September 30 2025
September 30 2025
With juvenile obstinance, arrogant ignorance, corrupt intent and a dangerous disregard for physical reality, the President of the United States stood before the United Nations and called the impact of fossil-fuel burning on the climate “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” The New York Times notes that Trump also said that “the scientific consensus on global warming was created by ‘stupid people.’” The BBC reports that this brought audible gasps from the audience, and caused one European official to text an American reporter: ‟This man is stark, raving mad. Do Americans not see how embarrassing this is?” ABC News and many other outlets have provided a fact-check of Trump’s remarks. Trump’s statements at the U.N. were all the more outrageous because the United States is responsible for the largest share of global emissions since the Industrial Revolution.
Climate scientist Michael Mann notes in the San Francisco Chronicle: ‟It is easy to ascribe Trump’s anti-climate rants to his contrarian personality and whimsical nature. But in so doing, we do ourselves a disservice. What Trump is really doing is advancing a plan laid down years ago by plutocrats and polluters. And making a mockery of our country as he does so.”
A group of 85 leading climate scientists prepared a 400-page written response to the Department of Energy’s report, which had suggested that climate change is not a serious problem. CT Mirror describes how the response came together, including the widespread rage in the scientific community at how previously-published scientific findings were being misconstrued and cherry-picked in order to reach a specific conclusion. The article also describes the widespread public opposition to the DOE report and the EPA proposal to eliminate the endangerment finding, including the scene at some of the public hearings where comments were accepted.
RealClimate reviews the new report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) that was prepared to respond to the DOE and EPA. It summarizes the findings of climate science since the adoption of the endangerment finding, documenting how the case for endangerment has only grown more compelling. ‟It’s important to note that this kind of task, impartially advising the government on scientific matters, is exactly what the NASEM was set up to do in 1863. They self-commissioned this report, instead of being asked to do so by the EPA or any of the other relevant agencies, and that is an act of bravery in itself.” The Kentucky Lantern notes that, using the bogus DOE report, ‟the GOP attorneys general from 25 other states are supporting a Trump administration move to rescind a finding that underpins the federal government’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change.”
While the thoroughly debunked (and now withdrawn) DOE report highlighted purported uncertainties in climate science, a recent article in The New York Times reviews a real uncertainty in climate science. That uncertainty is clouds, and how they affect the temperature of the Earth. The article does a great job describing the different kinds of clouds, and how lower-elevation clouds can have cooling effects while higher-elevation clouds have warming effects. These properties have led to suggestions of manipulating clouds to change temperatures, although such efforts can have unintended side-effects and thus face a lot of opposition. How global warming is going to affect clouds is a key question influencing future temperature projections.
The New York Times reports that the U.S. Secretary of Energy called the 2015 Paris Agreement “silly,” while saying that climate change is not an important impact on your quality of life. “In fact, if it wasn’t in the news, in the media, you wouldn’t know.” (He should try telling that to residents of Taiwan and China, who are suffering the impacts of super-typhoon Ragasa, including the million Chinese citizens who were evacuated ahead of the storm.) The Washington Post describes how references to climate change (and other facts, including slavery) are being scrubbed out of signage in national parks. The spokeswoman for the Department of Interior stated that these actions ensure “the American people are no longer being fed the lies of the delusional Green New Scam.”
The New York Times notes that the Secretaries of Energy and Interior are touring Europe to promote fossil fuels. ‟The European Union has a law that mandates a 55 percent reduction in its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and zeroing them out by 2050. Mr. Burgum said that such ‘climate ideology’ had infiltrated Western policymaking and required reversal if Western countries were to compete with adversaries on artificial intelligence, which he cast as a more pressing concern than climate change.”
Canary Media reports that a federal judge found that the Trump Administration’s order halting construction of Revolution Wind was without “factual findings.” The project will now be restarted. The Attorney General of Connecticut stated that ‟The Trump Administration’s erratic action was the height of arbitrary and capricious, and failed to satisfy any statutory provisions needed to halt work on a fully approved and nearly complete project.” The stop-work order had been bleeding its developers of “more than $2 million per day,” according to court filings, and ‟posed a risk to New England’s future grid reliability.”
The New York Times helps to explain the Trump Administration’s actions by pointing out that ‟President Trump has sought to halt the construction of five giant wind farms off the coasts of Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island — all states run by Democrats. But there is one East Coast wind farm that has so far escaped the administration’s ire: a $10.8 billion project under construction off the shores of Virginia, where Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, has been its champion.” The Guardian notes that the Trump Administration is trying to stop nine already-permitted offshore-wind projects that were set to provide electricity to nearly five million households and create around 9,000 jobs.
Heatmap describes some of the details of the court fight, including how Ørsted (the project developer) countered Trump’s absurd claims about national security threats and fisheries impacts from offshore wind. While the Administration had claimed there was no agreement with NOAA Fisheries, Ørsted’s head of northeast permitting detailed years of negotiations with NOAA. Ørsted’s head of marine affairs, who served in the military for decades, ‟told the court that the Navy had never once raised any issues with the project’s export cable and that as recently as July 2025, no military officials had expressed lingering concerns about electromagnetic emissions, vessel collisions or other potential national security problems.” The New York Times describes concerns by fossil-fuel executives about Trump’s arbitrary attacks on the wind industry.
Canary Media notes that, despite years of failures in the field, a new company in Los Angeles is expressing optimism at trapping energy from ocean waves. Eco Wave Power is now operating a 100-kilowatt system on a concrete wharf in the Port of Los Angeles, but it isn’t sending that power to the grid yet. ‟The firm’s design favors simplicity across the board. Others tried installing out at sea, where waves are more powerful, but they rack up costs for ships and specialist divers, and then suffer from the same powerful waves they try to harness. Instead, Eco Wave Power focuses on far more accessible seawalls and jetties, and absorbs the waves with welded steel pontoons while the sensitive power conversion equipment sits safely on land nearby.”