Climate emergency in America: US Fifth National Climate Assessment, Nov. 14, 2023.
Prologue
My Greek upbringing, education in science and history, work experience on Capitol Hill and the US Environmental Protection Agency, forbid me to remain silent when I see danger, especially threats to public health and the natural world. I am of course talking about the anthropogenic danger of climate change or, more precisely, climate chaos.
Earth Day, April 1990
Let me start with a personal story. On Earth Day 1990, I discovered the political implications of a warming Earth. I was then an analyst at the US EPA. I wrote an article for the Chicago Tribune (October 10, 1989) in which I argued that the emission of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels (petroleum, natural gas and coal) slowly but ceaselessly increased the temperature of the planet. I learned about these climatological conditions because I read the scientific literature and because I have been curious and keep asking questions. My advisor at Harvard, where I did my postdoctoral studies, was Roger Revelle, a pioneer in climate science. And during the 1990s, EPA sponsored seminars on climate science. I attended those seminars.
But on April 1990, when EPA and America celebrated Earth Day, some senior EPA officials decided they had to silence me. My article, and the two reprinted paragraphs in the Wall Street Journal, had raised questions on Capitol Hill about EPA and climate change. Two senior EPA officials threatened me with dismissal. They cooked charges against me in a letter of reprimand I found on my desk. I was offended by that insulting action. I took the letter of reprimand to the Administrator, William Reily, an appointee of President George Walker Bush. The Administrator dismissed the charges in the letter. I kept my job at the EPA.
But this experience did two things. One, it intensified my doubts about the ethics and “science” the Agency employed in its overall mission of protecting public health and the environment and, two, it raised climate change to the top of my research, writing and public responsibility.
From 1.5 degrees Celsius to 2 degrees: the Earth and humans on the brink
UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, warned, June 5, 2024, that if the 1.5 degrees Celsius Earth temperature becomes 2 degrees or more, the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets will melt, tropical corals will die, the Labrador current will change direction with bad effects on Europe, and the permafrost will thaw and release vast amounts of methane, speeding up planetary catastrophe.
On September 2, 2026, the UN Environment Program summarized the state of climate risk. It calls overshoot the inevitable rise of global temperature above 1.5 degrees Celsius, which the international community agreed not to exceed in 2015 in the Treaty of Paris. According to the UNEP report:
“UNEP’s Limiting Overshoot Spotlight Report examines the implications of entering an era of 1.5°C overshoot and the choices that remain available….
“The evidence consistently indicates that higher peak warming and longer durations of exceedance are associated with greater risks for people and nature. Today’s decisions are therefore critical: the lower the peak warming reached, the lower the risks faced by people, societies, economies and ecosystems; and the shorter the duration of overshoot, the lower the probability of crossing irreversible thresholds and adaptation limits. The central message is clear: mitigation and adaptation must advance together. Overshoot is not an argument for resignation, but rather for urgency to action.”
UNEP even suggested that carbon dioxide may be removed from the atmosphere, though it admitted the difficulties of doing so. Overall, UNEP was not certain that humans can reverse their climate harm and return to the business as usual 1.5 degrees Celsius global temperature. “A return to or below 1.5 is uncertain,” according to UNEP. “Even if a return to below 1.5°C is secured, many nations and communities will face irreversible losses and permanently changed conditions.”
We don’t know if this well-meaning but apolitical report will make a difference. Its language is bureaucratic and unclear. Certainly it fails to explain why after so many years of UN climate summits the temperature of the planet continues to increase. The forthrightness of the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is absent from this report.
For example, Antonio Guterres, in addressing world leaders in Scotland, Nov. 1, 2021, he hit the nail on the head. He said to the “excellencies” listening to him:
“ Our addiction to fossil fuels is pushing humanity to the brink… Either we stop it – or it stops us… Enough of brutalizing biodiversity. Enough of killing ourselves with carbon. Enough of treating nature like a toilet. Enough of burning and drilling and mining our way deeper. We are digging our own graves.”
One wonders why the UNEP report failed, if not to imitate the courage and integrity and knowledge of Guterres, but at least to criticize the petroleum states and fossil fuel corporations for fueling and lighting the fires engulfing the Earth, causing the melting of ice, the heat waves going through seas and land, the burning of forests and wars in Ukraine and Iran. Is it because fossil fuel lobbyists flood the UN annual climate summits? Or perhaps funding UN programs?
Wars intensify climate chaos
Astral road of human desires attacked by a rain of barbed wires. Paintin by Evi Sarantea.
Ignoring climate chaos, especially during and after wars, is leading the US and the world to catastrophe.
Wars cause climate instabilities while warming the planet, at least they add a substantial amount of global warming gases in the atmosphere. No state reports or regulates these increasing emissions. “The argument that climate change is a threat multiplier,” says Neta C. Crawford, international relations professor at the University of St. Andrews, “short circuits the causal chain: War and military buildups are climate change multipliers. And, while it is true that the climate is warming at an accelerating rate and that the window for preventing the worst outcomes is closing, the national security establishment’s impulse—to focus on national security threats that may or may not be caused by climate change—may make us less secure because it increases military emissions and siphons resources from emissions reduction, the energy transition, and adaptation.”
All countries, but especially countries waging war now or in the recent past, the United States, Russia, Ukraine, China, India, Pakistan, Britain, Israel, Turkey and the European Union, make dangerous contributions to climate chaos.
Are Americans sidelining climate change?
Carbon dioxide trapping heat and warming the planet. NASA.
An equally destressing and destabilizing development is that since the election of Trump, Americans of both parties “sideline” climate change and especially their country’s colossal responsibility for warming the planet with industrial and military emissions of greenhouse gases.
I have been affected by this indifference. I am not a politician. But my climate book, Earth on Fire, was published this year.
I noticed that both Democratic and Republican clubs in my hometown Claremont, California, were cold to my suggestion I present my book to their members. Something similar mirrors the hitherto indifference of the colleges in Claremont.
Fortunately, my climate book presentation at LaVerne University was broadcast by C-Span Book TV.
So, imagine the effects of ignoring climate chaos in America, a gigantic country with the pretense of global hegemony and certainly desire for survival. Moreover, Americans know that their country uses vast amounts of petroleum and natural gas and coal. Therefore, America is preeminent in intensifying the fires that warm and destroy ecosystems and people here and abroad. Thus, are we to believe that Americans put these awesome dangers bellow the price of goods like clothes? What are these Republicans and Democrats hearing in their houses of worship? Nothing about the fate of their children and the fate of this beautiful Earth, which fossil fuel businesses and wars set daily on fire?
However, Catholics heard Pope Francis. In his encyclical, “Laudate Deum / Praise God,” Francis did not mince words. On October 4, 2023, Pope Francis said, “The world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point.” I agree with Pope Francis. Our beautiful Earth is at grave risk.
Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, also sees danger in sidelining climate change. “What happens over the course of the next decade,” he says, “will profoundly shape the habitability of the planet for literally thousands of years to come.”
I agree with Leiserowitz. Warming the planet is both anthropocidal and ecocidal.
If the members of the Democratic Party want to improve the social, political and global position of America, restore and strengthen democracy, they better embrace a very fast transition from fires and death, that is, fossil fuel energy, to solar and wind alternatives for the future of America. The wind energy, however, would have to emerge from human-scale technologies, not gigantic wind turbines that kill birds.
It’s insulting to hear that Americans sideline a beautiful Earth and live people over consumer demands for lower prices, which even Trump failed to control.
Epilogue
Evidence keeps showing that humans through industrialization and wars are warming the planet, which is melting the Earth’s ice, threatening the survival of small island states, causing heat waves through seas and land, causing wildfires, floods, and, in general, unsettles life among humans and ecosystems.
Americans must not sideline climate chaos, no matter what they hear from the Trump administration, Republican and Democratic parties, and fossil fuel corporate media. Humans and industrial activities and wars cause the climate emergency threatening all humans and wildlife. The warming of the planet and the danger from climate change is about 32 times more potent in 2026 than it might have been in the preindustrial age. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Nov. 11, 2025) explained the climate difference then and now like this:
“The rate of warming from the end of the last ice age was about 7 degrees Celsius over a period of 18,000 years, or 0.04 degrees Celsius per century. In contrast, the rate of warming over the past 100 years was roughly 1.3 degrees Celsius per century. That’s about 32 times faster than the rate coming out of the Last Glacial Maximum.”
In addition, the “Fifth National Climate Assessment,” Nov. 14, 2023, warned Americans to pay attention to climate change. It said this:
“The things Americans value most are at risk… More intense extreme events and long-term climate changes make it harder to maintain safe homes and healthy families, reliable public services, a sustainable economy, thriving ecosystems and strong communities… The United States has warmed 68 percent faster than Earth as a whole over the past 50 years.”
Global warming / climate chaos is becoming a matter of life or death.
