United States politicians, even Democratic ones, no longer mention climate change, according to a recent report by Grist. Evidently, after their 2024 election losses Democrats concluded that global warming isn’t a winning issue. Their calculus is somewhat confirmed by a recent Pew poll that ranks climate change only ninth among Americans’ top concerns.

Meanwhile, hard-won US national climate data, scenarios, and analyses are quietly disappearing from official government websites. A prime example is the Fifth National Climate Assessment, a county-by-county description of likely risks from 1.5°C and 2°C of warming over preindustrial levels. This preeminent report on climate impacts and responses is a congressionally mandated, interagency effort to provide “the scientific foundation to support informed decision-making across the nation.” A clone of the government website is being hosted by Climate.us; the Trump administration has taken down the official site, which was here.

Those seeking to downplay climate change did a victory dance in May, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced it was retiring its RCP8.5 scenario—the worst-case trajectory in which humanity continues increasing its greenhouse gas emissions through the end of the century. We at Post Carbon Institute have been saying for a decade or more that this scenario was unrealistic and should be dropped, since it assumes the burning of more fossil fuels than the Earth can reasonably supply. However, axing RCP8.5 at this politically fraught moment has simply fed a predictable gloat-fest on the part of climate deniers. For example, the New York Post editorial board proclaimed that the revision showed climate warnings had done “untold damage” to the public, the economy, and “the average man’s pocketbook.” Fox News host Sean Hannity asserted that a “top UN-backed climate change panel is now waving the white flag of surrender” and “quietly admitting that the Earth will not in fact be destroyed by climate change.” President Donald Trump claimed on Truth Social that the United Nations had just admitted that its own climate projections were “WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” and called global warming research a “Green New Scam.”

Meanwhile, back in the real world, it’s becoming clearer that Earth is breaching the 1.5°C limit to which world leaders pledged, in 2015, to limit global warming in their effort to avert a catastrophic future. Earth first exceeded the 1.5°C threshold in 2024; however, in 2025, the global average surface temperature cooled to 1.44°C above baseline (2025 was still the third-warmest year on record). The 1.5°C limit is defined in the Paris Agreement by a multiyear average temperature; by that standard, many climate scientists expect the limit to be breached before 2030. Overall, Earth’s march toward 2°C of warming is accelerating. The question climate experts are now asking: Will it still be possible to keep warming below 3°C by the end of the century? The difference in impacts between 1.5, 2, and 3°C would be monumental: at 3°C, 3.25 billion people would be exposed to deadly heat-humidity conditions at least annually.

The US has always been a conflicted if not crazy country (after all, it tolerated slavery for decades and elected Donald Trump as president twice). Maybe now, with the nation at age 250, the extra CO2 that it’s breathing is starting to erode whatever remains of its collective rationality.

As I write this, Europe is emerging from an unprecedented heatwave in which over 1,300 people died from causes linked to high temperatures. Europe is the fastest-warming continent, heating at twice........

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