Amid the deluge of Trumpacies battering us from moment to moment, it would have been easy to miss one of the Trumpiest of the Trump administration's Trumpanacians. This week, it stripped funding to researchers at Princeton University because their findings are “contributing to a phenomenon known as ‘climate anxiety.’”
The US Department of Commerce expressed its deep concern over this phenomenon which it says “has increased significantly among America’s youth.” The department blamed “alarming climate scenarios” that are “misaligned with the administration’s priorities.”
Among the scenarios are those produced by Princeton meteorologist Syukuro Manabe — which were deemed good enough for the 2021 Nobel Prize in physics. But the announcement axing the funding dismisses them as “narratives.”
The Trump administration isn’t alone in disparaging the warnings of climate scientists as some kind of dangerous fiction. You’ll hear similar echoes at Pierre Poilievre’s campaign stops. At the very first rally of the current election campaign, Poilievre railed against “radical net-zero environmental extremism.” At other rallies he’s characterized Mark Carney of being part of this “radical net-zero movement” that would result in “net-zero jobs, net-zero paycheque.”
Net-zero carbon pollution, as you probably know, is hardly an extremist objective. It would not even undo the impacts of climate change and is simply the point at which scientists hope global heating would stop getting worse. But the term is being systematically demonized by a global network of right-wing populists, a recent Canada’s National Observer investigation found. Author Naomi Klein describes it as a network of “super-sized prepperism” and my-country-firsters which amounts to a "nihilistic death drive" for the planet.
The populist right might be hoping to cancel climate change by vilifying words and cutting funding. But the planet is unmoved by narrative battles and culture wars, as we found out this week from some of the world’s leading climate scientists who are still operating beyond the reach of Elon Musk’s chainsaw.
This week, Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service issued its latest monthly update. Climate change is very far from being cancelled. In March, global temperatures continued the extraordinary hot streak that has been confounding many scientists’ expectations.
It was the 20th month in the last 21 that the global average temperature was more than 1.5 C above the pre-industrial level. Virtually every month since July 2023 has surpassed that totemic temperature figure.
March was 1.6 C hotter than before the surge in fossil fuel burning brought on by the industrial revolution. And it happened despite the fact that the hot El Niño weather pattern is now long behind us.
"That we're still at 1.6C above pre-industrial is indeed remarkable," said Friederike Otto at Imperial College London. "We're very firmly in the grip of human-caused climate change."
The impact of all that heat was particularly obvious in the Arctic where winter freezes sea ice to its annual maximum in March. This year set a new record in the 47 years of satellite measurements — a record low for Arctic sea ice in winter.
At the other end of the Earth, Antarctic sea ice was a whopping 24 per cent below average, the fourth-lowest monthly record for any March.
Those are all just numbers. We could highlight a few of the catastrophic impacts on lives and livelihoods that have barely even made the news here. In Australia, an unfathomably large area has flooded. The count of dead livestock is over 150,000 and rising. The flooding has covered an area bigger than France and Germany combined. If the flooding were a country, it would be the 31st largest on Earth.
And a surprise March heat wave hit Central Asia, coinciding with a crucial season for farmers in a region where half of all workers are employed in agriculture. Temperatures were up to 10 C hotter than the pre-industrial average, according to a consortium of scientists. “This kind of change seems unreal,” said Ben Clarke, co-author of the group’s study. “But fossil fuel burning is fundamentally altering the climate faster than humans have ever experienced.” This level of heat is “quite frankly bonkers.”
We could go on listing climate impacts and if you have the stomach for it you could check out Yellow Dot’s Extreme Weather Report for the last three weeks. It’s becoming increasingly clear — even to the big financial players — that Trump tariffs are not the only way to wreck the global economy.
“Entire regions are becoming uninsurable,” warns Günther Thallinger, a board member of Allianz, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies. Thallinger is a former CEO of Allianz Investment Management and principal at McKinsey.
“We are fast approaching temperature levels — 1.5 C, 2 C, 3 C — where insurers will no longer be able to offer coverage for many of these risks,” Thallinger says. “The math breaks down … This is a systemic risk that threatens the very foundation of the financial sector … as temperatures continue to rise, adaptation itself becomes economically unviable … capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable.”
Thallinger issued his warning publicly to spur action. Other financial bigshots are more quietly betting on severe global warming. Some obscure recent documents from Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase and the Institute of International Finance show how top financial institutions are planning to navigate a world that breaches the Paris Agreement commitment to hold warming below 2 C.
“We now expect a 3 C world,” said Morgan Stanley analysts in March as part of an analysis promoting stocks in air conditioning. And JP Morgan acknowledged it is using “baseline” scenario planning that assumes a range of heating from at least 2.7 C to above 3 degrees.
No matter how much funding is cut from the messengers, climate anxiety is rising, and not just among youth.
“The good news,” says Thallinger, is that “we already have the technologies to switch from fossil combustion to zero-emission energy… The only thing missing is speed and scale. And the understanding that this is not about saving the planet. This is about saving the conditions under which markets, finance, and civilization itself can continue to operate.”
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