expertise and institutional knowledge are invaluable—and of great benefit to the public.  

I know this because I lived it, serving at the EPA through the majority of the first Trump administration. Within the Office of Community Revitalization, and across the entire agency—an institution charged with protecting human health and the environment—I saw politically-motivated and industry-driven attacks on science that sought to undermine our core values and mission. 

Lee Zeldin must protect people 

Last week, the President-elect announced former Congressman Lee Zeldin as his nominee to lead the EPA. Zeldin is a loyalist to the President-elect with no relevant environmental background to lead an agency that relies heavily on science to protect the public, and especially environmental justice communities. If confirmed by the Senate, he will be forced to choose between taking the EPA’s mission to serve the public seriously or following through on the Trump campaign’s promise of severe deregulation. 

Deregulation would benefit a small number of big polluters at the expense of people’s health, wallets, and the environment. This is also a major equity concern because heavily polluting industries exist most commonly in communities where Black, Indigenous and people of color, as well as low-income people, live. 

Data shows this is also a concern shared by nearly two-thirds of Trump voters, who worry that the future EPA Administrator will put the interests of polluting corporations ahead of protecting clean water, clean air, and public health. Now that Zeldin is the official nominee, I too share this concern. 

Zeldin has a history of fossil fuel fealty, illustrated by campaign donations and a track record of anti-science votes. During his terms in Congress, he voted against clean air and clean water legislation dozens of times, putting our health, environment, and economy at risk. Frankly, this is not the record of someone seriously interested in protecting people and our environment. 

Lee Zeldin must protect science 

More than two-thirds of the civil servants who power the EPA are scientists, charged with protecting both human health and the environment. They oversee long-term research that may, and often will, span administrations. The speed of science is not meant to be managed under political cycles, and when the pendulum swings too far between administrations, public trust in agencies designed to protect us erodes.

Science-informed public policy requires scientists serving in key agency positions to recommend policy. To do that agencies devote staff time, expertise, and resources to gathering and sharing data and information to make better decisions about policies now and in the future. When scientists are forced or threatened to leave agencies, it severely limits agencies’ ability to advance science-informed policy free from any particular group’s self-interest. It also poses a long-term threat. It could lead to more hazardous air pollutants from power plants and chemical plants.  Or it could mean capitulating to the auto industry, rolling back fuel efficiency standards and sending emissions soaring. Or it could mean putting children’s safety at risk because dangerous pesticides are allowed to flow freely. When federal agencies lose the expertise and knowledge of scientists, anti-science special interests benefit while public health is harmed. The EPA relies on scientists to inform policies that protect people and the environment, and the politicization of facts puts all of us at risk. 

In the first Trump administration, UCS catalogued over 50 instances of political appointees sidelining scientific evidence and attacking scientific integrity. These tactics included censoring scientists, circumventing advisory committees, undermining science-based safeguards, halting, suppressing and altering scientific studies, and driving out over 1,000 scientists and technical experts. President-elect Trump and former Congressman Zeldin are expected to do much of the same in the four years to come: removing experts who could stand in their way of dismantling landmark climate regulations that for decades have kept the air we breathe and water we drink clean.  

Lee Zeldin must protect stability 

The last time Trump was president, his administration sought to impose double-digit percentage budget cuts on the EPA year after year. And, year after year, the EPA saw the departure of hundreds upon hundreds of scientists. Undermining the EPA doesn’t only pose real, tragic health risks—it is in direct defiance of the voters who elected the incoming administration.  

An overwhelming majority of voters, including 81% of voters who supported Donald Trump, want Congress to increase funding for the EPA, or at the very least, keep it the same. Three in four Trump voters oppose attempts to weaken the EPA. And of dire importance to me, after focusing on the EPA’s environmental justice work for years, 72% of Trump voters support increasing funding for communities disproportionally harmed by air and water pollution. Rolling back the progress the EPA has made over its nearly 55-year tenure isn’t just out-of-touch with what communities need—it’s entirely detached from reality.  

Source: EPN 

Ultimately, attacking science endangers our health by compromising protections for the public and for environmental justice communities facing the largest potential impacts from buried science, and weak and ineffective environmental and public health protections. In order to support the EPA’s mission, and ensure they are providing benefits to those most harmed by the current status quo, we need a robust and supported scientific community at federal agencies—both to limit the potential harms of a Trump administration, and to ensure we can have a speedy recovery and reversal of any harmful and damaging policies when the opportunity arises. 

We must protect our future 

Nothing is inevitable, and UCS is ready to fight to keep strong science at EPA. During the first Trump administration, UCS successfully led a lawsuit overturning the EPA’s unlawful ban on scientists serving on advisory committees and restoring integrity to federal decision-making. When the EPA refused to hold a hearing on a proposed rule that would transform how the agency uses science in policy decisions and scientific assessments UCS organized an alternative public hearing, giving a platform to affected communities and experts. UCS brought accountability to the agency, exposing the devastating impacts of the administration’s weakened Clean Water Rule, highlighting its disregard for science and the importance of wetlands and tributaries in protecting drinking water. And UCS helped win additional pollution protections from trucks, and brought a spotlight to the real and devastating impacts reckless, anti-science leadership has on public health. 

I bring up what UCS did from 2017 to 2021, not to diminish the tangible harms accomplished in the first Trump administration, but rather to frame our mission in facing the challenge that lies ahead.  

It is clear that the incoming administration has the entire regulatory state in their crosshairs—which is why UCS is hitting the ground running to save science and save lives.  We intend to continue our work of fully supporting federal scientists through our network and resources in order to protect and limit the loss of the federal scientific workforce. We will also use Senate confirmation hearings to fight unqualified science agency nominations such as Lee Zeldin. We will also support efforts to continue funding programs that support communities via the Inflation Reduction Act.  

Independent science is a public good and it must be protected. 

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post said “In the first Trump Administration, the agency was dealt double-digit percentage budget cuts year after year.” This has been corrected to say, “The last time Trump was president, his administration sought to impose double-digit percentage budget cuts on the EPA year after year.“

2024 is another year of new extremes in climate: this year’s summer was the hottest on record. In particular, July 22 will be remembered as the hottest day recorded, when the global average temperature hit 62.9°F according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service. Heat waves, floods, storms, and wildfires are breaking records and impacted nearly everyone in the United States and its Caribbean territories.  

As we have been doing since 2022, this year we tracked alerts issued by the National Weather Service (NWS) for these extreme weather events during Danger Season—the period between May and October when climate change increases the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events. By mid-August everyone in the US lived in a county that had experienced at least one of these events.  

We saw that climate change is driving a longer Danger Season that affects everyone in the US. That means that the work of key federal agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Weather Service (NWS) is more critical than ever. They must be allowed to continue providing accurate and timely forecasts of extreme weather events because these forecasts save American lives.  

According to a proposed policy framework for the Trump Administration, NOAA and other federal agencies will be gutted, leaving us with little protection against the more intense and more frequent extreme weather we experienced this danger season and will continue to experience as global temperatures rise. 

In recent years, Danger Season has ended in October, but in yet another sign of worsening climate change, the Northeast is still facing fire weather amid summer temperatures in November. Here’s what it has brought so far. 

Heat

The 2024 Danger Season opened in late May with a nearly week-long heat wave in southern Texas during Memorial Day weekend, when millions in the US kick off the summer. The border cities of Brownsville and McAllen set daily records at 100°F and 102°F, respectively, while Del Río broke its own monthly record of 109°F, then a few days later it broke that record when temperatures hit 112°F.   

June 19 marked the first-ever excessive heat wave on record for northeast Maine in a nearly nine-day heat wave that stretched from Ohio to the mid-Atlantic. Impacts were expected on transportation infrastructure, as Amtrak warned travelers they may experience delays as trains need to run at slower speeds when tracks get too hot.  

On July 8, the Third Avenue bridge that connects the Bronx and Manhattan in New York City was stuck in the open position because the high temperatures expanded the steel, prompting city crews to hose down the bridge with water to cool it down. 

From June 27 to July 14, heat wave conditions persisted along the West Coast and Pacific Northwest. In Death Valley National Park, temperatures of 128°F grounded rescue helicopters that could not safely fly to rescue motorcyclists affected by heat. And in Washington state, triple-digit temperatures expanded the asphalt along a county highway, causing delays and emergency road repairs.  

However, these reports do not reveal the profound inequities in who is most exposed to climate impacts. I combined data from our Danger Season tracker with population disadvantage data to assess inequities in population exposure. I found a few concerning things.  

While counties with at least 25 percent disadvantaged population experienced, on average, 18 extreme heat alerts during this year’s Danger Season, counties with lower fractions of disadvantaged populations experienced 12 heat alerts. Counties with at least 25 percent disadvantaged populations and the highest numbers of heat alerts are in Arizona and California, as seen in the table below. Riverside County and Imperial County, both in California top the list with 84 and 77 heat alerts.  

Counties with at least 25 percent disadvantaged populations and the highest frequency of heat
alerts during the 2024 Danger Season  Wildfires

Wildfires raged on as well this Danger Season. To give an idea, 404 wildfires—threatening 1.6 million acres—were active in the US as of October 21, 2024 according to American Forests. The Park Fire, affecting Tehama and Butte counties in northern California, started on July 24 (allegedly caused by an arsonist) and burned nearly half a million acres on days when there were already wildfire weather and heat alerts in these and adjacent counties.  

The National Centers for Environmental Information tallies the number of fires and acreage burned; as of this writing, data are available to assess Danger Season impacts between May and August. These show a clear seasonal increasing trend in burned acres per fire, indicating that as peak wildfire season was reached in August, wildfires became more and more destructive.  

Wildfires became more destructive, consuming more acres per fire, as peak wildfire season advanced this Danger Season

The top ten counties with at least 25 percent of their population at disadvantage and number of fire weather alerts in the 2024 Danger Season are in Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah. Harney County, OR, tops the list with 56 fire weather alerts.  

Counties with at least 25 percent disadvantaged populations and the highest frequency of fire weather alerts during the 2024 Danger Season  Flooding and Storms

Near-record warm ocean temperatures, a reduction in Atlantic trade winds and wind shear, and the development of La Niña in the Pacific led NOAA to issue an above-normal hurricane season forecast. And the forecast was accurate—17 named storms. Rapid intensification was the defining characteristic of hurricanes this Danger Season. The list is long, but here are some of the most impactful storms.  

Beryl was a long-lived tropical cyclone (June 28 July 11), strengthening into a Category 5 over the Caribbean and making landfall not once, but twice over the Yucatán Peninsula before making landfall as a tropical storm about 100 miles southwest of Houston. Beryl was also the earliest-forming Category 5 storm on record, and poured 3-6 inches in southeast Texas and up to 2 inches in central and southern parts of Louisiana.  

On August 13, Tropical Storm Ernesto rapidly intensified right before grazing Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Although Ernesto did not make landfall in Puerto Rico or the nearby archipelagos, the storm still delivered winds reaching 50 miles per hour (mph, or 80.5 kilometers per hour) and heavy rainfall of up to 10 inches (25.5 cm) across Puerto Rico.  

By the morning of Wednesday, August 14, around 728,000 customers—nearly half of the island—were left without electricity. Many communities also lost access to drinking water, as the water supply systems depend on electric pumps. Flood warnings were issued throughout the island due to the storm’s impact. This storm highlighted the fragile state of the badly-run energy infrastructure in Puerto Rico. 

Hurricane Helene rapidly intensified from 45 to 80 mph (72.4 to 128.7 km/h), and it was blowing at 140 mph (225.3 kph) less than 36 hours later when it made landfall on September 26 as a Category 4 in the Florida Gulf Coast. In states such as North Carolina, the hurricane battered communities with high percentages of people living with disabilities, people of advanced age, or living in mobile homes, all markers of populations that face significant challenges to recover from such disasters.  

And in perhaps the saddest and most sobering reminder that we are running out of places to be safe from climate impacts, the community of Asheville, NC, more than 500 miles from where Helene made landfall, suffered more than 100 deaths from mudslides and other disasters caused by the storm. 

The ninth hurricane of the 2024 season in the Atlantic was Hurricane Milton, which rapidly intensified into a Category 5 on October 7. Milton resulted in at least 24 fatalities, and brought at least 19 tornadoes to Florida.  

These storms and other precipitation activity across the country brought large numbers of flood alerts this Danger Season. The highest number of flood alerts were in counties in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Illinois, and North Carolina. These counties have high percentages of people at socio-economic disadvantage. Orange County, TX, tops the list with 131 flood alerts this Danger Season. Newton County, Texas is in third place with 111 flood alerts, and 100% of its population is in disadvantaged status.  

Counties with at least 25 percent disadvantaged populations and the highest frequency of flood alerts during the 2024 Danger Season  Accurate weather forecasts helped save lives from the destruction of Helene and Milton

The National Hurricane Center’s (NHC) initial forecast for Hurricane Milton predicted a landfall location just 12 miles from the spot where the storm actually came ashore four days later.  This early forecast allowed millions of people to evacuate in advance of the hurricane, which undoubtedly contributed to reducing the loss of life from destructive winds and lethal storm surge.  

We need sustained and increased resources for scientists at key federal agencies such as NOAA and its dependencies (NHC and NWS) to do their job of issuing accurate, timely forecasts of extreme weather events that can minimize the loss of life and property. But if Project 2025 comes to fruition as written, the second Trump administration would break up and downsize NOAA (pro tip for the incoming administration: don’t dismantle NOAA; it’s proven that its science saves lives and property from climate impacts. I just wrote about it here).

This year’s Danger Season showed us that the climate crisis is in full force and worsening, and we need action to reduce global emissions, adapt to the impacts we can’t avoid, and strengthen the country’s scientific capacity to forecast extreme weather events and protect people.  

It’s November, and heat may not be the first thing on your mind. But here’s why it should be and what you can do to help indoor and outdoor workers stay safe from deadly heat. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has issued a proposed heat health safety standard and is taking comments on it through the end of December. Please weigh in to protect workers’ health and safety.

We’re coming off a summer that was the planet’s hottest on record, and millions of people had to work through it in conditions that are risky for their health—even deadly. Many of us interact frequently with outdoor workers or have friends and family who work outdoors. They work construction jobs, or harvest vegetables and fruit, handle baggage on hot airport tarmacs, clean the inside of planes with the AC turned off in between flights, or deliver packages to our doorsteps. In the United States, outdoor workers face a disproportionate risk of heat-related death, which occurs disproportionately among Black and Hispanic people.

Even now, with fall in the air, we are reminded of the harsh reality that fossil-fueled climate change is causing fall to be warmer across the contiguous US, particularly in the southwest. Phoenix, which has experienced record-breaking extended heatwaves this year, endured an unprecedented four days of temperatures of 110°F or higher in October! California too experienced a late-season October heatwave, made worse by climate change. And the first few weeks in November had weirdly warm temperatures across the Northeast.  

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) monthly outlook for October and November looks to follow this trend in which many parts of the US will have above-average temperatures. Warmer temperatures during the fall months could have repercussions on outdoor workers who worked through dangerously hot conditions this past summer.

Our own research finds that outdoor workers’ exposure to extreme heat can be expected to triple or quadruple between now and midcentury depending on the pace of growth in global heat-trapping emissions. As if this projected increase in extreme heat exposure isn’t daunting enough, outdoor workers are also at risk of collectively losing up to $55.4 billion in annual earnings due to extreme heat.

Is there any good news?

Yes! After years and even decades of calls for action, OSHA has finally proposed heat protection standards to help keep workers safe, and we have an opportunity to urge them to quickly finalize the strongest version of these standards.    

On July 2, 2024 OSHA  announced the release of the Heat Injury and Illness Prevention in Outdoor and Indoor Work Settings rulemaking and on August 30 OSHA officially listed the proposed rule in the Federal Register, requesting public comments by December 30, 2024.  

What it does

OSHA’s goal is to prevent and reduce the number of occupational injuries, illnesses, and fatalities caused by exposure to hazardous heat. It would apply to all employers whose workers take part in outdoor and indoor work across industries and in construction, maritime, and agriculture sectors where OSHA has jurisdiction, excluding emergency responders and people working in air-conditioned spaces.    

OSHA’s standard would require employers to create a plan to evaluate and control heat hazards in their workplace and would clarify employer obligations and the steps necessary to effectively protect employees from hazardous heat.

OSHA has also provided a robust and extensive scientific basis for the rule. Section III of the proposed rule provides these science-based background materials, and OSHA also has a one-stop shop webpage with additional background information and resources.

Critical points for public comments 

UCS, alongside a broad coalition of worker justice and public health professionals, has long been calling for these heat-health protections. We have also been weighing in on the OSHA rulemaking process over the years (2022 and 2023).

We hope that you will submit comments in support of OSHA’s rulemaking.

In a recent blogpost, my former colleague Kristina Dahl summarized the proposed rulemaking, noting that while there are areas for improvement that OSHA should address, this is a strong standard that will help keep workers safer from extreme heat.

As you prepare to submit comments on OSHA’s heat standard, below are points from Kristy Dahl’s overview to keep in mind:

1. Support the strong provisions in the heat protection standard which include:

• The core health-protective measures workers need when it’s hot: water, shade, and rest;
• Provisions that require rest breaks to be paid—a real win that will ensure workers don’t have to choose between their health and their livelihoods. UCS research shows that outdoor workers could collectively be losing billions of dollars in earnings due to worsening extreme heat by midcentury if provisions like this are not in place;
• The inclusion of an initial heat trigger at 80°F, above which certain protective measures go into place, and a high heat trigger at 90°F, when those measures get ramped up;
• Requirements that managers involve non-managerial employees in identifying hot spots in workplaces and in developing plans to monitor employees when it’s hot.

2. Highlight how the standard could be improved:

• Written heat injury and illness protection plans should not be exempted for employers with fewer than 10 employers. There are different means of assessing how many employers and employees this would exempt, but it’s safe to say it’s a lot. Pew Research shows that half of small businesses in the US have fewer than five employees, for example. And the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council has used Census data to estimate that nearly 80% of employer firms have fewer than ten employees.
• OSHA should strengthen protections for temporary and part-time workers, many of whom work in construction and agriculture, as recommended by heat and health experts like Juanita Constible.
• Weak and limited recordkeeping requirements. Under the proposed rule, employers would not be required to keep records of heat illnesses and injuries experienced in their workplaces or how those cases were resolved. Employers would only be required to keep six months’ worth of records of workplace temperatures.
• Fixed length for rest breaks. The rest break policy is set at a minimum of 15 minutes every two hours rather than progressively longer breaks as the temperature rises, as was suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in their 2016 recommendations.  
• Shorter-than-needed acclimatization periods. The proposed rule requires employers to implement a gradual period of acclimatization for new workers that is, at a minimum, four days long. Science suggests this is much too short. OSHA’s own data has shown that most workplace heat-related fatalities occur during the first week on the job. And the CDC notes that acclimatization can take longer than one week.
• Improve sedentary work activity protections. We are pleased OSHA included more specificity on what constitutes sedentary work indoors and encourage OSHA to maintain, at a minimum, this language. However, workers’ exposure to sufficiently extreme heat even when sedentary can present serious harms. Given this, we encourage OSHA to consider a stipulation in which the standard does not apply to those engaged in sedentary work activities in environments where the heat index is below 110 °F but does apply in environments above that threshold.
• Monitoring conditions at work sites or with local forecasts. This policy has the potential to provide insufficient protection for workers because measurements from the weather stations used to determine forecasts might differ from measurements at local worksites. Instead, we recommend OSHA strengthen this policy by requiring employers to monitor the on-site heat index or wet bulb globe temperature throughout the day. Alternatively, employers could note that if the daily maximum heat index forecast exceeds relevant thresholds, they would then implement protection measures for the full workday regardless of how temperature and humidity evolve throughout the day.

If you have expertise on worker conditions, public health or if you’re simply interested in submitting a more substantial set of comments you may be interested in reading and lending support to our full set of UCS comments on the heat protection standard. You could also draw from fellow advocate Juanita Constible’s excellent blog post about the proposed rule and this recent helpful NPR interview with experts including Kristina Dahl. We also recommend that you read the proposed rule itself and decide how you’d like to respond. For even more in-depth data, you may wish to review UCS’s reports Killer Heat and Too Hot To Work.

Whatever route you choose, we urge you to consider submitting a comment. The health and wellbeing of the roughly 36 million outdoor and indoor workers in the U.S. depends on this standard being as strong as possible, and it’s up to all of us to ensure it lives up to its potential.

State and local protections to complement the OSHA standard

While we are very close to being able to celebrate a productive end to this long OSHA heat standard journey (since the 1970’s), there are still multiple stages in the rulemaking process that will take months or years to finalize so the work doesn’t stop here.

We also need state and local protection standards. Why you ask? Good question. Currently only a few states and localities have heat protection standards and even when we have a final federal standard, states and localities can do more to tailor their policies to better reflect local conditions and employee needs while also lending to an increase in monitoring and enforcement of these standards so that fewer workers are left to the mercy of their employer. For more on state and local policies, see Public Citizens Scorched States report card and Section III, Part D of the proposed rule.

With your help, we’ll get a strong and final federal rule requiring employers to implement OSHA’s heat-protection standard. Moving forward we will also work to advocate for strong state and local standards. Thank you for your efforts in helping to keep workers safe from dangerously hot working conditions!

It may feel like we are facing a grim reality. Regardless of people’s beliefs, the facts show us the increasing toll from an unaddressed climate crisis. Globally, this year is going strong as the warmest on record and likely one of the coolest we’ll see in the decades ahead. In Spain, recent catastrophic flooding, the most devastating in Europe since 1967, has cost more than 200 lives. And locally, this year marks the second highest number of red flag warnings in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, with fires threatening to damage homes.  

Annual global mean temperature anomalies from January – September 2024 (relative to the 1950-1900 average) from six international datasets. Source: WMO 

In these dire times, it’s a huge relief to see that here in Massachusetts, state legislators rolled up their sleeves to protect their constituents now through steady climate action, passing An Act promoting a clean energy grid, advancing equity and protecting ratepayers, which Governor Maura Healey supports and is expected to sign shortly. This is a huge reason for hope and celebration! 

The legislation includes multiple components to decrease heat-trapping emissions from the electricity, transportation, and building sectors, including streamlining the siting process for clean energy projects, increasing energy storage targets, enabling a robust electric vehicle charging system, and implementing measures to protect ratepayers and reduce overreliance on gas in buildings and homes. In particular, I am celebrating two key achievements of this legislation related to clean energy siting and gas overreliance.  

Advancing faster, more equitable siting of clean energy infrastructure 

While the ability to build quickly is a key component of a clean energy transition, doing so with appropriate attention to the needs of communities, particularly to those who have been most heavily burdened by energy infrastructure and pollution, is just as crucial.  

Our own recent analysis found that to date, infrastructure siting has put a disproportionate burden on environmental justice (EJ) communities where people of color, low-income people, and limited-English proficient speakers live across the state. While close to 50 percent of Massachusetts neighborhoods (2,604 of 4,985 census block groups) classify as EJ neighborhoods, more than 80 percent of existing polluting electricity generating units—with their associated health risks—are located in or within one mile of an EJ neighborhood. 

The existing siting process has resulted in a high concentration of polluting electricity generating units in and near environmental justice neighborhoods. Source: UCS, with Alternatives for Community and Environment, GreenRoots, and the Conservation Law Foundation. 

With that in mind, it’s really encouraging to see that the three key recommendations from our analysis, guided by priorities from the Massachusetts Environmental Justice Table, were included in the new legislation to advance the siting of new clean energy infrastructure in the Commonwealth: 

• requiring a robust cumulative impacts analysis,  

• expanding the state’s Energy Facilities Siting Board to include representation from environmental justice and Indigenous sovereignty perspectives, and  

• integrating public health and climate change as priorities for decision-making.   

Addressing the state’s gas overreliance problem in buildings 

Buildings are the second largest source of heat trapping emissions in Massachusetts. As the state works to achieve its climate goals, it’s essential to explicitly put in place measures to move away from gas use in buildings.   

The new legislation gives particular attention to this issue by: 

• Allowing gas utilities to build networked geothermal projects. This is an important tool to replace fossil fuels for heating and cooling entire neighborhoods.  

• Prioritizing short-term repairs or retiring stretches of gas pipelines instead of continued investments in costly pipe replacements. 

• Considering alternatives such as electric heating and cooking before allowing for more gas hookups. This is good not only for the climate, but for the health of Massachusetts households by reducing indoor air pollution from gas stoves.  

Rising to meet the challenge ahead 

The job is not done yet. Despite this welcome good news, the new legislation does have some concerning elements and leaves plenty of work for the next legislative session. Of particular concern is the inclusion of nuclear fusion as a technology that qualifies for the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard, a tool created to incentivize the generation of energy using commercially available technologies that harvest natural sources that are constantly replenished, like the wind and the sun (hence renewable energy) . The inclusion of fusion, a technology that’s not going to yield any practical source of electricity generation in the foreseeable future, is at best a distraction from the urgent need to decarbonize our electric grid with available and proven renewable energy technologies. 

While this new legislation will build on the state’s climate progress, including recent pieces of legislation like a net zero by 2050 goal, increased investments in offshore wind, and key protections for its most pollution burden communities, there is still a lot of work ahead of us, especially given the incoming Trump administration and the increased importance of state action.  

But for today, I want to express my sincere gratitude to our legislators for passing this bill, to Gov. Maura Healey and her administration for their leadership in prioritizing the health and well-being of their constituents and our shared planet, and giving us this much-needed breath of fresh air. Thank you! 

The fossil fuel industry’s presence at this year’s UN climate negotiations in Baku, Azerbaijan, has been simultaneously heavy-handed and covert. More than 1,770 lobbyists—including the heads of some major oil and gas corporations—have been granted access to the talks, many as guests of the host country. The numbers dwarf those of almost every country delegation and threaten to drown out the voices of Global South nations—not to mention Indigenous peoples, youth, women and others who disproportionately bear the brunt of climate impacts. The industry’s close access to the leaders of the negotiations raises questions about how COP29 will stay on track toward the goals of increasing much-needed climate finance and following through on a fast, fair transition away from fossil fuels.

Even more alarming, the fossil fuel industry’s influence at COPs is deeply entrenched and goes beyond lobbying. We’ve seen it at COP29 with greenwashing by corporations and trade associations, misrepresentations of what science deems necessary to address the climate crisis, and a widening ambition gap due to the insidious effects of fossil fuel influence.

To help parties break free from the grip of fossil fuel interests, here’s a guide to the top five ways the fossil fuel industry is trying to co-opt climate talks—and a call to world leaders to resist them.

1. Showing strength in numbers

Late last week, the Kick Big Polluters Out coalition revealed that at least 1,773 fossil fuel lobbyists have been granted access to COP29, outnumbering nearly every national delegation attending the talks in Azerbaijan. This is a major presence for the industry primarily responsible for driving destructive and deadly climate change and more than all the delegates from the ten most climate-vulnerable countries combined (1,033 people badged).

According to the provisional list of registered on-site participants, major fossil fuel corporations BP, Chevron, Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies brought a total of 44 lobbyists to COP29. Participating in and influencing COPs has been part of ExxonMobil’s playbook for decades. Darren Woods, the corporation’s chair and CEO, is one of 12 ExxonMobil lobbyists in Baku. By comparison, Guyana—a country vulnerable to floods, droughts, sea-level rise, and other climate impacts (and where ExxonMobil is being sued over its offshore oil extraction projects)—also has 12 representatives at COP29.

2. Obtaining high-level access

But it’s not just the numbers. It’s who’s representing the fossil fuel industry, and who they are consorting with. The heads of several major oil and gas corporations—Aramco, BP, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies—are included in the provisional registration list as guests of the host country.

ExxonMobil’s Woods showed up at COP29 as a host country guest. He was invited to speak at a high-level meeting convened by the COP Presidency—an unparalleled opportunity to personally cultivate political leaders from around the world and attempt to define the terms of the energy transition in ways that perpetuate reliance on fossil fuel products and grow corporate profits.

Meanwhile, Woods discouraged US President-elect Trump from withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement, saying “The way you influence things is to participate, not to exit.” Ironically, this is one point on which I would agree with ExxonMobil’s CEO—with one significant amendment when it comes to the fossil fuel industry: “The way you influence things UNDULY is to participate…”

3. Refusing to pay up

Climate finance is the top priority for COP29, and one leg of the financial stool is funding for lower income countries to address loss and damage from fossil fuel-driven climate impacts. The year 2024 is on track to be the hottest year on record, with extreme weather events leaving a trail of death and destruction across the globe. While major fossil fuel corporations continue to rake in massive profits, people and communities in the Global South bear a disproportionate burden of these disasters—which is why many in the climate justice movement are campaigning to Make Big Polluters Pay.

Demonstrators at COP29 calling for industries and corporations that have fueled and continue to worsen the climate crisis to be held liable. Source: Kathy Mulvey/UCS USA

According to a new report commissioned by the International Chamber of Commerce, climate-related extreme weather events have cost the global economy more than $2 trillion over the past decade. In a painful irony, this is the same International Chamber of Commerce whose delegation to COP29 includes 33 fossil fuel industry lobbyists—and whose US arm pushes the oil and gas industry’s anti-climate agenda. (Read more in this blogpost by my UCS colleague Laura Peterson).

Earlier this year, Azerbaijan, the host country for COP29, announced a Climate Finance Action Fund to be capitalized with $1 billion in voluntary contributions from fossil fuel-producing countries and oil, gas, and coal companies. However, the fund’s launch—set for Climate Finance Day at COP29—has been quietly postponed. The shelving of the fund marks a small victory for advocates who had decried the initiative as a problematic distraction from the imperative for the United States and other wealthy nations— the responsible parties at these UN climate talks—to collectively provide at least $1 trillion per year in grants or very low-interest loans. National and international policymakers must be wary of voluntary approaches that low-ball polluters’ responsibility, risk granting them social license, and could give them inappropriate influence over decisions about how the funds are spent.

4. Conniving to cash in

Even as the fossil fuel industry avoids paying its fair share of the mounting costs of fossil fuel-driven climate harms, fossil fuel subsidies bankrolled by governments (and taxpayers) around the world soared to $7 trillion in 2022, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Here at COP29, ExxonMobil’s Woods added insult to these compounding injuries when he demanded that governments create “incentives” for companies to transition to less carbon-intensive energy sources. The problem: ExxonMobil has its own misleading, dangerous definition of “advancing climate solutions” that its lobbyists are no doubt pitching to COP29 decisionmakers. The corporation’s “low carbon” roadmap relies heavily on technologies such as carbon capture and storage and hydrogen that cannot deliver steep emissions cuts in the critical period between now and 2030. In an interview with The New York Times while he was at COP29, Woods bragged that he resisted investor “pressure to get into the wind and solar business”—and ExxonMobil’s stock soared as the company doubled down on oil and gas.

While fossil fuel industry lobbyists continue their efforts to delay the urgently needed phaseout of oil, gas, and coal, they’re simultaneously trying to co-opt the clean energy transition by demanding subsidies from governments for technologies that aren’t likely to play a material role in meeting 2030 climate targets. Countries must resist any attempt by the fossil fuel industry to swindle funding that should rightly be put toward climate finance desperately needed by nations in the Global South.

5. Greenwashing, diverting attention, and capturing the conversation

During the first week of COP29, I didn’t catch any fossil fuel industry lobbyists in the act of lobbying at the Olympic Stadium where the talks are being held, as such conversations are most likely taking place behind closely guarded doors staffed with security. But the fossil fuel industry’s presence is pervasive and prominent:

• The COP29 Presidency hired Teneo—a public relations firm with close ties to the oil and gas industry—to enhance its image ahead of the talks.
• The Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter—a voluntary initiative launched at COP28 by oil and gas corporations and condemned by hundreds of civil society organizations as a greenwashing ploy—has predictably resurfaced at COP29 after minimal visibility or progress over the past year.
• Events in the business pavilion have been sponsored by oil and gas corporations including Chevron, ExxonMobil, SOCAR, and TotalEnergies.

I’ve spent hours walking around the pavilions in the Blue Zone, where the official negotiations take place, and the public Green Zone, collecting numerous examples of corporate greenwashing. I’ve seen posters promoting natural gas as “the cleanest of hydrocarbons,” dozens of “net zero” claims, and cartoons touting the deployment of problematic technologies over proven climate solutions.

In the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) pavilion, I found a banner announcing that “oil touches our daily lives in different ways.” In oil-producing regions of the world, that statement is painfully true—people suffer health problems, environmental devastation, displacement, and loss of livelihoods and cultural heritage.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Union of Concerned Scientists (@unionofconcernedscientists)

Friday Nbani Barilule, who leads the Lekeh Economic Development Foundation in Nigeria, took the opportunity to share how oil touches his life and that of others in the Niger Delta region where he lives and works. Watch his testimony here and read more in my blogpost about last month’s Niger Delta Climate Change Conference.

Overcoming fossil fuel industry influence with public policies, investor action, and climate litigation

Fossil fuel corporations and their surrogates shouldn’t have a seat at the negotiating table where climate policy is being made. Allowing them access is like setting the cat loose among the pigeons. Corporations such as BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Shell—which have engaged in a decades-long campaign to deceive the public and policymakers and block or delay climate action—have repeatedly shown that they can’t be trusted as good-faith players in climate policymaking.

Even as they continue to exert undue influence over climate policy, major fossil fuel corporations insist that we focus only on governments to advance climate action. Shortly after new evidence emerged that Shell and other oil and gas corporations knew of the planet-heating effects of their products as early as 1954, a Dutch appeals court overturned an earlier order requiring Shell to cut its global warming emissions by 45% by 2030. In celebrating the ruling, Shell urged people to “lobby governments rather than Shell to change policies and bring about a green transition.”

UCS and our allies will continue to lobby governments, and we’ll continue to work with climate-conscious investors to pressure corporations to slash their heat-trapping emissions and align their lobbying with their stated support for the Paris climate agreement. And we recognize the symbiotic relationship between international climate negotiations and climate litigation. UCS’s Science Hub for Climate Litigation is building a community of scientists to help meet the great demand for scientific expertise to inform litigation and legal action around the world.

As the United States and other nations grapple with surging disinformation and drastic anti-climate political change, COP29 has an opportunity to show the world that international diplomacy remains a vital means to address the global climate crisis. As the fossil fuel industry employs a range of strategies to co-opt and derail the process, negotiators must exercise political will to overcome these schemes. We’ll measure world leaders’ success in COP29 decisions that begin to remedy the harms people around the world are already experiencing, accelerate the phaseout of fossil fuels, and fund an equitable global transition to clean energy.

As the second week of the UN climate talks, COP29, get underway in Baku, Azerbaijan, negotiations are reaching a critical stage.

Nations remain far apart in reaching agreement on a new climate finance commitment from richer countries and will need to double down on efforts over the next few days to secure an ambitious outcome. Finance is the top priority for this COP and is the linchpin to help lower-income nations transition from fossil fuels to clean energy, close the energy poverty gap, adapt to climate impacts, and address mounting loss and damage.  

What the science says is needed for international climate finance

As a report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) points out, the goal of tripling renewables and doubling energy efficiency by 2030 that countries agreed to last year in Dubai requires investments on the order of $1.5 trillion annually. The International Energy Agency confirms that midcentury climate goals can be met but will require trillions of dollars for renewable energy, energy efficiency, grid transmission, and energy storage. Those investments will deliver huge climate and public health benefits from reduced fossil fuel pollution. Meanwhile, the latest UN Adaptation Gap report estimates that the finance gap for adaptation is $187-359 billion per year. And with every year of delay on robust climate action, loss and damage is piling up across the world. 

US election results cast pall over COP29 opening days

The US election results, coming just days before COP29 started, certainly cast a pall over the opening days of COP29. The United States is the largest historical emitter of heat-trapping emissions and a major player at these negotiations. The prospect of an incoming Trump administration that has threatened to exit the Paris Agreement and roll back key climate and clean energy policies is deeply concerning, especially against a backdrop of rapidly worsening climate impacts and a continued rise in global heat-trapping emissions. Unfortunately, with a prospective anti-science administration that seems hellbent on undermining global diplomacy, we can fully expect that they will follow through on their threats.  

While some politically and economically popular clean energy provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act may prove durable and action from forward-looking states and businesses will be significant, there’s no doubt that a lack of robust federal leadership will leave US climate action hobbled for a time. Other nations—including the European Union nations and China—and states and businesses in the US will need to step up to fill the void.  

Nevertheless, here at COP29, the Biden administration still represents the US, and, despite the election outcome, has an important opportunity to show leadership, take responsibility, and champion ambitious outcomes in these negotiations. These global outcomes can also help set north star goals for what’s needed well past the term of the next administration.  

UCS delegation at the COP29 venue. Credit: Rachel Cleetus, UCS.

Ahead of COP, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) joined over 80 US-based groups in sending a letter urging the Biden administration to support an agreement to collectively provide at least $1 trillion annually in climate finance for lower income nations. UCS is also calling on the Biden administration to announce an ambitious emissions reduction commitment for the country—aka a nationally determined contribution (NDC)—for 2035. That will give the climate advocates, subnational actors, and others who support climate action an important goal to rally around through the Trump administration’s term and beyond. Cutting emissions sharply by ramping up renewable energy and transitioning away from fossil fuels is good for the nation’s economy and for public health, in addition to contributing to global climate efforts to stave off the worst impacts of climate change.

Climate finance negotiation status at COP29 

Week one of COP29 saw little progress on the core issue of climate finance—or the new collective quantified goal (NCQG)—with the negotiating text still at a lengthy 25 pages and containing a lot of bracketed options showing areas where nations have still not reached consensus. The key and contentious issues of the overall quantity of finance, the quality of the sources finance (e.g. public grants versus loans), and how to define which nations will be part of the contributor base will be punted to the ministerial segment, which gets underway in the coming days.  

On the issue of expanding the contributor base, it was encouraging to see China announce that it has already provided and mobilized $24.5 billion in climate finance for developing nations since 2016, which closely matches estimates of China’s south-south finance contributions from US-based experts at WRI.  

A new study recently released by the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance (IHLEG), underscored the need for climate finance to be made available to developing countries (not including China) on the order of at least $1 trillion annually by 2030, and $1.3 trillion by 2035. This is the third report of the IHLEG, which has been providing an independent perspective on the finance agenda since COP26. Overall, the report estimates that “the global projected investment requirement for climate action is around $6.3–6.7 trillion per year by 2030.” The report also warns that if countries fail to marshal sufficient funding in a timely way, the task of cutting emissions becomes much harder, requiring more money more quickly, and that funding needs for adaptation and loss and damage will also rise sharply as climate change worsens.  

Another new study, from the Global Solidarity Levies Taskforce, shows opportunities for raising funds from innovative sources to help meet climate finance goals. Options could include a cryptocurrency levy (which could raise $5.2 billion annually), a tax on the ultra-wealthy (which could raise $200-250 billion annually), and a plastics production levy (which could raise $25-35 billion annually). These kinds of options should be additive to what is committed directly by richer nations through public finance and would require global tax agreements outside of the UN climate talks.  

Adaptation and Loss and Damage Funds need more contributions at COP29 to deliver for climate-vulnerable nations

During the first week of COP29, there was a signing ceremony to finally get the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage operationalized so it can start receiving and disbursing funding for lower income nations often coping with the most extreme impacts of climate change. The World Bank is serving as the trustee for the Fund and the Fund’s first executive director, Ibrahima Cheikh Diong, began his four-year term this month.  

Global civil society representatives meet with new UN Fund for Loss and Damage Executive Director Ibrahima Cheikh Diong. Credit: Rachel Cleetus, UCS

While this marks important progress for this hard-won fund, the amount of actual funding collected remains woefully inadequate. At COP29, only one new contribution has come in—$19 million from Sweden—bringing the overall amount to $720 million thus far. Last year at COP28 in Dubai, the United States contributed a paltry $17.5 million to the fund.  Without a significant ramp-up in pledges, this fund will not deliver justice for those on the most acute frontlines of the climate crisis. And to ensure ongoing predictable and adequate levels of funding, it’s crucial for the NCQG agreement to also include specific provisions for funding for loss and damage.  

Meanwhile, the UN’s Adaptation Fund is also suffering from gross underinvestment. So far, that fund has only raised contributions of around $61 million from donor countries, far short of its annual goal of $300 million. And richer countries are still far off track from delivering on their pledge to double adaptation finance to at least $40 billion annually by 2025.  

Adaptation has historically received much less attention and funding than emissions reduction efforts and is much less attractive for private sector, profit-driven investments. It must get appropriate attention in the NCQG outcome, and it’s especially important to ensure the focus is on grant-based funding so as not to feed into the cycle of debt with which low-income nations are already contending. 

What countries need to do in final week to guarantee a good COP29 outcome

The midpoint of climate negotiations is always a challenging time. Not enough progress has been made thus far at COP29, and the clock is ticking for nations to reach consensus on a range of crunch issues. This is the time for major emitting nations, especially richer countries, to show leadership and negotiate in good faith to maintain trust and credibility. There are some hopes that the G20 summit happening simultaneously this week in Brazil can deliver some helpful climate breakthroughs from major economies that could contribute to advancing proceedings at COP.  

The major presence and influence of fossil fuel lobbyists at COP29 continues to be alarming. As my colleague Kathy Mulvey notes: “Countries must resist any attempt by the fossil fuel industry to swindle funding that should rightly be put toward climate finance desperately needed by Global South nations.”   

The science is clear that without urgent collective action, the world could be on track for a catastrophic rise in global average temperatures of up to 3.1°C above pre-industrial levels this century. Meanwhile, extreme climate-fueled disasters—like hurricanes Helene and Milton in the United States, devastating floods in Spain, and Typhoon Man-yi that just hit the Philippines—continue to batter people and economies around the world.  

As the final week marathon gets underway, UCS will join civil society colleagues to make sure the voice of the people is loud and present at COP29, and that world leaders feel the pressure to deliver science-aligned, ambitious, and equitable outcomes. We have already participated in press conferences (see here and here), engaged in direct advocacy with negotiators, and joined in public actions at COP29—all geared toward pushing forward our key asks.  

Cat sitting on cardboard house in Baku’s Old City. Ashley Siefert Nunes/UCS.

And for a more light-hearted take, check out the cats of Baku, who have also joined forces with us in meowing for more climate finance.  

As the climate crisis advances unchecked, the work of federal agencies dedicated to protecting our health and the places where we work, play, worship, produce food, energy, and shop has become critical and are now at great peril. One such agency is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which provides the scientific bedrock of data needed to protect our health, homes, and livelihoods from climate change and other environmental threats.

This year’s heat waves, hurricanes, flooding, and wildfires for millions across the country shows that people in the United States rely on the scientific data and information that thousands of federal scientists tirelessly churn out and make available for decision-makers, emergency responders, and the general public. From providing operational meteorology for forecasting heat waves or hurricanes with days or weeks in advance, to longer-term assessment of global and regional climate patterns, federal agencies provide data that saves lives.

But if Project 2025–the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the incoming second Trump administration–is implemented, NOAA will be dismantled, downsized, or some parts of it put in private hands, compromising or outright eliminating the valuable services the approximately 11,000 employees who work there provide to the country.

In general, the new Trump administration presents grave threats to priorities on climate, energy, and justice. Project 2025 would be a disaster for the country and climate, as it intends to politicize the climate and environmental science that informs policy-making, promote an energy agenda based on fossil fuels, attack bedrock environmental protections, and eliminate the use of the Social Cost of Carbon in government estimates of the cost of climate change, among others.  In this post I will focus on Project 2025’s ill-advised designs for NOAA.

NOAA scientists’ data saves lives. Project 2025 would dismantle the agency.

NOAA’s work is crucial for monitoring and understanding climate change, and each of its various divisions play an integral role in protecting our ecosystems and communities. NOAA does a lot of important work in partnership with communities to protect them from climate and increasing resilience. For example, the Climate Adaptation Partnerships (CAP, formerly known as the Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments, or RISA) program collaborates with researchers, decision makers, and communities to support resilience in the face of climate risks such as storms, droughts, flooding, extreme heat and wildfires. These partnerships have resulted in, for example, the creation of weather forecasting tools that help maritime operators make better decisions around vessel routes and schedules to navigate the icy waters of the Arctic. This fantastic story map showcases local CAP work with local communities to address extreme heat, dust storms, water/drought planning, fire and disaster planning, among others across the country.

NOAA has many key divisions that perform critical work to inform decision-making around climate change and its impacts. Here is a listing of the most important ones.

The National Hurricane Center‘s (NHC) mission is to “save lives, mitigate property loss, and improve economic efficiency by issuing the best watches, warnings, forecasts, and analyses of hazardous tropical weather and by increasing understanding of these hazards”. 

The NHC works closely with the National Weather Service (NWS), an office best known for its vital role in providing extreme weather alerts for the 122 Weather Forecast Offices across the country. Using data from satellites and advanced models, NWS and NHC warn the public of impending storms, floods, and heatwaves, helping save lives and minimize damage. Travel across the country by water, land, and air is safer in part thanks to timely extreme weather data. And NHC’s forecasts have been improving over the past few decades: storm track errors, a common metric of the accuracy of storm path forecasts, have gone down in recent years according to a report from the American Meteorological Society.

This hurricane season, NOAA’s forecasts were so accurate that Hurricane Milton made landfall only 12 miles north of the location the first forecast had predicted. Hurricane Helene’s loss of life was reduced in the Gulf Coast in part due to an early and accurate forecast that made possible evacuation orders well in advance of landfall in Florida. UCS’ own Danger Season tracker of extreme weather alerts and impacted communities depends on alerts issued by the NWS.

NWS’ Weather Forecasting Offices (WFOs) responsible for issuing extreme weather alerts cover all 50 states, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands (not shown in the map but covered by the San Juan WFO). https://www.weather.gov/srh/nwsoffices

The National Ocean Service (NOS) provides valuable data on economic, environmental, and social pressures impacting our coasts, Great Lakes, and oceans. From coastal erosion to pollution, NOS’s science helps states and communities manage these resources sustainably. 

The Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) program develops foundational climate science research to understand climate events such as tornadoes, hurricanes, ocean currents, El Niño and La Niña events, as well as the health of coastal environments. OAR plays a major role in the U.S. Global Change Research Program, tracking climate patterns and assessing long-term impacts of climate change for the country via the comprehensive National Climate Assessment.

The data produced is essential for global scientific understanding and informs local and national climate policies. In addition, OAR’s research improves weather forecasting models, helping to predict severe weather and air quality issues more accurately. These efforts save lives by providing advanced warning and helping communities prepare for hurricanes, wildfires, and air pollution events. OAR also monitors the Arctic’s rapidly changing environment, as it significantly influences global weather patterns and sea levels. From melting sea ice to shifts in marine life, this research is vital to understanding and adapting to climate impacts. 

Data from scientific agencies inform the National Climate Assessment, which in turn provides critical information for policymakers at all levels of government on existing and future climate change risks and opportunities in the US and its territories. https://nca2023.globalchange.gov/downloads/NCA5_Report-In-Brief.pdf 

The National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) operates NOAA’s satellite programs, which monitor climate and weather conditions globally. These satellites provide essential data on everything from sea surface temperatures to hurricane tracking, giving communities and policymakers the data needed to prepare for extreme weather. 

NESDIS manages the satellite programs that inform the U.S. Drought Monitor, an assessment of drought conditions used by, for example, the US Department of Agriculture to trigger disaster declarations and eligibility for low-interest loans for farmers across the country. Drought.gov.

The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) supports sustainable fishing practices and protects marine species, a critical part of maintaining balanced ocean ecosystems that can withstand climate pressures.  

The Office of Marine and Aviation Operations (OMAO) and NOAA Corps oversee NOAA’s fleet of ships and aircraft used for research and data collection, essential for on-the-ground climate and ecosystem studies.  

Project 2025 would eliminate unbiased data

Though NOAA does not make policy recommendations, the science and scientific data that it produces informs fact-based assessments of climate and other environmental threats that serve as the basis for policymakers to make sound policies. By creating and advancing climate science research, NOAA lays the unbiased, scientific bedrock of data and information for decision- and policy-making that can deliver for us a climate-resilient future. Investing in their work and supporting their mission to understand climate change will benefit current and future generations. 

But Project 2025 would change all of that, proposing that NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories” (see page 664 in Mandate for Leadership.) This is ill-advised for many reasons.

Climate-augmented extreme weather events have little regard for state boundaries, and are influenced by global and regional atmospheric and oceanic conditions. As such, nationwide data collection and analysis provides the most scientifically-accurate information that can be used to issue forecasts and projections to protect people across the country.

Privatization of public services–a change proposed by Project 2025 for NOAA’s weather forecasts–does not automatically equal better services. Handing essential services to private operators needs to come in with clear accountability and performance metrics to guarantee service levels, and must ensure that towns, counties, or states with less resources are not left without access to these critical data. Without equity in access to service, privatization could also mean that regions with higher risks for heat, hurricanes, or flooding risks, to name a few, could be forced to pay more to access weather forecasts or alerts.

Recent experiences in privatizing critical services such as electricity generation and distribution in the US territory of Puerto Rico, for example, have resulted in degraded, life-threatening reliability of a vital utility, largely due to lack of accountability and performance metrics in privatization contracts.

Why we need NOAA now more than ever

All public agencies, including NOAA, should be held accountable by the public and the rest of government to ensure they fulfill their mission and make the best possible use of taxpayers’ money. But this is not what the second Trump administration and Project 2025 intend to do.

If the first Trump government is any indication, the intention is to dismantle, intervene, and politicize NOAA in order to facilitate profit-making for industries that make more money the more they pollute and the less they have to invest in technologies or processes to reduce the harmful impacts of their activities. The fossil fuel industry can deny all they want, but the health and ecosystem impacts will not be willed away; they will just continue to be passed down to communities across the planet and the country, and the progress that has been made in addressing climate impacts and environmental quality and in reducing injustices and inequities will be rolled back.  

We need champions like NOAA to stand strong in the face of climate change. Their research, policies, and environmental protections are essential building blocks for a sustainable and just future. The first Trump government took a wrecking ball approach at perverting the roles and missions of scientific agencies and offices that protect us.

The incoming second Trump government has an intentional and dangerous blueprint in Project 2025 to repurpose the public services NOAA provides in order to line the pockets of the fossil fuel and other polluting industries. NOAA has a clear track record of providing the best science available to protect against loss of life and property in the face of worsening climate change and must be protected.

Last month, 44 climate scientists from 15 countries wrote an open letter to the Nordic Council of Ministers highlighting the risk of a potential collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a critical ocean current system in the Atlantic Ocean. In the letter, the climate scientists stress that the risk of an AMOC collapse due to climate change has been greatly underestimated according to new observational evidence.

Not only would the collapse of the AMOC lead to “catastrophic” impacts on the Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, and Finland), but it would also shift weather patterns worldwide. For the United States, an AMOC collapse would lead to warmer ocean temperatures and greater sea-level rise along the East Coast, leading to devastating impacts on fisheries and ecosystems in the coastal Atlantic Ocean, as well as greater flood risk to coastal communities and infrastructure.

The potential collapse of the AMOC—which could happen within this century, or be triggered within this century and play out over a longer timeframe—comes as a result of climate change caused by additional heat-trapping emissions like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But what exactly would cause the AMOC to collapse? And if it does, could climate mitigation efforts restart the AMOC to its original circulating strength?

What is the AMOC?

To understand what exactly the AMOC is, a better question to start might be: why does the Earth’s climate system exist? Because the Earth is a sphere, it receives incoming light (electromagnetic radiation) from the sun at different intensities depending on what latitude you’re located at. For example, the polar regions of the planet receive indirect light from the sun, as the sun’s rays are spread out over a larger surface area. Closer to the Equator, the sun’s rays are more direct. This unevenness in sunlight leads to regions closer to the Equator to be warm and regions closer to the North and South Poles to be cold.

The Earth’s climate system does not like imbalances in heat! And that’s why the AMOC exists: it does everything in its power to mix the warm and cold regions together in order to establish an equilibrium. Both the ocean and atmosphere play a role in this mixing—the AMOC is the oceanic piece of this circulation that brings warm ocean water up from the equator to the northern Atlantic Ocean, and then transports colder water back to the equator in an attempt to even out the differences in temperature (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The AMOC is an oceanic circulation that transports warm, fresh water from the Equator to the North Atlantic and cold, salty water from the North Atlantic to the Equatorial region. Figure from NOAA.

In addition to transporting warmer water north and cooler water south, the AMOC also mixes an imbalance in salt levels in ocean water. Water near the Equator is much less salty than water in the North Atlantic. Why? The Tropical Atlantic Ocean receives significantly more rainfall than the North Atlantic, where it rains much less. More rainfall in the Tropical Atlantic Ocean results in less salty water. This imbalance in the climate system forces the AMOC to transport fresh, warm (low density) water north and salty, cold (high density) water south.

The AMOC is a vital circulation of our climate system, and because of all the warm water it transports to the North Atlantic, human civilization has flourished in very high latitudes in Europe, as well as allowing the development of complex ocean dwelling life and ecosystems.

Picture Quebec City in Canada and London in the UK. Quebec City is famous for its winters with snow and sub-zero temperatures. London, on the other hand, barely receives snow, even during the winter season. But here’s the kicker—London is significantly further north (closer to the North Pole) than Quebec City. London is warmer despite it being further north in part due to the existence of the AMOC, which brings warm water up from the Equator to northern Europe.

What causes the weakening and potential collapse of the AMOC?

As global temperatures warm due to human-caused climate change, the Greenland ice sheet is melting rapidly, leading to vast amounts of freshwater entering the North Atlantic. Because of this, the ocean waters in the north are less salty and less dense than before. This partly reduces the density imbalance between the Equator and the northern Atlantic Ocean, resulting in the AMOC to weaken or potentially collapse (Figure 2).

The idea of a potential AMOC collapse is not new: some scientists were already thinking about this in the early 1960s. However, with the advent of sophisticated climate models in recent decades, climate scientists are better able to study what exactly happens when freshwater increases in the north Atlantic Ocean, forcing the weakening of the AMOC.

Figure 2. AMOC strength over the past 1,600 years according to paleoclimate data. The y-axis shows the temperature anomaly in the North Atlantic—a cooler temperature indicates more sea ice/freshwater melt entering the North Atlantic. Figure from Oceanography | Vol. 37, No. 3 p.24. What would happen if the AMOC weakens or collapses?

In the early phases of a weakened or collapsed AMOC, huge changes would be expected in the local climate of northern Europe. Scandinavia, the UK, Iceland, and Ireland would experience winters much colder than currently observed, with weather becoming even more unpredictable. In fact, in the open letter published last week, there is a dire warning that a weakening AMOC “would potentially threaten the viability of agriculture in northwestern Europe.”

But the impacts of a weakened or collapsed AMOC would spread worldwide. As the AMOC circulation weakens, warm water would start to pool up against the eastern North American coast, leading to significantly warmer ocean temperatures and higher sea level rise compared to other regions across the globe. Near the tropics, monsoon patterns and other tropical rainfall belts would shift. Globally, the circulation of the atmosphere, which governs where weather patterns set up, would change in intensity. All of this as a result of an oceanic circulation in the Atlantic Ocean slowing down.

How likely is this scenario?

Why did this group of scientists suddenly sound the alarm? In the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report, published in 2023, scientific consensus stated that there was a “medium chance” the AMOC would collapse before the end of the 21st century. However, four recent peer-reviewed observational studies have found that the AMOC is in fact already showing signs of collapse (see references 6-9 in the open letter).

In one study published in Science Advances, scientists developed a physics-based early warning signal for an indication of when AMOC could be heading towards a collapse. Unfortunately, they found that based on observations, the AMOC has already weakened so much that the Earth is closing in on a tipping point with the AMOC potentially collapsing.

If the AMOC did collapse, it would be nearly impossible to bring it back to life. In physics-based and climate modeling simulations, the AMOC experiences something called hysteresis. Hysteresis is a phenomenon where any change to a system, such as the AMOC, depends on its history. The AMOC has existed and persisted for thousands of years in the stable pre-industrial climate. Therefore, it’s difficult to force the AMOC out of its current circulation state. If we reach the tipping point of an AMOC collapse, it would be very difficult to change back to a circulating state, simply because the AMOC would need a lot of push to get it going again.

What are climate scientists demanding?

Dozens of climate scientists have sounded the alarm for the Nordic Council of Ministers. They do not discuss the potential of the AMOC collapse lightly, as it would directly affect and have devastating impacts on the communities that many of these scientists live in.

Perhaps even more alarming is the language around their call to action: they recognize that adaptation for citizens in the Nordic countries to an AMOC collapse is not a “viable option,” and that the leaders of these countries should instead “take steps to minimize this risk as much as possible.”

The scientists call on the leaders of these countries to use their international standing to push world governments to take drastic steps to cut the release of heat-trapping emissions and stay close to the 1.5-degree Celsius target set by the Paris Agreement. However, current estimates from the United Nations Emissions Gap Report predict we’re on track to warm 2.6-3.1 degrees Celsius.

Will the world’s governments and corporations heed the warning from these scientists? We hope so. Countries must do everything in their power to drastically reduce heat-trapping emissions, and we must hold governments accountable to protect the oceanic circulation in the Atlantic Ocean, and limit the risk of its collapse and the potential to upend civilization in northern Europe and beyond.

The former governor of New York, Mario Cuomo, famously said, “you campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.”

But if you campaign with lies, you will govern with lies.

Donald Trump and JD Vance just became President- and Vice President-elect by relying heavily on cruel, hateful, and disinforming rhetoric. Throughout the campaign, both candidates, their spokespeople, and surrogates relied on overt, unapologetic racism, on targeted anti-trans ad buys and messages, and on attacks on climate change science, policy, and progress, to name just a few examples of their key messages.

We should expect them to spread more hate speech and disinformation after they are inaugurated. And we should understand that we don’t have to stand by helplessly when they do.

Lies our president-elect told us

Disinformation, the intentional spreading of lies, is a form of propaganda. Those who wield it as a political tactic have three main goals: to spur and stoke division, to reinforce political and cultural identities that weaken discourse and democracy, and to maintain or reinforce existing power structures and undermine progress.

The Trump-Vance campaign stoked political division by amplifying Russian disinformation about the federal government’s response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton. This content dovetailed perfectly with their campaign’s anti-immigrant, anti-government, and anti-US-support-for-Ukraine narratives.

There are many ways in which Russia, a petrostate, benefits from its state media outlets and from social media accounts spreading lies during the US election process, but an obvious one is that Russia profits from a US government that undermines international climate negotiations and progress by withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement.

Joseph Goebbels, the chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, disclosed the “secret of propaganda” when he remarked that “those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in the ideas of the propaganda, without ever noticing that they are being immersed in it.”

Over the past decade or so, we have seen strategic and successful efforts from the fossil fuel industry and its allies to cement disinforming narratives into political and cultural identity, and the Trump-Vance campaign joined in whole-heartedly. In their statements and posts, climate science and solutions denial overlapped with other conspiratorial thinking—about COVID19, global economic initiatives, drivers of migration, immigrants themselves, and antisemitism.

It’s hard to find common ground on climate policy when a significant proportion of the public has been sold lies about climate science, scientists, advocates, and progress. This, of course, is the point. Climate disinformation is intended to deny science, deceive the public, delay action, or dodge responsibility. In so doing, it maintains the power of the fossil fuel industry and its political allies and locks the world’s people into an increasingly dangerous future.

Quid pro quote

Come January, the fossil fuel industry has a powerful and shameless ally in the White House. We can expect even fewer brakes on worst impulses and actions in the second Trump administration.

During the 2024 campaign, candidate Trump reportedly offered to “roll back a slew of environmental regulations in exchange for $1 billion in campaign contributions” from the fossil fuel industry. If these allegations are true, it is astonishing and appalling that the President-elect solicited a campaign contribution in exchange for anti-environmental (and anti-health) action, and even quoted his price.

A Senate investigation into the issue has been stymied, lawmakers say, because big oil and gas companies are not responding, though “none of them have denied the accuracy of the reporting.”

Big Oil companies are demonstrated purveyors and chief beneficiaries of climate disinformation, but they’re not in it alone. Big Tech, including some companies that own large online search engines and social media platforms, are fossil fuel industry accomplices—they too spread and profit off climate lies, greenwash their own business practices, and support anti-climate officials, including President-elect Donald Trump.

What to expect while we’re reflecting

I’m not saying, better the devil you know, but this isn’t our first go-around with a Trump administration.

We should be confident that how candidates Trump and Vance behaved in the election is once again how they’ll govern, and that because of the strategic thinking behind Project 2025, a second Trump White House will be better prepared to do serious, long-term harm to the US government, the people in the country, and our climate.

It doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict that we will see continued

• attacks on the truth-tellers, that is scientists and science-based advocates,
• efforts to exacerbate political and social division rather than to help people suffering from climate-fueled disasters,
• lies about climate-fueled disasters and risks (anyone remember Sharpiegate?),
• fuel for conspiratorial thinking that undermines trust in democracy, institutions, science, and other people.

Yes, the administration will change in January 2025, but some things won’t. When confronted with climate disinformation or by conspiratorial thinkers, it’s still best not to waste time on bad faith arguments or in playing scientific whack-a-mole. It’s still best to speak with curiosity and empathy with people you love who’ve been disinformed. It’s still kind and wise to ask them where they’re getting their information, and why it resonates with them.

And if people you care about are attracted to conspiracist thinking, boy, have you got an ACTUAL conspiracy for them—the actions of the fossil fuel industry and its pals (see here, here, and here).

Hold Big Tech accountable, too

I often hear that in the United States, taking action to stop the spread of climate disinformation online is impossible because of the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. I think that, to a certain extent, this is a red herring. As an analogy, I have a right to my opinion but I don’t have the right to publish that opinion in the New York Times.

Many platforms and search engines already have editorial policies, including policies against certain categories of mis- and disinformation. An oft-cited criterion for removing mis- or disinforming content is that, as Meta/Facebook writes, it “directly contribute(s) to the risk of imminent physical harm.”  That’s why, with climate impacts being ever more heavily borne around the world, it’s important to demand that platforms include climate disinformation in their lists of barred content.

Here are some other demands UCS, as part of the global Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition, has for Big Tech:

• Throttle bad actors’ posts. Online climate-disinforming content originates from a small number of accounts. If accounts repeatedly defy anti-disinformation policies, platforms can “throttle” or delay content from those accounts, fact-checking BEFORE allowing posts to go live and spread falsehoods and harm.
• Don’t profit. Platforms and search engines can simply STOP advertising, monetizing, and amplifying climate disinformation.
• Do better. We can all work together to demand that search engines and social media platforms develop new, counter disinformation policies and/or strengthen and enforce existing ones.

Struggle on

There’s a long, hard road ahead of us and a lot of uncertainty. One thing I am sure about is that no effort to clean up and safeguard the systems that inform (and too often, disinform) the world will be wasted. Counter disinformation work is crucial to building a world in which facts, science, truth matter, and democracy ultimately prevails.

Today, it has become clear that former President Donald Trump will return to office for a second term, after a close and hard-fought election.

There’s no denying it: this is a very difficult outcome for us and for everyone who cares about a safe and sustainable future. There’s every reason to expect that a second Trump administration will pose a risk to our values and priorities at least as severe as the first term, if not more.

President-elect Trump’s path to the White House has been an unprecedented campaign of disinformation, threats, divisive language, and dangerous policy promises. It’s understandable to look ahead to the next four years with serious worry—but while we shouldn’t underestimate the risk, we can’t afford to despair. The challenges the planet faces are too urgent for complacency or cynicism.

Here at the Union of Concerned Scientists, we knew a second Trump term was a real possibility, and we’ve prepared for the challenges ahead. There’s hope in our unique approach: by combining science-backed analysis with grassroots advocacy, UCS has a 50-plus year track record of success, regardless of who’s in the White House.  

We—and our supporters across the country—have a vital role to play in defending the progress we’ve made at the federal level, advancing our goals at the state level, and exposing and pushing back against the abuses that are likely to come. We’re clear about the threats we face but we must move forward with hope and determination. 

Our priorities for the next year and beyond include:

•  Launching a new national campaign to defend science in government decision-making from day one. When science is sidelined, people get hurt. With your help we will work to limit political attacks on government scientists and experts, stop suppression of scientific research, fight unqualified science agency nominations, and defend against other anti-science action in the Project 2025 agenda.
• Protecting democracy, state by state. This election was marred by efforts to undermine the right to vote—through voter-roll purges, restrictive laws, and rampant disinformation. We will continue to work and expand our Election Science Task Force and push to improve free and fair elections at the state level through science-based best practices, including fair representation, better ballot design, and more transparent election data.
• Safeguarding and advancing clean energy and climate-safe infrastructure. The investments made in the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law are having an impact—creating jobs and changing the trajectory of the energy economy in red, blue, and purple states. We have an opportunity to work across the partisan divide in Congress and the states to defend those vital investments and make sure the path toward a cleaner, safer future stays in place. And we are already set up and working in states across the country to forge more ambitious policies to cut pollution, advance equity, and build a thriving future—we can and will press on.
• Holding corporate bad actors accountable. Through our Science Hub for Climate Litigation, we’re providing research and expertise to inform legal cases in the United States and around the world that seek to hold Chevron, ExxonMobil, and other powerful fossil fuel companies and their allied organizations accountable for fraud and for climate damages.
• Relentlessly pushing for long-term solutions that protect science. Wewill work to advance federal legislation that permanently establishes scientific integrity principles and practices across the federal government, prevents excessive and undue influence of corporate special interests, and undoes the damage caused by recent Supreme Court decisions that undermine the ability of federal agencies to implement equitable science-based policies.

To learn more, you can read this series of blog posts from our team laying out the challenges ahead and the strategies we’re putting in place to confront them.

• A Second Trump Administration Threatens an Assault on Climate, Energy, and Justice Priorities by Chitra Kumar, managing director of the Climate and Energy program.

• A Path Forward for Science and Democracy by Jennifer Jones, program director of the Center for Science & Democracy.
• It’s an Unpleasant Déjà Vu for Clean Transportation Advocates by Don Anair, deputy director and research director of the Clean Transportation program.
• What a Second Trump Administration Means for Food and Farms by Karen Perry Stillerman, deputy director of the Food and Environment program.
• Can Advocates Reduce Nuclear Dangers and Advance Nuclear Justice Under a Trump Administration? by Tara Drozdenko, director of the Global Security program.
• States Must Step Up by Juliet Christian-Smith, Western States regional director.

In the remaining months of the Biden administration, we’ll keep fighting for progress—and after the inauguration we’ll prioritize defending the investments and policies we’ve worked so hard to implement.

We’ll defend USDA’s efforts to fund conservation and fulfill their commitment to end discrimination in the agriculture sector. We’ll fight to protect investments in clean transportation infrastructure, support state efforts to fill in the gaps that will emerge at the federal level, and keep the spotlight on industry actors trying to prevent the transformation of our transportation system. And we’ll pass the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act at home and work across civil society and national borders to block the resumption of nuclear testing and reduce the risk of nuclear war.

We know that it will be difficult. The Trump agenda is a threat to democracy, to equity and justice, to public health and the climate. We must work tirelessly to counter these threats—and side by side with a broad coalition of allies. We will look beyond this election cycle to build power in the long term. And with your support, we will.

Read what UCS experts expect from the second Trump administration on climate and energy, food and agriculture, global security, science and democracy, and transportation.

Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Louis Brandeis was the first to call states the laboratories of democracy. States have unique power in our federalist system to advance change. Indeed, UCS’ state-based strategies have focused on advancing some of the most innovative policies at the state scale, including cap and trade and zero-emission vehicle standards. Both have subsequently been adopted widely. 

For the past four years, states like California have benefited from federal leadership that has made historic investments in climate action, clean energy, water, and clean transportation. We knew we could rely on the federal government to grant California regulators the ability to pass forward-looking policies necessary to make our air breathable. 

Contrast that with what we experienced in President Trump’s first term: more than 200 documented attacks on science by the administration, total disregard for the need for climate action, the sidelining of science during the pandemic that resulted in people being hurt, prioritizing the interests of polluters, and doors previously open to ambitious state regulations slammed shut. 

It’s about to get tough again for state leaders focused on the forward-looking climate, energy, water, transportation, food, and security policies that President-elect Trump and Project 2025 are seeking to dismantle and defund. But there is still progress to be made. As my UCS colleague in California, Don Anair, notes: even during the first Trump administration, there were successes in California for climate, clean energy, and clean transportation.

States must go all in on offense

Fortunately, California continues to have a governor and legislative leadership who understand the importance of driving down emissions, protecting frontline communities, and transitioning away from fossil fuels as quickly and equitably as possible.

While our colleagues and partners in Washington, DC, will be playing tough defense on the issues we care about—like fighting attacks on federal science and scientists, opposing anti-science federal nominees, defending regulations that protect health and safety for people across the US—states like California will have to go all in on offense. 

Here in California, advocacy organizations like UCS will need to look for new funding sources for the investments our climate and communities desperately need. We will need to find creative solutions to transition away from combustion vehicles without the certainty of our vehicle regulations. We will have to develop clean energy, ensure communities have access to safe and affordable drinking water, build out electric vehicle charging infrastructure, transition irrigated land to more sustainable uses, and much more—all with an oppositional force in the White House. 

Across the Western states, UCS has worked hard for years to have a robust presence and partnerships with many allied stakeholders who will help us pass policies. I am confident we can show the country and the world that a way forward on the issues we care the most about is still imminently possible.   

Now, more than ever, states must step up.

California can continue to lead

UCS will continue to prioritize work in California. The state continues to be the fifth largest economy in the world and an international leader on climate change. During the Biden-Harris administration, UCS was able to drive important change in the Western States, and we will continue to do so. 

• At the California Air Resources Board (CARB), we will continue to push for the most health protective transportation regulations possible, proving to the nation that a zero-emission vehicle transition is possible. 
• At the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) we will continue to ensure that utilities are planning for 100% clean energy by 2045. 
• At the California Energy Commission (CEC), we will work to plan for an integrated clean energy and transportation future that includes bidirectional electric vehicles. 
• And at the State Water Board we will ensure that groundwater is protected and water rights are appropriately tracked and enforced.
• At the legislature, with the help of Governor Newsom, we will pass legislation to remove barriers to clean energy deployment, protect scientists from political interference, transition away from fossil fuels in the transportation and energy sectors, and give all Californians access to safe and affordable drinking water. 

While we expect the second Trump administration will do its best to put up roadblocks and barriers all along the way to California’s efforts, UCS will continue to advance science-based solutions at the state scale for a safer and healthier world.

Read what UCS experts expect from the second Trump administration on food and agriculture, global security, science and democracy, transportation, and engaging with states.

After a hard-fought close election fueled by an active campaign of disinformation, Donald Trump has won the presidency.

As advocates for solving the climate crisis, it is daunting to take stock of the new hurdles we see to progress, especially at a time when the deadly and costly impacts of climate change are so clear across the nation.

While the Union of Concerned Scientists and our supporters have deep concerns about what will come next, we know there are no sides in science. Facts do not bow to politics. The next hurricane doesn’t care if you are conservative or liberal or what political party you belong to. The science is clear: the climate crisis is real and worsening. People need real solutions and that’s what we’ll be fighting for.

Trust they will do what they said in the campaign 

We expect the new administration to attempt a long list of harmful actions to undermine climate progress, many of them outlined in the Project 2025 manifesto. UCS is primed to resist and fight back; not all of these actions are foregone conclusions—science, statutes, and public engagement will all serve to limit the worst. How much damage is done at the federal level to the progress we have made will also depend on the election outcomes in the House of Representatives and the role it will play. The Supreme Court—which has been increasingly hostile to federal agencies—could also be a deciding factor in key instances.

At the same time, enormous clean energy momentum is already underway in states and localities all across the country, supported by shifts in governing agendas to include climate action as a priority, strengthened climate- and health-harming pollution standards, and forward-looking investment policies at the local, state, and federal levels. That commitment to the future can remain as a bulwark against repeated attacks on climate progress from the executive branch—but much is still at risk of being lost, precisely when the world requires a redoubling of action, not a slip.

All-out attacks on climate action

The fact remains that when it comes to critical climate and public health protections, federal action is key, which is what makes the threats from a Trump administration so concerning. Based on the actions of the first Trump administration, how he campaigned, and what Project 2025 has laid out, these are some of the actions we are expecting and will respond to:

• Giveaways to the fossil fuel industry, paid for by people and the environment. Donald Trump’s campaign promises included supporting unfettered expansion of oil and gas production while reversing pivotal new clean energy provisions that facilitated the transition away from fossil fuels. This represents an outright pendulum swing from the Biden administration’s whole-of-government approach to tackling climate change. It indicates a shift in prioritization of interests, underscored by new findings that Trump’s PACs received more than $75 million from oil interests to continue receiving sweet deals from federal taxpayer subsidies while evading accountability.
• Attacks on science-informed standards and agendas. The new administration’s dramatic shift in agenda will be underpinned by actions that undermine trust in science and the capacity of administrative agencies to undertake good decision-making. We will be watching out for attempts to defund federal agencies and target career staff who have institutional knowledge and scientific expertise; rolling back or undermining agencies’ scientific integrity policies; manipulating the data and analyses used to justify public health and environmental protections; stopping essential scientific studies that advance our understanding of public health pollution harms as well as climate science, impacts, and solutions; and nominating egregious, unqualified cabinet appointees who care about power and profits, not the public interest or the mission of their agencies (such as Rex Tillerson and Scott Pruitt) 
• Regulatory rollbacks. Critical climate and public health standards that hold polluters to account—such as standards limiting climate and health-harming pollution from coal- and gas-fired power plants and fossil fuel extraction and transport—are at extreme risk of attempted weakening or outright abandonment. While the previous Trump administration ultimately saw many of its efforts fail in the courts due to neglect of statutory obligation and basic facts, even failed attempts still result in lengthy delays, which translate into significant, widespread, life-shortening, and climate-exacerbating impacts.
• Legislative rollbacks. Polluting industries have already pushed Congress to roll back provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. However, this law is benefiting people and forward-looking companies all across the nation, meaning complete roll backs are unlikely—but we expect targeted efforts to continue, especially to undo those provisions posing the greatest threat to fossil fuel industry interests.
• Threats to environmental justice and equity. The Biden administration took several historic steps to advance environmental justice priorities but many of them are likely to be in danger under a Trump administration—including efforts under the Justice40 Initiative to help ensure targeted funding and resources for disadvantaged communities, EPA grant programs to help clean up pollution in overburdened communities, and a whole-of-government approach to embed environmental justice in the work of all agencies.  
• Undermining of climate diplomacy. Trump has promised to again exit the Paris Agreement —the international agreement to try to limit the worst impacts of climate change, thus undermining global climate progress. As a rich nation and a major carbon emitter, the United States has an outsize responsibility and is key to achieving the goals of the agreement. Stepping away from it would affect US credibility and could potentially impact its ability to secure cooperation on other geopolitical, trade, and security issues that are in the national interest.

Indeed, this is a tough moment for desperately needed climate and energy progress, but we will not give up—and we want you to fight with us.

We will fight back. Join us!

We will work to defend against rollbacks to public health safeguards and climate policies that are grounded in science and delivering tremendous benefits to people. We will highlight the importance of the work of agency scientific experts including on climate and clean energy issues, and we will call out the manipulation of science and analysis undertaken to justify polluter handouts. We will relentlessly oppose anti-science Cabinet nominees who prioritize the interests of polluters and special interests over the health and safety of people and communities, and we will support legal challenges to rollbacks of pollution standards.

UCS will continue helping to inform the science that helps underpin climate litigation, which continues to proliferate and evolve. Across the United States and its territories, dozens of communities, states, and tribes are suing the fossil fuel industry over climate deception and damages. Since the adoption of the Paris climate agreement in 2015, 86 climate lawsuits have been filed worldwide against major oil, gas, and coal corporations. Some of these cases seek compensation for climate damages, others aim to force these companies to reduce global warming emissions, still others seek to end false climate- and environment-related claims. These kinds of actions will likely gather force under a Trump administration.

UCS is mobilizing immediately with the 17,000 scientists in our network and with partners to launch an emergency campaign to fight attacks on federal science and scientists, and stop the Trump administration from politicizing science and firing the experts who help protect our communities, families, and the planet. But we will need everyone—not just scientists—to stand up for the critical role of science for climate, for health, for the well-being of all.

We will share more about these and other efforts in the weeks ahead.

 2024 will be a year to remember. As a result of fossil fuel-driven climate change, it’s on track to be the warmest year in recorded history. This heat fueled extreme weather events across the world, with most having significant impacts on human life and infrastructure and ecosystems. 

In the United States, communities are still recovering from Hurricanes Beryl, Helene, and Milton. Each storm made history in its own right: Beryl was the earliest Category 5 storm on record in the Atlantic Ocean, Helene broke rainfall records in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee, and destroyed tens of mountain communities, and Milton was the second fastest intensifying storm since 1979. I wrote about the unprecedented Hurricanes Helene and Milton in an earlier blogpost. 

In other parts of the world, floods, heatwaves, wildfires, and droughts made headlines. Flooding in Central Europe this summer killed 27 people, while extreme rains in Pakistan and Afghanistan left hundreds dead and thousands of families homeless. In Brazil, the world’s largest grassland caught fire; a rapid attribution study found the fire to be 40% more intense due to climate change. And in the African Sahel, including countries like Senegal, Mali, and Niger, an extreme heatwave at the end of Ramadan would not have occurred without human-caused climate change. 

How exactly does human-caused climate change lead to more frequent and more intense extreme weather events? In this blog, I explain the science behind these extreme weather events and pinpoint how additional heat-trapping emissions in Earth’s atmosphere are responsible. 

The Earth is warming 

The burning of fossil fuels has led to an increase in pollutants such as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution began in the 1800s. Carbon dioxide and other pollutants trap heat in the atmosphere that would otherwise leave the Earth, acting as a sort of blanket that doesn’t allow the Earth to emit as much heat as it used to. 

This is fossil fuel-driven climate change—more heat-trapping emissions in the atmosphere results in a warming planet, with a clear warming trend observed over the last few decades (Figure 1).  

It didn’t have to be this way—the fossil fuel industry was broadly aware of the danger its products posed to the global climate since at least the mid-1960s, but chose to downplay and distort the evidence of climate change while engaging in a decades-long global campaign against climate action. And now we’re dealing with the consequences: as global warming has progressed, it has also amplified extreme weather events around the world. 

Figure 1. The global average surface temperature since 1880. Source: NOAA (https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature) 

Droughts and floods are worsening

To understand why droughts and floods are worsening on a warming planet, there’s a concept in atmospheric science called the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship that we’ll need to review (bear with me here, I promise it will help!). It states that the atmosphere can hold 7% more water for every one-degree Celsius increase in temperature.  

In my previous blogpost, I explained the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship through an analogy where I envision the atmosphere as a sponge: as the temperature increases, that sponge gets bigger and bigger, allowing the atmosphere to hold more and more water. 

How does this affect the frequency and intensity of droughts and floods? If the sponge (atmosphere) can hold more water, it can hold off on raining out (imagine squeezing a sponge) longer. So, one of the reasons droughts are getting worse in some parts of world is due to the atmosphere being able to hold more water before that water leaves the atmosphere. As just one example, climate change is worsening the megadrought in the western U.S.  

For the same reason, this “sponge effect” also results in more floods—when the atmosphere finally rains out, it dumps much more rain than it used to in a given period of time. This is one of the reasons why we’re observing unprecedented heatwaves and droughts in the Sahel, while record-breaking flooding is occurring just a few thousand miles away in Pakistan and Afghanistan.  

This simple analogy works great when considering the global average change in droughts and floods. However, the change in the frequency and intensity of droughts and floods varies for different regions (Figure 2).  

For example, there is a clear increase in heavy precipitation over Europe mainly due to a warmer atmosphere being able to hold more water. Specifically, many regions in Europe will see an increase in rare heavy precipitation events, while only a slight increase in less rare events. Climate change is also causing a “precipitation whiplash” in some cases—abrupt shifts between extreme dry and extreme wet conditions in the same place, including in California.  

Figure 2. Observed changes in heavy precipitation (top) and agricultural and ecological drought (bottom). More information can be found in the IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM.pdf.  

Storms are breaking records

The atmosphere is warming rapidly, yes, but it’s actually warming slower than it could be thanks to the Earth’s oceans, which are absorbing 92% of the heat from human-caused climate change. However, all this additional heat in the oceans is leading to record-breaking heat content levels, which also result in record-high ocean surface temperatures. According to the Climate Shift Index from Climate Central, record-breaking ocean surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were made 400-800 times more likely due to fossil fuel-driven climate change. 

Tropical cyclones such as hurricanes develop in the tropical oceans due to an imbalance in heat between the cool upper atmosphere and the warm ocean surface. If there is a greater imbalance in heat between these two regions, for example, a warmer ocean surface, then the hurricane can strengthen faster and become a more intense storm. 

This is exactly what happened this year with Hurricanes Beryl, Helene, and Milton. Beryl reached Category 5 strength so early in the season because it traveled over waters that were significantly warmer than usual due to climate change. Helene and Milton experienced rapid intensification in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, respectively, due to record high heat level content.  

In the future, as the world continues to warm due to additional heat-trapping emissions, storms like Beryl, Helene, and Milton will become more common. 

COP29, the L&D fund, and climate attribution

In less than two weeks, the world’s governments and organizations will convene at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s 29th annual Conference of the Parties (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan. The backdrop will be the news of 2024’s unprecedented year of extreme weather fueled by fossil fuel-caused climate change.  

At COP29, nations will decide how to fund lower-income countries’ climate adaptation and mitigation needs; my colleague, Rachel Cleetus, nicely lays out what we’ll be following this year at COP29 in this blogpost. These contributions to lower-income countries are critical as extreme weather events worsen in a warming world; we need to be sure that every country has the money necessary to adapt to climate change. 

I’ll also be following the discussion on the operationalization of the Loss and Damage fund. L&D is a term that accounts for any loss or damage, economic or non-economic, due to an extreme weather or climate event. As part of my science fellowship with the Union of Concerned Scientists, my goal is to first identify gaps in scientific literature that could help bolster and reinforce the L&D fund, and then apply a machine learning method to fill that research gap. 

Specifically, I’m interested in summarizing the current state of climate attribution science, which is a subfield of climate science that basically answers the question, “was this extreme weather or climate event more likely due to climate change?” Currently, we know that there are large gaps in climate attribution literature, for example, a lack of attribution studies in more vulnerable regions—especially in the Global South.  

Following the L&D conversation at COP could better clue us climate scientists into what those on the frontlines of the climate crisis need and help us advocate for that at COP. 

As we enter an era where years like 2024, with its unprecedented number of extreme weather events, become more common, it is up to the world’s governments at this year’s COP to resist fossil fuel industry lobbying. Governments must signal more ambitious emissions reduction commitments while agreeing on a robust climate finance goal that can, among other priorities, enable further strengthening of the world’s infrastructure to prepare for more extreme weather and climate events. 

The annual UN climate talks, COP29, will kick off on November 11, just days after the US elections and in a year of numerous consequential elections around the world. Coming at the end of what is certain to be the hottest year on record, with millions of people experiencing devastating climate-fueled disasters and global heat-trapping emissions still rising, this COP has a sobering backdrop. Here’s what’s on the agenda at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, and why it matters.

Priorities for COP29

COP29 is being billed as the ‘Finance COP.’ That’s because countries previously agreed under the Paris Agreement that, by the end of 2024, they would decide on the new quantum of climate finance for lower-income countries, building on the previous target of $100 billion/year. While this is the top priority, other important issues will also be on the agenda.

At COP29, world leaders must deliver outcomes that respond to the acute state of the climate crisis, including:

1. An agreement on a robust climate finance goal (aka the new collective quantified goal, or NCQG, on climate finance). As I discussed in a previous blogpost, this funding is crucial for lower-income countries to be able to make a rapid clean energy transition while closing the huge energy poverty gap for millions of people without access to modern forms of energy. It is also essential for these countries’ climate adaptation needs and for addressing their loss and damage from extreme climate impacts. UCS is urging the United States and other rich countries, together with additional contributors in a position to provide funding, to commit to a collective goal of $1 trillion annually starting in 2025. This could be met from a variety of sources—including pollution fees on fossil fuel companies, the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies, and wealth taxes on the richest people. The true need is in the trillions, and it’s only just that richer countries, which are most responsible for heat-trapping emissions, take the lead by paying their fair share. It’s time to also expand the contributor base to include oil-rich countries in the Middle East, Singapore and China, among others. This funding must come primarily in the form of grants or very low-interest loans to avoid exacerbating the debt burden in lower-income nations. Reforming the international multilateral lending architecture to be fairer and more aligned with climate and sustainable development objectives is also critical.
   
2. A strong signal that nations will submit more ambitious emission reduction commitments (aka nationally determined contributions, or NDCs) by February 2025. Numerous scientific reports (see below) show that nations are falling far short of what is needed to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. The next round of NDCs is due by February, and it will be very important for major emitting nations—including the U.S., EU member states, and China—to significantly ratchet up their targets. UCS is advocating for the US to commit to cutting its emissions at least 70% below 2005 levels by 2035, a level that can be met if we implement additional strong policies (beyond the Inflation Reduction Act and other existing federal and state policies) to accelerate the deployment of renewable energy and the phase out of fossil fuels. Cutting emissions across all sectors and all heat-trapping gases is crucial. Unfortunately, we are currently not even on track to meet our 2030 goal of cutting emissions by 50-52% below 2005 levels, and the choices made by the next administration will make a big difference in our chances of getting there.
   
3. An agreement to adequately resource the UN Loss and Damage Fund and quickly disburse funds to frontline communities. Last year on the opening day of COP28, nations agreed to launch the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, a hard-won historic achievement, but one that came with paltry initial pledges. Since then, the World Bank has taken on the role of hosting the fund and serving as its trustee on an interim basis for four years. Now, what’s desperately needed are new funding commitments from countries to help meet the significant and growing needs as the climate crisis worsens. As just one example, earlier this year, heavy rainfall and flooding across Sudan, Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon, worsened by climate change, killed more than 2,000 people and displaced millions. Climate vulnerable countries need funding to start flowing quickly. The Loss and Damage Fund should also include a community access window providing directly accessible small grants for communities, local civil society organizations, Indigenous Peoples and groups facing marginalization. At COP29, nations—including the United States—must make substantive new pledges to the Fund, and these commitments should also be reflected as part of the overall NCQG negotiations.   
   
4. Clear follow-through on last year’s agreement transition away from fossil fuels. At COP28, as part of the outcome of the first Global Stocktake, countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels including accelerating action in this critical decade, as well as to triple renewable energy capacity globally and doubling the global average annual rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030. Despite important gains in renewable energy, there is still more progress needed and fossil fuels continue to expand at odds with this agreement.
   
5. Progress on support for climate adaptation. Adaptation has received far less attention and funding than climate mitigation efforts, even as climate impacts rapidly worsen. A 2023 UN report estimates that the adaptation finance gap is about $ 194-366 billion per year. For many lower-income nations facing punishing climate impacts, this lack of support is increasingly untenable and undermining trust in the global climate regime. Under the NCQG agreement, climate finance for adaptation must be on par with mitigation. At COP28, nations reached agreement on a framework for a Global Goal on Adaptation, but there is much more needed to help implement this aspirational framework including funding, technical assistance, risk and vulnerability assessments, and clear metrics for progress.

Scientific reports sound the alarm (again)

Ahead of COP29, a series of recent scientific reports signal how far off track the world is in meeting its climate goals and the harsh toll of impacts on people—but also point the path to necessary actions that policymakers must secure. These include:

1. IEA’s World Energy Outlook—which shows an incredible growth in renewable energy—especially solar power—and yet a rapidly narrowing window to cut emissions fast enough to reach net zero by mid-century, and the risk of an up to 2.4°C increase in global average temperatures above pre-industrial levels.
   
2. UNEP’s 2024 Emissions Gap Report—which shows that nations’ collective emissions reductions are falling far short of what’s needed, putting the world at risk of a temperature increase of 2.6-3.1°C above pre-industrial levels, and underscoring how world leaders are failing their people.
   
3. The 2024 NDC Synthesis Report—which shows, as UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said, “current national climate plans fall miles short of what’s needed.” Even if fully implemented, they would put the world on track for a temperature increase of 2.1 to    2.8 °C this century.
   
4. WMO’s latest GHG Bulletin—which shows that heat-trapping emissions surged to record levels in 2023, with the atmospheric concentrations of CO2 reaching 420ppm, a level never previously experienced by humans.
   
5. The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate change—which highlights the stark impacts of climate extremes on human health and the economy, including that heat exposure has led to the loss of 512 billion potential labor hours in 2023, worth $835 billion in potential income losses. Countries ranked low and medium on the Human Development Index faced the worst impacts.

What happens at home matters for the world

My colleagues and I will be on the ground in Baku, closely tracking the climate negotiations and pushing for bold, fair outcomes. UCS, working together with a broad coalition of global civil society partners, participates at COP to help ensure that science and justice are represented in these negotiations and that policymakers hear loud and clear what people need them to do. Of course, what happens back home in countries, the policies that are implemented (or not implemented), will make all the difference in whether nations live up to global climate agreements.

UCS is also working hard at home in the United States, seeking greater ambition in clean energy deployment and a phaseout of fossil fuels, together with investments in climate resilience. And we’re advocating for the US to also live up to its global responsibilities to contribute a fair share of climate finance for low- and middle-income countries.

Unfortunately, climate policy spaces—both domestic and international—are increasingly under siege from fossil fuel interests trying to delay or block progress or secure loopholes that would allow them to continue their business-as-usual practices, expanding fossil fuel production and raking in profits while the climate crisis worsens. Policymakers and courts must hold them to account and dismantle their hold over our energy choices and our climate future. Their influence at COP must also be thwarted.

The next couple of weeks in Baku will undoubtedly be intense. We’ll share more as the negotiations unfold, so please stay tuned.

The housing affordability crisis in the United States is particularly hard for renters. Nearly half of American renters—and over 56% of Black renter households—spend more than 30% of their income in rent. And throughout the country, our longstanding housing shortage and affordability crisis are coming into closer and closer contact with the climate crisis. The United States is short 7.3 million affordable rental homes for those with the lowest incomes—and this summer’s extreme weather and climate disasters have damaged or destroyed many affordable rental units, making them unavailable. The road ahead for all communities affected by fires, floods, and hurricanes this Danger Season is long.

Reducing the harm of eviction post-disaster

In the days and weeks after a disaster, the priority for all levels of government should be meeting people’s immediate needs and stabilizing communities. Households with the lowest incomes are often faced with the risk of losing housing: not only because of physical damage, but also because their livelihoods may be disrupted, making it impossible to pay rent. Some rental agreements will be cancelled after disasters because of damage to units that renders them uninhabitable. Recognizing that many may have lost their livelihoods and belongings in the disaster, in addition to being physically and mentally traumatized, it’s essential for local governments to issue a moratorium on housing evictions post-disaster. The hearing of eviction claims filed just before or after a disaster should not be considered an essential function of the court system. Given that children—particularly Black children—are the single most at-risk group for eviction, reducing the risk and harm of eviction filings now can sow the seeds for a more equitable recovery in the years ahead. 

As response turns to longer-term recovery, landlords may see financial incentives to evict their tenants. After disasters, landlords may issue rent deals or lower income requirements in an effort to attract tenants to complexes that had to close for repairs. While this gets tenants in the door, eventually deals expire, disaster-associated housing assistance ends, and tenants can’t sustain an unaffordable rent, leading to eviction filings. An examination of eviction filings after Hurricane Harvey found that older, more affordable complexes with a history of flooding were the sites of increased eviction filings. Second, as was observed after the 2023 Maui wildfire, as disasters take units offline, landlords may see an opportunity to evict existing tenants and charge new renters higher rates. 

Aside from immediate housing instability and public health impacts, evictions can affect renters for years to come, hurting their credit and limiting future housing opportunities by placing them on tenant blacklists. 

Every state hit by disaster has the ability to request assistance from the federal government and enact its own emergency plan. As part of their emergency powers, governors may issue temporary moratoriums on evictions, as was done early in the COVID19 pandemic, and as many are urging North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper to do in the wake of Hurricane Helene. When hearings resume, courts must resist the urge to hold “rocket dockets”—hearing a high volume of eviction cases in a short period of time—and uphold their obligation to due process, allowing claims to be raised and evidence to be presented.

Renters disproportionately denied emergency aid and undercounted in long-term recovery

After a disaster, renters and homeowners alike are encouraged to submit applications to the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) for assistance to address what the federal government calls “unmet needs.” Unmet needs are disaster impacts that survivors aren’t able to address on their own, and are particularly challenging for those with the lowest incomes. Renters are more likely to be denied FEMA assistance than homeowners: according to FEMA’s own analysis of its almost five million aid applications from 2014-2018, poor renters were 23% less likely to receive assistance than wealthier homeowner applicants.

Renters and advocates in climate frontline states like Texas and New Jersey have been raising this issue in courts for over a decade. While FEMA has adopted a proposed rule to simplify the application process and reduce barriers to aid, it has yet to adopt changes that explicitly address the concerns of renters. 

The harm caused by FEMA denials can reverberate for years. Data from successful FEMA applications are used by state and local governments to inform long-term recovery, including the development of new housing.

As recovery from this Danger Season’s disasters continues, local, federal, and state governments must design their response with renters in mind if they want to build long-term resilience and more equitable futures for millions of Americans. We must address the affordable housing crisis for renters through specific policies and investments to encourage building more rental units for the lowest-income families, and ensuring that they are both built to robust standards and located in areas that are more climate-resilient.

We also need a much more proactive, well-funded approach to climate resilience across the nation that goes well beyond post-disaster response and recovery. And we’ve got to make steep cuts in global heat-trapping emissions to limit how much worse fossil-fueled climate disasters get.

The nation is grappling with yet another year of climate change-fueled disasters with billion-dollar price tags, from the extreme heat and wildfires out west and back-to-back hurricanes. At this moment, the last thing federal, state and local governments need is to divert precious resources to debunk baseless conspiracy theories and disinformation. Regrettably, this is where we find ourselves. President Biden, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and state and local government representatives have been busy trying to communicate the truth about the response and recovery efforts related to Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. Due to the extent of the baseless rumors, FEMA posted a “Hurricane Rumor Response” webpage which helps to nullify the disinformation and provide valuable information.

To help make sense of disaster assistance and FEMA’s role, I provide answers to six questions to help clarify the federal disaster recovery process.

1. What happens when a disaster hits?

The process of how disasters are declared and what happens once they are, may be a bit mysterious but briefly here are a few things to know. The President can issue an emergency declaration or major disaster declaration for a range of disasters, for example climate change-related disasters like Hurricane Milton and Helene and the wildfires in Maui, natural hazards like earthquakes and other incidents like the Baltimore bridge collapse and major societal and public health disruptions like the Covid-19 pandemic. The Stafford Act (officially, the “Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act”) is the law that gives the President the authority to provide disaster response, recovery and preparedness assistance to state, local, tribal, or territorial (SLTT) governments.

An emergency is defined as:

“any occasion or instance for which, in the determination of the President, Federal assistance is needed to supplement State and local efforts and  capabilities to save lives and to protect property and public health and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe in any part of the United States”.

A major disaster is defined as:

‘‘any natural catastrophe (including any hurricane, tornado, storm, high water, wind driven water, tidal wave, tsunami, earthquake, volcanic eruption, landslide, mudslide, snowstorm, or drought), or, regardless of cause, any fire, flood, or explosion, in any part of the United States, which in the determination of the President causes damage of sufficient severity and magnitude to warrant major disaster assistance under this Act to supplement the  efforts and available resources of States, local governments, and disaster relief organizations in alleviating the damage, loss, hardship, or suffering caused thereby.”

The request for a major disaster declaration comes from the Governor of the state that’s been impacted and signals to the President that the impact is beyond the means of the state’s ability to manage (the process for an emergency declaration is similar):

“(a) In General – All requests for a declaration by the President that a major disaster exists shall be made by the Governor of the affected State. Such a request shall be based on a finding that the disaster is of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the State and the affected local governments and that Federal assistance is necessary.” “Based on the request of a Governor under this section, the President may declare under this Act that a major disaster or emergency exists.” [see Sec. 401. Procedure for Declaration (42 U.S.C. 5170)].

Once the President provides the declaration, authorities are delegated to FEMA and FEMA will utilize the Disaster Relief Fund (DRF) to release federal assistance to the SLTT governments in need.

2. What is the Disaster Relief Fund?

FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund (DRF) is the federal government’s primary source of funding for disaster response, recovery and preparedness. Congress provides appropriations annually to the fund and often provides supplemental funding when disasters mount and costs begin to drain the available funds. The fund primarily supports major disaster needs for FEMA’s direct disaster programs and a small portion is dedicated to support FEMA’s readiness activities.

FEMA’s direct disaster programs include public assistance (PA), individual assistance (IA) and the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP). Briefly, PA provides funds for large projects like repairing critical infrastructure and debris removal. IA is a source of funding for individuals and households. Individuals can receive immediate assistance with a one-time $750 cash payment for emergency supplies. An individual or family can also receive additional funds under IA by registering with FEMA to help pay for repairs to homes that have been damaged by storms, personal property replacement and for temporary housing. The HMGP is a pot of funding to help reduce future losses through preparedness activities. A major disaster declaration makes all three disaster programs available to impacted communities while an emergency declaration releases both public and individual assistance programs.

The Stafford Act requires SLTT governments to share the disaster relief responsibility by covering 25 percent of the cost. FEMA provides the remaining 75 percent. If the disaster is particularly devastating, the President may lower or waive the cost share altogether.

After much public advocacy to reduce future impacts and invest in preparedness, in 2018 Congress passed critical legislation that established the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities “BRIC” grant program to allow the President to set aside 6 percent of the DRF specifically for pre-disaster, preparedness and resilience efforts. Under BRIC, FEMA prioritizes innovative, equitable and nature-based infrastructure projects. For example, communities can use funds to  increase energy resilience while also reducing emissions by advancing energy efficiency and microgrids, for example. As one of the FEMA programs under Justice40, FEMA ensures a minimum of 40 percent of the benefits are targeted to historically disadvantaged communities. FEMA also prioritizes funds for other critical resilience activities that are often underprioritized such as implementing building codes and conserving and restoring wetlands and dunes.

3. Is FEMA the sole federal agency available for disaster response and recovery?

FEMA has the lead authority for disaster response and recovery (under the Stafford and the Homeland Security Acts). The Presidential Policy Directive on National Preparedness provided a coordinated “whole of government” disaster assistance approach that includes thirty federal agencies. Other federal agencies provide rebuilding and longer-term recovery support under their own authority and Congressional appropriations or FEMA’s “mission assignments” in which it will reimburse agencies for specific efforts.

For example, the US Army Corps of Engineers (the “Corps”) has its own authority under the Flood Control Act and Coastal Emergencies law to provide disaster preparedness services to reduce the amount of damage caused by an impending disaster. After hurricanes or other disasters, the Corps will often provide emergency power, critical infrastructure inspections and debris management under its own authority. The Corps also fulfills FEMA’s Operation Blue Roof mission assignment to help owners with temporary roof repairs.  

Many of the other critical federal programs that individuals and communities rely on after a disaster are dependent upon Congressional supplemental funding. For example, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Community Development Block Grant – Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) grant program provides flexible funds to disaster impacted areas, particularly low-income communities, to help people and neighborhoods rebuild after a disaster. The Small Business Administration (SBA) provides low-interest loans for disaster assistance to homeowners, businesses, non-governmental organizations and renters.

4. How is the Disaster Relief Fund funded and what happens when it runs low?

Congress appropriates funding annually to the Disaster Relief Fund (DRF). Unfortunately, the DRF  typically runs low before September 30th, the end of the Fiscal Year (FY) even though FEMA (as mandated by Congress) provides monthly DRF status reports and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) provides seasonal outlooks, such as the Atlantic hurricane season that predicted an above-normal 2024 Atlantic hurricane season. Budgeting sufficient funds to the DRF is complicated by the fact that the federal government’s fiscal year ends right in the middle of Danger Season (the months from May to November when we expect an increase in climate change-related events) and because FEMA estimates the DRF budget based on the past ten years rather than proactively estimating future funding needs based on future climate change and development projections. It’s perhaps not surprising then that Congress has provided the majority of DRF funding through the often last minute, politically fraught supplemental appropriations.

During these times, the FEMA administrator is sometimes forced to place the DRF under Immediate Needs Funding (INF) restrictions, which is a last-resort measure that delays distributing obligated funds to communities for large recovery projects and instead applies these funds for immediate disaster response, lifesaving and life-sustaining efforts. According to FEMA, since 2001, the agency has implemented INF restrictions 9 times, including last year. This puts unnecessary stress on FEMA, which is already spread thin particularly during Danger Season. Congress must do better to provide FEMA with sufficient funding to respond to risk in a timely and equitable way before Danger Season starts (More on this in question 6).

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/state-summary/US 5. Are disaster costs rising and if so, why?

Yes. Unfortunately, disaster costs have been steadily rising.

Already this year, the President has declared 117 disasters, 87 of which have been major disaster declarations (compared with 71 major disaster declarations in 2023, 47 in 2022, 58 in 2021 and 104 in 2020). Before the devastating Hurricanes Helene and Milton, NOAA estimated (as of September 10, 2024), that in 2024 there were 20 separate billion-dollar climate change-related disasters that collectively contributed to the deaths of 149 people with a total economic cost of $53 billion.

Sadly, we know that the lives lost and costs of damages for this year are only going to increase as states begin to tally damages from Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton and as we wait out the rest of the Atlantic hurricane and wildfire seasons. Last year, we experienced 28 separate billion-dollar disasters which resulted in over $93 billion in damages.

While 2022 had fewer billion-dollar disasters (18), it was a record-setting year for the cost of damages with a total cost of $165 billion. That made 2022 the 3rd most costly year on record behind 2017, when Hurricane Harvey landed as a Category 4 storm, and 2005 when Hurricane Katrina landed as a Category 5 storm.

We’re seeing how climate change is reaching more and more communities leaving no one untouched and having lasting impacts, especially on low-income communities, communities of color, and Tribal communities, due to both their proximity to hazard-prone areas and lack of adequate infrastructure and/or disaster management resources.

In brief, the unfortunate recipe for these increasing costs is threefold:

1. We’re putting more and more buildings and people in harm’s way
2. These buildings and assets aren’t built to modern building codes, and some infrastructure was built 50 to 100 years ago, and
3. Climate change amped by fossil fuels is increasing the likelihood of intense hurricanes, heaviest rainfall events and extreme wildfires, for example

Climate change is also increasing the chances of multiple climate hazards occurring simultaneously or consecutively across the US—meaning there’s less time between disasters. According to Climate Central, over the last 5 years there were 16 days on average between US billion-dollar disasters, compared with 82 days in the 1980s. In 2023, that number shrank to just 12 days between disasters. This is significant, as having less time between disasters has major implications the amount of time and resources federal and SLTT governments have available to respond, recover quickly, and prepare for future risks.

6. What can we do?

First and foremost, we must reduce heat-trapping emissions. The sobering reality is that people everywhere are feeling the impacts of a warming world. We need all levels of government and the private sector to turn the dial down on global warming by rapidly reducing heat trapping emissions. The latest science shows that, globally, heat-trapping emissions must be cut by about half by 2030 and reach net zero no later than 2050 to have a fighting chance of keeping the 1.5C goal alive.

Second, while it’s not likely that Congress will come up with a new way to respond to disasters in the near term, there’s a lot Congress can and must do in the near-term. As Colt Hagmaier, FEMA’s Assistant Administrator of the Recovery Directorate within the Office of Response and Recovery (ORR) said: “Restoring hope doesn’t happen by chance but by action and individual commitment to humanity.”  Congress should:

1. Anticipate the likely need for more funding ahead of Danger Season and be ready to provide supplemental appropriations when the FEMA administrator requests additional funding for the DRF. Disasters affect all states—red and blue—so this should not devolve into a lengthy partisan fight while people on the frontlines of disasters wait and suffer,
2. Provide supplemental funding and permanently authorize HUDs CDBG-DR program, which is often the only lifeline for low-income families and communities post-disaster.
3. Work in a bipartisan fashion to reform the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) by, at a minimum, modernizing and funding flood risk mapping, incentivizing flood risk disclosure, providing innovation and resources for flood risk mitigation and provide FEMA with the authority to offer affordable flood insurance to those who can least afford it.

Third, while FEMA can be commended for advancing reforms to its disaster assistance grant programs, there’s no shortage of additional actions the agency can take. FEMA should:

1. Adjust their funding requests based on future climate projections instead of averaging the costs over the past ten years.
2. Utilize its authority to include advisory layers on flood maps based on future climate change projections.
3. Modernize the NFIP minimum floodplain management standards which haven’t been updated in 50 years.
4.  Systematically increase and broaden its staff to ensure the agency has the expertise it needs to improve upon Justice40 and other equity goals in addition to being able to manage the increasing complexities that come with the climate crisis.

We need bipartisan action

My heart is heavy as I think of the communities hit by these record-breaking disasters because we know that recovery from a devastating hurricane, wildfire or any disaster is long and arduous.

While UCS will continue to push for reforms to current federal policies and advocate for new federal disaster recovery policies, the good news is that we’re not alone in these efforts. For example, at the national level, the Disaster Housing Recovery Coalition (DHRC) under the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) brings together 850 national, state, and local organizations to help disaster-impacted communities recover.

We have the solutions; we urgently need bipartisan actions at all levels of government to help give people the change they want to see.

It is mind-bog-gling, syllable pun intended, that scientists still do not know how many wetlands lost protection in last year’s crippling of the Clean Water Act by the Supreme Court. A new peer-reviewed study in the journal Science said the range of possible protection loss is between a fifth of nontidal wetlands to nearly all of them.

Lead author Adam Gold, a watershed researcher for the Environmental Defense Fund, said the wild uncertainty is because the court arbitrarily created a new standard for federal protection divorced from the science of how wetlands support larger streams, rivers, lakes and the ocean.

The Sackett case involved an Idaho couple who sued after the Environmental Protection Agency stopped their backfilling of a lot near a lake to build a home. The court was unanimous in saying that in the case of that couple, the EPA overstepped its authority. But a 5-4 conservative majority, led by Justice Samuel Alito, a long-time skeptic of both EPA authority, and what constitutes any kind of pollution, went a fateful extra step.

Alito famously said that carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning, a key contributor to global warming, is not a pollutant. That is despite studies tying carbon dioxide to skyrocketing rates of childhood asthma. A 2011 study in the journal Asthma and Allergy, said the parallel increase of global asthma and carbon dioxide emissions is “remarkable.” There is evidence linking elevated carbon dioxide to longer pollen seasons.

On wetlands, Alito’s razor-thin majority instituted an “eyeball” test. The court said a wetland merits federal protection only if it is “indistinguishable” from larger waters, evidenced by a “continuous surface connection” to them.

An American Bittern on the Outer Banks in North Carolina, where wetlands are under constant threat of development. Photo by Derrick Z. Jackson. Court Rejects Decades of Science

The ruling was hailed by industrial and agricultural polluters and developers. Groups that filed briefs against the EPA’s authority included the US Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, and the National Association of Home Builders. The Chamber of Commerce said the ruling put an end to a  “tortured definition” of water protection that “threatened to strangle projects with years of red tape.”

But the court’s tortured institution of a visual test for continuous water in wetlands rejected decades of federal wetlands science, much of it conducted under the administrations of Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama.

Federal reports found that all types and sizes of nontidal wetlands, that is places without visible, continuous surface connections, still serve critical downstream ecosystem functions. Some are seemingly far from large bodies of water. In others, water flows into underground aquifers. In others still, the soil is saturated but surface water is visible for only part of the year.

And then there are ephemeral streams that run only during rainfalls. A 2008 EPA report published during the Bush administration said, “Given their importance and vast extent, it is concluded that an individual ephemeral or intermittent stream segment should not be examined in isolation.”

Years later, a 2015 EPA report published during the Obama administration said, “All tributary streams, including perennial, intermittent, and ephemeral streams are physically, chemically, and biologically connected to downstream rivers.” It emphasized there is “ample evidence that many wetlands and open waters located outside of riparian areas and floodplains, even when lacking surface water connections, provide physical, chemical, and biological functions that could affect the integrity of downstream waters. Some potential benefits of these wetlands are due to their isolation rather than their connectivity.”

That left Gold with the unenviable task of trying to fit a square peg of data into the round hole of nonsense—that one must see water in a wetland for it to be wet enough to be a wetland. Basically, he found out that any future permitting disputes between developers and federal agencies, especially for inland, nontidal wetlands, will likely depend on legal decisions of “wetness.”

For instance, if just geographically isolated wetlands were removed from protection, that would amount to 19% of the nation’s 90 million acres of nontidal wetlands. If a court ruled that a wetland must be flooded for more than a month during the growing season, that would knock out 61% of wetlands from federal protection. If a wetland needed to be semi-permanently flooded, that would remove 91% of acreage from protection.

“I was surprised by the uncertainty,” Gold said in a telephone interview. “A reason it is so hard to determine is because the language used by the court is neither scientific nor objective.” He said the high court’s insistence on a ‘continuous surface connection’ as a condition for protection “are subjective words that are not defined by anything related to how wetlands work. If we start parsing out wetland protection by how ‘wet’ they are, it is highly unclear where this all ends up.”

Wetlands Are Environmental Heavyweights

What we do know is that wetlands are an underrated champion of the environment, the economy and climate mitigation, despite representing less than 6% of land in the contiguous United States. Wetlands are the nurseries for commercial and recreational fisheries, which generated $321 billion and supported 2.3 million jobs in 2022, according to a report last year by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Along with anglers, wetlands are the critical backdrop for hunters and wildlife watchers, who spent $400 billion in 2022, according to a report last year by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Shorebirds enjoy feasting in the muck of the Hackensack Meadowlands. Wetland habitat is critical for shorebirds, which are experiencing some of the fastest declines in the avian world. Photo by Derrick Z. Jackson.

Yet, the nation is losing ground on wetlands. A report this year by the US Fish and Wildlife Service found between 2009 and 2019, the nation lost enough acreage of forest and scrub wetlands to equal the size of Rhode Island. That cannot happen when so many studies also show how wetlands are a carbon sink.

Globally, wetlands such as peatlands, mangroves, salt marshes, and seagrass meadows cover 6% of the world’s surface. But they sequester a third of the world’s organic ecosystem carbon. A 2022 study in the journal Science said the function of wetlands as a climate workhorse makes preserving them a matter of “utmost importance.”

Losing so many acres of wetlands also cannot happen when the EPA says wetlands are “biological supermarkets” for insects and small fish that are feasted on by larger creatures: fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals. The agency says wetlands are the sole home for more than a third of the nation’s threatened and endangered species. Nearly half of threatened and endangered species dine in, or seek shelter in, wetlands during their lives.

It also cannot happen when wetlands literally save property and lives by being buffers against winds and storm surges. A 2020 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that wetland losses in Florida between 1996 and 2016 resulted in an additional $430 million in property damage from Hurricane Irma in 2017.

A 2021 study in the journal Global Environmental Change found that globally coastal wetlands save $447 billion in damages and 4,620 lives a year. A 2019 study in the journal of Marine and Freshwater Research found that the world’s wetlands deliver $47 trillion a year in ecosystem services. The prime ones are erosion and flood control, waste treatment, water purification, recreation, and tourism.

The Hackensack Meadowlands in New Jersey, from which New York City skyscrapers are visible. The buffering effect of the wetlands spared many communities in the area the worst of flooding from Superstorm Sandy in 2012. Photo by Derrick Z. Jackson. States Offer Unwieldy Checkerboard of Wetland Protections

None of those wetland benefits registered with the Supreme Court majority that now demands an “eyeball” test of surface water to determine if a wetland is a wetland. Such a test leaves protection to the mercy of the states.

An analysis by the Environmental Law Institute found that 24 states do not independently protect their wetlands, relying completely on the Clean Water Act. The map of the states with no protections and those with their own protections closely mirrors the red and blue maps of presidential elections. Most states in the South and the Great Plains have no protections, thus leaving their wetlands at the highest risk of destruction (though notable exceptions include the Everglades wetlands in Florida and prairie pothole wetlands in Minnesota).

None of that makes sense when everyone (except perhaps five members of the Supreme Court) knows that pollution from one state can easily travel downstream into another state. Even Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who this year voted in a 5-4 majority to block EPA rules to limit power plant and industrial pollution from crossing state lines, joined the court’s three liberals, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in saying the new test of a “continuous surface connection” raises all kinds of questions.

“How does that test apply to the many kinds of wetlands that typically do not have a surface water connection to a covered water year-round—for example, wetlands and waters that are connected for much of the year but not in the summer when they dry up to some extent?” Kavanaugh wrote. “How ‘temporary’ do ‘interruptions in surface connection’ have to be for wetlands to still be covered?

“How does the test operate in areas where storms, floods, and erosion frequently shift or breach natural river berms? Can a continuous surface connection be established by a ditch, swale, pipe, or culvert?”

That is why Adam Gold found it so hard to come up with a firm number of how many wetlands have lost protection. “No one likes uncertainty,” Gold said. “Not the regulators, not the permit applicants, not the scientists…. It is very clear what a wetland is. But now it’s unclear what protections they have.”  

That is because for the majority of the Supreme Court, a wetland where the water is out of sight is a wetland out of mind.

In August, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued its updated forecast for the 2024 hurricane season. It was to be above normal in every regard: more named storms and stronger hurricanes than usual. One of the main reasons for this forecast? Significantly warmer than usual surface temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean, which come largely as a result of human-caused climate change. 

Despite a quiet peak hurricane season in August and early September, 2024 will be a year to remember. In late June, Beryl became the earliest Category 5 hurricane in recorded Atlantic history. And in just the last two weeks, we’ve observed two powerful hurricanes develop in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico: Hurricanes Helene and Milton.  

Helene made landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida as a Category 4 hurricane and brought torrential rain and wind to North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Virginia. Less than two weeks later, Milton made landfall near Sarasota, Florida as a Category 3 hurricane, knocking out power to nearly 3.5 million people throughout the central part of the state. Fossil fuel-caused climate change was a driving force in these storms, and despite the nearly perfect forecasts, we are still not ready for the effects of climate change. 

More hurricanes are rapidly intensifying because of climate change—Milton included

Both Helene and Milton underwent periods of rapid intensification, defined as a strengthening in winds of at least 35 mph in a 24-hour period, which were fueled by ocean temperatures nearly 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal for this time of year.  

The footprint of global warming caused by heat-trapping pollutants is undeniable: according to the Climate Shift Index (CSI) from Climate Central, the warmer surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were made 400-800 times more likely due to climate change. In fact, Helene and Milton’s rapid intensification rates are part of a larger trend in the Atlantic Ocean, where rapidly strengthening hurricanes have increased significantly since 1982 as a result of warmer waters. 

In particular, Hurricane Milton was a storm for the record books. The hurricane went from a Category 1 hurricane to a Category 5 hurricane in just 18 hours, making it the second fastest strengthening storm in Atlantic recorded history after Hurricane Wilma in 2005. After its jaw-dropping rapid intensification, Milton became the fourth most intense hurricane in the Atlantic basin since 1979, and the second most intense hurricane this late in the calendar year (for my fellow weather weenies, we remember Wilma’s record intensity in late October of 2005 like it was yesterday). 

Why are the oceans so warm and fueling this rapid intensification? The oceans have absorbed 93 percent of the extra heat trapped by increased heat-trapping emissions in the atmosphere. The world’s burning of fossil fuels has raised global average temperatures significantly, with 2024 on track to be the warmest year on record. Not only were the ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean near record levels, but the ocean heat content in the Gulf of Mexico—the fuel for hurricanes to rapidly intensify—was at a record high. 

As the world continues to warm, hurricanes will become more intense; in fact, a rapid attribution analysis demonstrated that storms like Milton will become 40 percent more common due to human-caused climate change. Hurricanes Milton and Helene are merely a sign of the devastation that will become more common. 

Global warming led to Helene’s extreme rainfall

After undergoing rapid intensification, Hurricane Helene made landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida as a Category 4 hurricane on the evening of September 26. Helene was the 8th Category 4 or 5 hurricane to make landfall in the US since 2017, which is the same number of Category 4 and 5 landfalls over the previous 57 years!  

While Floridian communities were affected by the strong winds and storm surge from Helene, Southern Appalachia—a region far inland from the coast—received record amounts of rainfall, which led to historic landslides and flooding not seen since the Great Flood of 1916. While rescue efforts are ongoing, nearly 230 deaths have been attributed to Helene, making it one of the deadliest US landfalling hurricanes since 1950.  

According to rapid climate attribution studies, human-caused climate change contributed significantly to Helene’s extreme rainfall. One study found that global warming may have caused 50 percent of the rainfall observed during Hurricane Helene. How is this possible? 

 Think of the atmosphere like a sponge: as the world warms due to additional heat-trapping emissions in the atmosphere, the sponge will become bigger, allowing the sponge (atmosphere) to hold more water and carry it from the oceans further inland. 

Helene’s rainfall is a sign of what is to come in the future as the planet continues to warm. In the meantime, my colleague, Alicia Race, wrote an excellent blogpost on how you can help the ongoing Helene relief efforts. 

Humanity is not prepared for the climate we’ve created 

Milton and Helene were historic and unprecedented hurricanes. They both brought destruction and death to communities here in the US and were made worse by the effects of climate change. Unfortunately, these types of storms will become more common in the future as the planet continues to warm. 

A silver lining here is that weather forecasting models, which are used to predict the intensity and path of hurricanes, nailed the forecasts for Helene and Milton. In fact, the National Hurricane Center’s (NHC) first forecast for Milton showed it making landfall only 12 miles north of where Milton made landfall four days later! 

On one the hand, it’s a good thing that the NHC, with its suite of weather models, could predict these unprecedented storms fueled by climate change, and partly because of this, people in coastal areas were asked to evacuate in advance. But despite the ample warning, we still lost many lives to these storms, especially in mountainous, inland areas with spotty Internet and cell services as well as limited evacuation infrastructure and experience with hurricanes.  

In a world with global warming, despite forecasts being nearly perfect, lives are being lost because we’re experiencing storms of unprecedented severity. How was a family in western North Carolina supposed to respond to a rainfall forecast of 15 inches of rain? Were they expected to know a landslide or flood would affect their home? The science is sound, but the nearly perfect forecasts can only do so much. My colleague Rachel Cleetus, Policy Director of the Climate and Energy Program, has this to say on the implications of stronger storms in the future:  

“Continuing to invest in NOAA’s science, data, and tools is crucial. And even with the best warning systems, we know there are many socioeconomic barriers to people being able to get to safety and recover from the devastation of storms like Helene and Milton. Not having enough money for a hotel room or gas for your car; being worried about losing your job if you miss work; having a disability or a health condition that makes it difficult to evacuate; having to flee with young children—these kinds of factors often force people to make tough decisions about whether they can leave or are trapped in place. And after disasters, those with the least resources—who may not have insurance or may be living in flood-prone areas in mobile homes, for example—often have the most difficult time getting back on their feet. Addressing these challenges in an equitable way is crucial if we are to limit the human toll of extreme climate disasters.” 

The hurricane forecasting models are sound. Now lawmakers must catch up and pass policies that reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and drastically cut heat-trapping emissions.