The State of the Planet, Part 2

As the US boils in fascism, the planet and our collective future bakes in radiative imbalance

Since the start of 2025, it’s been hard to write about climate with this rapidly worsening vortex of fascism. It seems I need to work through a sort of panic response every time. To write about this stuff, I need to hold it emotionally, which is difficult but also very helpful.

And I don’t want to further traumatize you, my readers! My goal is to give you a few minutes of thoughtful companionship and to hopefully help you face all of this through directly addressing it. I know that when I read pieces (for example, in the NYT) that dance around fascism or irreversible climate breakdown without clearly and directly saying what we’re all thinking and feeling, it’s actually harder for me. It feels like collective avoidance, like heads in the sand… and collective avoidance takes away my hope. But when someone writes about it correctly, it helps. It’s validation and it’s community.

So, I’m finally ready to write about climate here. But first I need to purge by briefly holding space for the horribleness that has been increasing every day and that accumulates in my soul and makes it hard for me to post here because my brain is constantly going “what the fuck.” Here’s some of what’s on my mind:

• The fascists are cruelly taking away healthcare from the poor and disabled and working class, and giving the money to the billionaire class. They’re also selling us all more deeply into debt in order to give money to the ultra rich, by over 3 trillion dollars in the next ten years. In my view, the billionaire class’s addiction to money is a mental illness, and more money makes them less happy, and more likely to spread their unhappiness on everyone else. (Does Trump seem full of joy and happiness to you?) It also makes them more likely to be killed violently by people who have nothing left to lose. Anyway, Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill (“what the fuck?”) is a massive redistribution of wealth upwards, which will further fuel fascism. This regime is about cruelty, stupidity, and selling off America.

• The fascists are going to allow migrant farm workers to remain in the U.S. if their bosses are willing to “vouch” for them. Imagine working in fields knowing that at any time your boss can call ICE and have you forcefully tackled and zip-tied by masked blue-jeans-wearing men who refuse to show ID, and deported, without due process, without a lawyer, without a chance to call a friend or loved one, to an undisclosed prison in a foreign country (you don’t even know which country) with no way to contact anyone, no hope of getting out, and knowing you will probably die. (I wonder how the payments from the US to these prison countries are structured, and if the structure incentivizes rapid deaths.) I have long thought that these people - people like Mitch McConnell and Stephen Miller - would love to own slaves. Well, here we almost are. I didn’t expect to see it in my lifetime.

• The fascists just gave ICE an infusion of 75 billion dollars in the “Big Beautiful Bill.” As AOC put it, ICE is now “bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA, & others combined.” Every morning, I wake up and see new videos of ICE terrorizing people. This 10x increase in funding will probably make ICE more than 10x worse. Not only will they hire 10x the thugs, but that increase will make them more confident. They will feel completely unaccountable because, apparently, they are. As I wrote earlier, every fascist regime needs its secret police; in Nazi America, it's ICE. Our tax dollars have been taken from NOAA and NASA and the NSF and Medicaid and many other institutions that truly made America great, only to be given to billionaire golfers and their brown shirt thugs.

• It seems that ICE is increasingly trampling on First Amendment rights, assaulting peaceful protestors with no accountability. I feel that we may be slipping past the point where protest can stop the backsliding.

• The genocide committed by Israel and assisted by the US and other nations in Gaza just keeps getting worse. A few days ago, we learned that Israel is even blocking baby formula from entering Gaza. They’re openly committing infanticide while the world watches (“what the fuck?!”). I’m certain that we have no idea yet of the full range of atrocities.

• The unethical people at Fox News are lying to the conservative base. Fox News, following the fascist talking points, sells the theft as getting rid of “waste, fraud, and abuse.” I talked to my dad a few days ago; unfortunately he’s a Trump supporter. He has no idea what ICE is actually doing. We concluded that we’d actually agree on a lot of stuff, but we’re working off of two completely different sets of “facts” which makes it impossible to discuss anything. This is how Fox News has ripped America apart. Because here’s the thing: not every Trump supporter is a terrible person. They’re being lied to, and unfortunately, they don’t have the capacity to realize that they’re being lied to. It’s a tragedy.

• That was a super weird 4th of July.

But despite all this, the planet continues to overheat irreversibly. Here’s a brief overview of the state of our planet.

Flooding

Let’s start with flooding: Over the weekend, there was incredibly intense rain and flash flooding in Texas, with over 100 people confirmed dead at the time I posted this and dozens still missing. It’s heartbreaking. Some places received more than 20 inches of rain.

On Sunday, I experienced the most intense rainfall I’ve yet seen in Chapel Hill; we received over 7 inches. I found myself furiously digging diversion cuts with a pick mattock as rain poured and lightning flashed around me in the dark.

Have you noticed more intense rains where you live? What’s going on?

Yes, rain is more intense than it was a few decades ago because our planet is so much warmer now. It’s not too hard to understand why: Hotter air evaporates water more quickly and holds more water vapor. (This is also why droughts in drought-prone areas are getting worse.) Think of it as an acceleration of the water cycle. With every degree celsius of heating, air can hold about 7% more water vapor.

As with all impacts arising from climate heating, rainfall and flooding will continue to rapidly intensify with increasing planetary heat, due mainly to fossil fuel use.

Heat

The most fundamental metric for climate breakdown is the planetary temperature. Heat drives all the other impacts. Our planet is overheating badly, and this is enough to know that the state of our planet is dire.

The global mean surface atmospheric temperature looks like this (for five datasets, figure from Carbon Brief, with data from NOAA and NASA GISS. Trump is cutting about $1.8 billion from NOAA’s annual budget, a quarter of the agency, and has refused to renew the $3 million lease for the NASA GISS building, creating chaos for the center):

We have just experienced the 10 warmest years on record. 2024 was the first year in the history of humanity that was over 1.5°C hotter than the preindustrial (1850-1900) average. 2025 could also be over this threshold, although it is too soon to say. However, January 2025 was the hottest January on record, and this is especially remarkable due to the prevailing mild La Nina conditions, which until now have meant relatively cool global surface temperatures.

This figure shows the mean ocean heat content in the top 700 m of the world’s oceans, for four datasets, relative to the 1971-2000 mean (from the EPA, an agency being largely dismantled by the Trump regime):

Given the stunning increases in global temperature beginning in 2023, both in the ocean heat and in the near-surface air temperature, and the high temperatures so far in 2025 despite La Nina conditions, I personally don’t feel we should rule out the possibility that the planet is overheating more rapidly than our current understanding of Earth science can explain. The possibility of a climate acceleration is still an area of active research. However, whether overheating is accelerating more rapidly than expected has no bearing on what humanity’s collective course of action ought to be.

The WMO just released its annual report, which projects the average of the next five years will likely exceed the 1.5° threshold (70% chance).

Now let’s do a simple thought experiment. Imagine everything getting steadily hotter year after year. This heat would drive worsening impacts. After enough years, we would get to worst-case scenarios. This is why it’s so important to transition away from fossil fuels in order to change the emissions (and therefore temperature) trajectories, and why it’s so simultaneously stupid and horrifying that the Trump administration is dragging the world as quickly as possible in the exact wrong direction.

To me, this is scary stuff. It would be scary enough if humanity were acting in a coordinated way to end planetary overheating, but to me at least it would be an amazing comfort to know that we were collectively doing the right thing. It’s much more scary when half of the people in the US are so detached from the reality of what’s happening on the planet that they voted for Trump.

Fossil fuel industry

The next thing to address in the State of the Planet is the fossil fuel industry. Planetary overheating is effectively irreversible, and it is almost all caused by the fossil fuel industry: their executives, their lobbyists, their lawyers, and all the people they pay (including Reuters and the New York Times, Chuck Schumer, Joe Manchin, and Trump). About 80% of global overheating is caused by fossil fuels, while most of the rest is caused by animal agriculture, especially cows.

Too many people still don’t realize that fossil fuel investors and executives are the reason our planet is overheating, that they have been lying and spreading disinformation for half a century, and that they are still full of deceit and bad intentions. In Congressional testimony from 2021, Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobil; Michael Wirth, CEO of Chevron; David Lawler, CEO of BP America; Gretchen Watkins, President of Shell Oil; Mike Sommers, President of the API; and Suzanne Clark, President and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce “did not dispute that man-made climate change is a ‘code red for humanity,’ but refused to take responsibility for decades of disinformation and would not pledge to end spending to block climate action.”

There’s no longer any good reason to delay transitioning away from fossil fuels. But these guys want ever more money, so they sabotage the transition. They prioritize their pocketbooks over a habitable planet. I suspect that in their brains they imagine a continuation of deepest luxury for themselves, maybe in a New Zealand bunker, while the rest of us die from starvation, heatstroke, and warlords’ bullets. Theirs is a worldview of separation. But they are more connected than they know.

I think we should be naming and shaming fossil fuel executives at this point. People should confront them everywhere they go. They are gradually destroying Earth’s habitability for their own profit - essentially extracting our planet’s capacity to support life and converting it into money - and they know it. This is evil. But, of course, our system of extractive capitalism is also evil, because if one of these CEOs suddenly woke up, looked in the mirror, and decided to help stop climate breakdown, they would be fired and replaced.

So, what do we do? We keep waking everyone up to the dual reality of climate breakdown and fossil fuel deceit. We keep waking everyone up to the fact that renewable electricity is already cheaper than fossil fuel electricity. We keep naming and shaming and birddogging. We keep suing the fossil fuel industry, because we have the receipts. We keep resisting, and building community, and building the movement of movements, as best we can.

Emissions

While the fossil fuel industry is the main cause of overheating, and the planet’s mean surface temperature (of the oceans and the atmosphere) is the main symptom, atmospheric CO2 concentration is the main diagnostic test. Burning fossil fuels adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere (where did you think the HUGE volumes of gasoline and coal and jet fuel and fossil gas go to when they burn?); the carbon dioxide interacts quantum mechanically with infrared streaming from the Earth into space, reflecting some of it back to the Earth, like a blanket; and as a result, the planet heats up.

CO2 concentration continues to rise exponentially due to the burning of fossil fuels (figure from NOAA):

This plot is known as the Keeling Curve in honor of Dr. David Keeling, who started the measurement in 1958 on the top of Hawaii’s huge mountain, Mauna Loa. NOAA now monitors atmospheric CO2 buildup at more than 50 stations around the world. These data are critical to understand and verify how much fossil fuel is getting burnt (we certainly can’t trust the fossil fuel industry!), how much CO2 the ocean and global forests are absorbing, and how the Earth’s constantly changing climate system is working. However, the crazy Trump administration is slashing NOAA’s funding, following the Project 2025 plan which would eviscerate NOAA and US climate research more generally.

The Trump administration and Project 2025 want to bring us into the unreality of fascism. The fascists hate science, and scientific data: real, verifiable, facts.

What’s coming in Part 3

This is already a long post, so I’m going to continue it in State of the Planet, Part 3. We still have a lot to talk about, such as the state of climate science in the US under Trump, impacts of overheating to our food system, Earth system tipping points, how China is beating the US in the new climate economy, the wealth gap, the state of the movement, what you can do, and more. So stay tuned…

With warmth and love -

Peter

About this newsletter

I’m a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (for now, but probably not for much longer), speaking on my own behalf. I’ve been arrested multiple times for climate civil disobedience, because I care, because I want to stop the destruction, because some things are more important than my career.

Like many climate scientists in the US, my job is hanging by a thread as funding is slashed and missions are canceled. I’m pivoting towards more writing and activism. For 19 years I’ve done this critical work on the side, in my free time, but now it’s time to make it front and center. If you want my voice out in the world, please support my work with a paid subscription. And spread the word!