At the United Nations in September, United States President Donald Trump declared “This ‘climate change,’ it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success. If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.”
Guess who the stupid one is and guess who is going to pay the price?
According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service of the European Union, 2024 was the hottest year on record. The previous hottest year was 2023. Meanwhile the World Meteorological Organization reports the average level of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere climbed by the highest amount ever between 2023 and 2024 because of the burning of fossil fuels.https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/01/09/climate/2024-heat-record-climate-goal.html
The Global Tipping Report 2025 published by the University of Exeter in Great Britain warns that “The world has entered a new reality. Global warming will soon exceed 1.5°C. This puts humanity in the danger zone where multiple climate tipping points pose catastrophic risks to billions of people. Already warm-water coral reefs are crossing their thermal tipping point and experiencing unprecedented dieback, threatening the livelihoods of hundreds of millions who depend on them. Polar ice sheets are approaching tipping points, committing the world to several metres of irreversible sea-level rise that will affect hundreds of millions.” The most vulnerable environments include warm-water coral reefs, small ocean islands, the Amazon Rainforest, low-lying coastal cities, Arctic region icecaps, and Northern Hemisphere permafrost.
To make challenges to Trump’s unsubstantiated claims more difficult, the Trump administration now has the United States no longer measuring and reporting carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere and has stopped requiring polluting facilities to report the amount of greenhouse gases they contribute to global warming.
Pollution causing global warming has produced a feedback loop that threatens to make climate change more rapid and more deadly. A feedback look occurs when the outputs of a system, in this case greenhouse gases, become new inputs, changing the system and making the situation more extreme. With the feedback loop, climate change will be spiraling out of control. Humanity may have already past the point where its impact is reversible.
Forest fires in the United States, our Canadian neighbor, and the rest of the world are becoming more widespread and destructive. As with temperature records, 2024 was the worst year for forest fires, beating the previous record set in 2023. Forest fires now burn more than twice as much tree cover annually as they did at the beginning of the 21st century. In 2024, large countries like Brazil, Russia, and Canada had their worst fire seasons since satellite monitoring started in 2001.
In the United States, in 2024, over 40,000 wildfires burned almost 10 million acres, a 40% increase from a decade ago and for times as many acres as 40 years ago. It cost almost $5 billion to suppress these fires, an increase of 250% increase in the past decade. The Smokehouse Creek Fire in Texas burned over 1 million acres. That fire and the Windy Deuce Fire destroyed 130 homes and caused $4.5 billion in long-term economic damages. The Park Fire in Northern California was even more costly. It grew explosively within hours, destroyed over 700 structures, and forced thousands to people to evacuate the area. In response to these fires, insurance companies are restricting or withdrawing coverage in fire-prone areas leading to higher premiums if you can get coverage and frequent non-renewals.
The way the feedback loop is now working is that wildfires destroy trees that would have absorbed atmospheric carbon dioxide making the situation worse. Forest fires and droughts caused by shifting rain patterns combine to undermine the ability of the soil and plants to absorb carbon dioxide contributing to higher global temperatures and more carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere. Warming air temperature warm the Earth’s oceans lessening their ability to absorb carbon dioxide so it remains in the atmosphere further heating the planet. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere raises temperatures making everything worse and the cycle continues.
