As Iran war spreads, ICE rampages, jobs plunge and Trump-Epstein files hide, climate crisis doesn't pause

As has been true every day for the totality of Trump 2.0, we’re victims of a political lahar, a seemingly unstoppable deluge of the regime’s actions and inactions carving holes in the economy and whatever remains of the Constitution. Even more than usual has been going on since last Friday to catch everyone’s attention.

There’s been the continuing illegal and misbegotten war on Iran and the White House-generated lies about who killed scores of children and others with a Tomahawk missile at a school. Plus the oil price roller coaster since the war itself got rolling a week earlier. There’s been ICE’s continued terrorizing of American communities along with the firing of one anti-immigrant fanatic and hiring of a replacement anti-immigrant fanatic to run it and all of Homeland Security. Then came the government’s release of its monthly report showing 92,000 jobs were lost in February and that a lot fewer jobs had been gained in January and December than previously estimated. The stock market is giving investors the jitters. And, of course, there’s the continuing coverup of what should be called the pedofiles. 

So it was easy for U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright (and all but a handful of media) to ignore a new study published in AGU’s Geophysical Research Letters. The headline tells it all: 

Global Warming Has Accelerated Significantly

The study confirms the widely but not universally held view among climatologists recently that climate change is accelerating. The authors — Grant Foster and Stefan Rahmsdorf — noted that in the 45 years since 1970, average temperature rise per decade has been 0.2C (0.36°F). Since 2015, they say, it’s been 0.35°C (0.63°F). In the past The key unanswered question: Is this acceleration an anomaly or a trend? If the latter, instead of mid-century, it’s estimated we could permanently exceed a post-industrial temperature rise of 1.5°C (2.7°) by the end of decade. As in the next president’s first term.

Worse, although it’s far from a majority view in the field, some climatologists think exceeding 2°C (3.6°F)  will happen by 2050 or even earlier. Staying below 2°C was supposed to be the “realistic” goal under the Paris Climate Agreement rather than the 1.5°C “aspirational” goal that almost everybody hoped for but almost nobody thought could be made to happen politically. The world has breached or nearly breached the 1.5°C threshold the past three years. Technically, the 1.5°C target is defined as a 20-year average, not just one or a couple of years. But the repeated, consecutive annual breaches are widely viewed as an early warning that the long-term threshold is rapidly approaching.

Fred Pearce at Yale Environment 360, wrote in January:

The 1.5-degree target was set at the Paris climate conference a decade ago, at the insistence of more vulnerable nations, to forestall severe weather impacts and potential runaway warming that could lead to exceeding irreversible planetary tipping points. But climate scientists say that 10 years of weak action since mean that nothing can now stop the target being breached. “Climate policy has failed. The 2015 landmark Paris agreement is dead,” says atmospheric chemist Robert Watson, a former chair of the U.N.’s arbiters of climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Meanwhile, a picture of what lies ahead is becoming clearer. In particular, there is a growing fear that climate change in the future won’t, as it has until now, happen gradually. It will happen suddenly, as formerly stable planetary systems transgress tipping points — thresholds beyond which things cannot be put back together again.

Another study published in Nature suggests global sea levels may be 8-12 inches higher than many coastal hazard assessments have assumed, putting hundreds of millions more people at risk of flooding than was previously calculated. 

All 10 of the hottest years in recorded history have occurred since 2015. The past three years alone represent the warmest three-year period since modern measurements began.

James Hansen, the former head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the most influential climate scientists, has been called “alarmist” by professional science deniers since he first testified to Congress in 1988. He and his colleagues have persistently argued that warming is accelerating faster than many models predicted. In recent analyses he has said the Paris Agreement’s 2°C limit is effectively already unattainable, arguing that climate sensitivity and declining aerosol pollution are causing faster warming.

Three years ago, Hansen authored a paper asserting that short-term breaches of the 2°C threshold could happen by 2050. Another prominent climatologist, Michael E. Mann, said at the time he thought this unlikely.

Now Hansen is saying far more: “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change defined a scenario which gives a 50% chance to keep warming under 2°C — that scenario is now impossible. The 2°C target is dead, because the global energy use is rising, and it will continue to rise.” 

That’s not the mainstream view. Not yet, anyway. But ever more climatologists are leaning that direction. The data will soon show definitively whether acceleration is the new normal or an anomaly that will soon return to the slower rise in temperature of the old normal. 

Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather said the Hansen study is a useful contribution. “It’s important to emphasize that both of these issues — [pollution cuts] and climate sensitivity — are areas of deep scientific uncertainty,” he said. A study Hausfather himself co-authored last year also found global warming has accelerated, but put the rate slightly slower than the Foster-Rahmsdorf study, at 0.27°C a decade. “Either way, this represents a significant increase in the rate of warming,” said Hausfather. “[This] should be worrying as the world hurtles toward crossing 1.5°C later this decade.”

It obviously should be worrying. But as Kate Yoder at Grist writes, attention has been focused elsewhere:

Scientists are pretty sure that Earth is hotter than at any time in the last 125,000 years, but the news media is moving on, trying to keep on top of a fire hose of pressing news — from the daily chaos of the Trump administration to the breaking developments in the war on Iran. The shift in attention started during the COVID-19 pandemic and, despite a temporary rebound, has gathered pace in recent years: Since its peak in 2021, global news coverage of climate change has dropped 38 percent, according to data from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Media and Climate Change Observatory. [...]

Last year, the first of Trump’s second term, major broadcast networks in the U.S. cut their climate coverage 35 percent compared to the year before, according to a recent report by Media Matters, a watchdog organization. “The competition, the ‘flood the zone’ strategy from the administration, is making it very difficult for anything that’s not super urgent in this moment,” said Allison Fisher, director of the climate and energy program at the nonprofit.

The Foster-Rahmdorf study didn’t propel Wright to step up to the podium as he has before to decry the “climate alarmists” who he implies invented a non-existent “climate crisis.” Whether he truly believes that or not — who can tell with these mofos? — he’s publicly pushed the idea that extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a net benefit because it boosts plant growth. That’s the fossil fuel industry’s latest pathetic excuse to justify burning still more hydrocarbons. Biologists and other scientists don’t agree with Wright and the other purveyors of the carbon-emissions-are-a-blessing brigade. On the human front, the current level of burning already causes the premature deaths of at least 7-8 million people worldwide every year. And that’s before tallying the rising number of deaths from induced climate change.

Wright’s dismissive regard for scientists was reinforced with the clumsy work of the gang of five hired by his Department of Energy to “tell the truth” about climate change that thousands of scientists supposedly had distorted or hidden. After receiving a flood of complaints about errors, including several from scientists who said the authors had misinterpreted or misquoted their work, the 400-page report was withdrawn. 

It was, in fact, a sloppy piece of fossil-fuel propaganda, exactly what you’d expect, exactly what Wright expected and wanted, from a squad of veteran climate science rejectors. But while the report has been pulled, the aggressively pro-fossil fuels, anti-renewables policies remain. As a consequence, some $35 billion in renewables projects were lost in the first 10 months of Trump’s second term. 

Wright and other “energy dominance” muckety-mucks dismiss the burned towns, flooded neighborhoods, disrupted harvests, displaced communities, and sea-level rise. But they cannot ignore the economics. At The American Prospect last June, Ryan Cooper wrote Climate Change Will Bankrupt the Country:

Bloomberg Intelligence has the details in a new report estimating that climate disasters cost America $955 billion in the 12-month period ending May 1 this year, or about 3 percent of GDP. This mainly comes from skyrocketing home insurance premiums, which have doubled since 2017, as well as expensive weather disasters, like the one-two punch of Hurricanes Helene and Milton ($113 billion) and the Los Angeles fires ($65 billion).

Now, some caveats are in order. This is just one year in one country, and damages are surely not uniform across the globe. Additionally, much of the disaster response shows up as more spending that is included in GDP. But undoubtedly most of it must be counted as damage, as it involves spending to replace structures or infrastructure that otherwise would have gone to productive business, particularly in the context of a low-unemployment, high-interest-rate economy. As the Bloomberg analysis argues, disaster spending is “crowding out consumer discretionary spending elsewhere in the economy and putting pressure on local governments to prioritize disaster repair over other infrastructure projects.”

Risk analysts trained to anticipate catastrophic economic disruptions are increasingly describing climate change in the language of systemic threat. The 104-page World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2026 ranks environmental dangers among the most severe global risks facing humanity in the coming decade. Extreme weather, biodiversity collapse, ecosystem degradation, and water shortages dominate the list:

The impacts of environmental risks have worsened in intensity and frequency since the Global Risks Report was launched in 2006, as discussed in depth in Section 2.6: Looking back: 20 years of the Global Risks Report. Moreover, the outlook for environmental risks over the next decade is alarming — while all 33 risks in the GRPS are expected to worsen in severity (Figure E) from the two-year to the 10-year time horizon, environmental risks present the most significant deterioration. Extreme weather events are anticipated to become even more of a concern than they already are, with this risk being top ranked in the 10-year risk list for the second year running. Biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse ranks #2 over the 10-year horizon, with a significant deteriorationcompared to its two-year ranking.

These risks do not operate independently. They interact with food systems, migration patterns, supply chains, and geopolitical stability.

In a January report — Parasol Lost:Recovery plan needed Global risk management for human prosperity — researchers at the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries at the University of Exeter warn that climate change could produce the kind of cascading systemic failure that global financial markets experienced in 2008.

If climate sensitivity is higher than expected we have underestimated the rate of future warming, with catastrophic warming levels of over 2°C before 2050 now likely, unless we change course. These findings show that net zero carbon budgets will not limit temperatures to 1.5°C.

This is a classic model risk situation, with strong parallels to the global financial crisis, where financial models could not see the interconnected nature of the global financial system, leading to complacency and a failure to mitigate systemic risk. Emergency action was required to stabilise the system, which would have been unimaginable without the crisis. Following this, significant work took place to enhance financial services risk management practices. We have arrived at a similar ‘break glass’ moment for climate change. Emergency action is required to stabilise the climate system, and to implement equivalent risk management practices to those that protect financial stability. 

If the climate crisis were merely a technological challenge, the story might look very different. Over the past 15 years renewable energy technologies have advanced at astonishing speed. Solar and wind power have become the cheapest new sources of electricity in many parts of the world. Battery storage costs have fallen dramatically. Electric vehicles are beginning to reshape the global automobile market. 

China’s greenhouse gas emissions have been flat or barely rising for three years. India, for the first time saw a 2.6% drop in emissions in its power sector in 2025. Europe’s overall emissions dropped 0.8%. And although the Trump regime reduced year-over-year solar installations in 2025, more solar was added to the U.S. grid last year than from any other single source. 

However, U.S. emissions rose 2.4% last year. As long as the Trump team keeps ruining things, more emissions are going to be on the menu. And it’s not just the U.S. Retreat has also taken hold elsewhere as numerous European countries have watered down or delayed some of their climate goals because of financial matters, a number of right-wingers rising to power, and energy dislocations caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine. Almost no European country is on a trajectory to meet its 2030 emissions target. But Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Portugal are all fighting against the policy retreat. 

The gap between technological possibility and political reality is the central paradox of the climate crisis. The scientific evidence grows more disturbing with every passing year, yet global emissions continue to rise. Governments promise a green transition while simultaneously approving new oil and gas projects. Financial institutions issue climate commitments — or dump them altogether — even as they continue financing fossil-fuel expansion.

The result, as anyone who has followed the climate crisis is well aware, is a global economy attempting to manage two contradictory trajectories at once: a rapid build-out of clean energy amid continued growth of fossil-fuel infrastructure.

If this were just a matter of being patient until we reach the tipping point where clean energy and clean agriculture become dominant and then take over completely, urgency would not be so urgent. But it is. The acceleration of climate impacts needs to be met with accelerated climate policies. Although affordability, a misbegotten war, and a predatory grifter at the helm should be foremost in Democrats’ campaign focuses in the midterm elections, many candidates are looking to a Searchlight poll late last year for messaging advice:

 “Advocates and elected officials should understand that their messages are actively weakened by a focus on ‘climate’ over affordability and low energy prices, and that voters are looking for immediate help with rising costs rather than solutions to abstract problems,” Searchlight’s post about the polling said.

The results didn’t surprise Representative Sean Casten, an Illinois Democrat and longtime climate champion who’s been making the case that clean energy can lower electricity bills. Casten recently unveiled draft legislation called the Cheap Energy Agenda, along with Representative Mike Levin, a California Democrat.

“There’s no obvious electoral upside in being really smart on energy and climate policy,” Casten said. But he’s still talking about climate change all the time. “Polling doesn’t tell you what you talk about,” he said. “It tells you how you talk about it.”

The Foster-Rahmsdorf study is just the latest of many studies telling us to hurry up because the climate isn’t waiting.