The climate system’s warning signs are blaring, but hardly anyone in Washington has noticed.
In recent months, scientists have revealed new ways climate change is affecting the planet: Higher temperatures threaten to worsen damage from a potentially historic El Niño; a record warm winter in the U.S. West pushed river levels near catastrophic levels; new data shows the planet heating up more quickly, shrinking Arctic ice cover to record lows; a critical ocean current that regulates weather is closer to collapse than previously thought.
Those developments come as the Trump administration has shredded regulations to corral planet-heating gases, hamstrung climate science agencies and dismantled research institutions. Democrats, meanwhile, have shifted their messaging to energy affordability ahead of the midterm elections, and the environmental movement has gone to ground.
Climate experts warn, though, that as the effects of climate change grow more dire, the costs of delaying action are rising.
“You have to remember that these consequences, a lot of them are irreversible, effectively — certainly in a human lifetime — and you’re piling up debt,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton University geosciences professor and contributing author to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “You’re laying down debt that the system is going to come back and demand payment for. And we’re not going to be able to afford it later.”
The shift in Washington has been driven by President Donald Trump, who has for years dismissed climate change as a hoax, and even sought as recently as last weekend to discredit the IPCC as “WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” in a social media post.
That message was a response to last week’s announcement by the IPCC that it will not consider the worst-case emissions pathway known as Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5, or RCP8.5, in its next synthesis of climate science because it no longer appears plausible. But that high-emissions scenario was always viewed as an unlikely outlier to help galvanize policymakers to reduce greenhouse gases.
Democrats in Washington, who saw their signature climate legislation largely erased last year by Republicans’ massive budget bill, have gone quiet on the issue as they seek to retake control of Congress in November’s midterm elections. Many are following the advice of Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego, who has urged others in the party to promote solutions to lower energy costs — much of which he said will lead to cleaner sources.
“The solution is: Come up with a solution that solves both the climate change problem and the energy problem,” he told the POLITICO Energy podcast last month. “There’s just some people that when you say, ‘climate change,’ they just get shut off.”
Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), one of the chamber’s climate hawks, told a recent climate-focused conference in Washington that Democrats should stick to a message of optimism: that clean energy is the cheapest, cleanest, fastest power to add to the grid. At the same time, they should also hammer Trump and Republicans for actions that have boosted energy prices, such as initiating a war with Iran, throttling new solar and wind projects or cleaving renewable energy incentives.
Still, Schatz said a dose of foreboding gloom was helpful for building activist momentum. The dire climate outlook had helped motivate young voters in the Sunrise Movement to pressure Congress, which ultimately passed the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the largest-ever U.S. action to confront climate change.
“I don’t want to underestimate the power of fear sometimes to motivate people to action,” he said. “But I think in the end, it’s got to be hope. It’s got to be belief in the future.”
Yet environmental activists — some of the party’s most stalwart allies — are “too distracted” by other matters to pound the table for climate change, said Craig McLean, a former NOAA chief scientist who spent 41 years at the agency. McLean said “it befuddles me” why activists have relinquished their traditional role of illuminating the damage Trump has done to scientific institutions and the climate.
McLean noted that Democrats have instead gone all in on hitting Trump over cost-of-living pressures like rising pump prices from the war with Iran or electricity bills due, in part, to energy demand from artificial intelligence. Environmental groups have echoed those calls.
“We don’t know where the party wants to go other than ‘Not Trump,’” McLean said. “Climate is there on the table right in front of our noses. And why it’s not being picked up — they must be believing that it’s not what the winning issue is right now. I wish we could change that.”
Climate impacts are growing worse
Anyone looking at the latest climate data won’t have to dig too deep to find some unsettling trends.
The severe El Niño forecast for this year has worried scientists about devastating global impacts, which could include deadly heat and agricultural disasters around the world. El Niño is a natural climate cycle, typically occurring every two to seven years, but its impacts are growing even more dangerous when combined with the influence of human-caused climate change.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Agency for International Development, which in the past played a central role preparing under-resourced nations for those events, has been largely gutted under Trump.
In the U.S., the Southwest experienced record winter heat that exacerbated drought impacts — including for the Colorado River, which has reached critical water levels due to record-low snowpack that has threatened hydropower production and raised the prospect of mandatory water cuts to states. That prompted the Interior Department to intervene in efforts to negotiate out a new agreement for the six states — and 40 million people — who rely on its flows.
More broadly, some new studies have said the overall rate of warming is accelerating. The World Meteorological Organization said this year the amount of energy the Earth absorbs from the sun versus what it expels is “more out of balance” than any time in recorded history because atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are at their highest level in 800,000 years, upsetting the energy flow of solar radiation into and out of the Earth system. That contributed to winter Arctic sea ice shrinking to its smallest size in the 47-year satellite record in March 2025.
Also troubling climate watchers is the research showing the massive system of ocean currents is closer to collapse than realized, bringing severe consequences for ecosystems, agriculture and infrastructure. Scientists have warned about the ocean current system, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, slowing down or collapsing by the end of the century, though the precise time frame remains uncertain.
More well understood is the effect of melting ice sheets, which would significantly raise sea levels that swallow cities and island systems, fuel more floods and thrust hurricanes further inland.
Apocalyptic-like triggers appear often too distant and nebulous for most people, said Robert Kopp, a Rutgers University climate scientist and IPCC author. Even more immediate extremes have struggled to change behaviors: The world experienced back-to-back record hot years in 2023 and 2024, which the world will likely top this year. Washington, meanwhile, has devoted little attention to that.
“How many times do you have to be told that this year is the hottest year on record for it just to become background noise?” Kopp said. “You have to look at it also in the broader context of that like we have an ongoing constitutional collapse. So it’s unsurprising we can’t actually as a country address any large-scale challenge.”
It’s understandable that politicians are focused on kitchen table issues rather than the health of the planet, even as rising temperatures inflict severe economic toll, Princeton’s Oppenheimer said. “Climate anxiety” can also obstruct near-term action that at least addresses the problem, he said.
“They’re just not focused on it,” he said. “History has a harsh lesson for someone who has the courage to run on climate change rather than the price of gasoline.”
That thinking has quieted once prevalent proclamations in Washington to keep all fossil fuels buried underfoot. Climate scientists, meanwhile, continue to note that sharply curbing coal, natural gas and oil consumption is the clearest, fastest way to arrest runaway climate change.
Addressing energy affordability is far less partisan than climate change, said R. Max Holmes, CEO of the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The upshot for those who prioritize climate change is that new renewable power beats fossil fuels on cost, he said.
“Does it matter if people are saying we need to get all fossil fuels or we need to focus on energy affordability? In the end, I think it gets you to the same place,” Holmes said. “I’m not sure which one gets you there faster.”
The rampant “climate hushing” among even vocal Democrats and the environmental movement undoubtedly will affect the pace of policy action, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
Basic political science suggests the scant space Democrats have afforded climate change in the current election cycle means they will not prioritize it if they win back any modicum of power, Leiserowitz said. But the current discourse, he said, is misjudging voters’ opinions on addressing climate change: 41 percent of Americans want to hear candidates talk more about the issue compared with 22 percent who want them to discuss it less, his organization found in a December poll of 1,146 Americans.
“A fair number of Democrats who have long been champions of climate action themselves have remained or have gone quiet,” he said. “I just don’t see any reason why they need to be scaredy cats.”
Trump’s climate cuts
Whenever Washington returns to dealing with climate change in a concerted manner, it will have its work cut out for it thanks to Trump’s decimation of the federal workforce, climate funding and regulations on greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere.
The Trump administration has snuffed out grants for climate research, thwarting new discoveries. It wants to eliminate the premier Boulder, Colorado, climate science institution the National Center for Atmospheric Research. It set off a scientific brain drain through staff cuts that hollowed out NOAA, EPA and NASA.
Its budgets floated draconian cuts to satellites and other programs devoted to monitoring the Earth’s climate, including a 50 percent reduction of the National Science Foundation and of NASA’s science budget in its proposal for fiscal 2027.
Organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists have focused on protecting outfits NCAR, the Agriculture Department’s regional climate hubs and the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the interagency effort that put together the National Climate Assessment every four years — which Trump dissolved last year.
But much of the green movement has drifted away from an overt climate message to focus on affordability, said UCS chief of staff Julian Reyes. He worried that would result in deprioritizing rebuilding the nation’s climate science institutions and functions.
“It diminishes the importance of climate change,” he said. “Language does matter.”
Whether and how quickly the U.S. recovers those capabilities matters for maintaining global scientific leadership, said Kei Koizumi, a former special assistant to President Joe Biden and principal deputy director for science, society and policy. Federal support for research since World War II was central to establishing the U.S. as the vanguard of scientific discovery and innovation, he said.
“Regardless of whether it’s a campaign issue or not, [climate change] is becoming more and more a real reality issue for millions of Americans,” Koizumi said. “We’re going into these increased impacts of climate change blind.”
Chelsea Harvey contributed to this report.
