Amid the unprecedented wildfire disasters in the Los Angeles area comes news that last year was the hottest year ever recorded — just as the previous nine years were the hottest ever before that.
Even more alarmingly, the global average temperature in 2024 was 1.6 degrees Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial era, surpassing the long-term warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius for an inhabitable planet.
“Climate-change-related alarm bells have been ringing almost constantly, which may be causing the public to become numb to the urgency, like police sirens in New York City,” Woodwell Climate Research Center scientist Jennifer Francis tells the Associated Press. “In the case of the climate, though, the alarms are getting louder, and the emergencies are now way beyond just temperature.”
Yet President-elect Donald Trump, who repeatedly has called climate change “a hoax,” vows to remove the United States from the Paris Agreement again, just as he did in 2016. Although the repeat withdrawal might seem like déjà vu, experts warn that the consequences will be far worse this time. It took Trump three years to withdraw last time, but he will be able to remove the United States from the treaty much faster in his new term.
Scientific American writes that other nations are closely watching U.S. goals — calling for emissions reductions of 50–52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 — and weighing their commitments. Further, Trump may withdraw the United States from the foundational 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, too. In his first term, Trump also halted contributions to the U.N. Green Climate Fund, which is earmarked to aid poorer nations in addressing global warming that is largely the fault of affluent countries.
Climate change is not just affecting the Global South, though. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which the creators of Project 2025 want to abolish or gut, reported 27 weather disasters last year in the United States, including the devastating Hurricane Helene. These calamities cost over $180 billion and killed more than 560 people.
Project 2025 is additionally gunning for the National Weather Service — the most useful and benign of federal agencies, consulted by Americans daily for forecasts, but most importantly, an issuer of essential bulletins about severe weather warnings. These have included its life-saving warnings of a “Particularly Dangerous Situation” in the Los Angeles area over the last week.
While climate change affects everyone, nonreligious and religious alike, the special concern of the Freedom From Religion Foundation is the political pressure of white Christian evangelicals, Trump’s political base, who largely deny that climate change is caused by human activity such as burning fossil fuels. Fully 68 percent of U.S. white evangelical Protestants fit this description. By contrast, 76 percent of the religiously unaffiliated say current climate change is caused mainly by human activity. A Pew Research poll showed that 90 percent of atheists — the highest percentage of any group by religious identification to do so — accept the scientific data and acknowledge the reality of climate change.
But Trump is nominating climate change deniers and Big Oil advocates to key federal positions to derail U.S. climate change mitigation, as FFRF has previously documented. These include climate change deniers Doug Burgum as secretary of the interior, Scott Bessent as secretary of the treasury (tasked with enforcing the Inflation Reduction Act), Sean Duffy (who once suggested the sun is creating climate change and we need “alternative science”) for secretary of transportation and Lee Zeldin, who embraces Trump’s agenda of “energy dominance,” as EPA administrator. If the Heritage Foundation and its cronies get their wish, Project 2025 would slash EPA funding, undermining the government’s commitment to transitioning to clean energy.
“Secular Americans make up almost 30 percent of adult Americans,” reminds FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor, “and we must raise our voices to protest every step Trump takes to sabotage climate change mitigation.”
To become an advocate and sign up to receive action alerts on this issue, go to FFRF’s advocacy arm, FFRF Action Fund and click on “Become an Advocate.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with over 40,000 members, working to promote the constitutional principle of separation of state and church and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
Photo by Joanne Francis on Unsplash
