Environment
In a monthly reporting call on global climate, researchers from the US government’s climate and weather agency avoided mentioning rising levels of greenhouse gases
By James Dinneen
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Extreme weather, including hurricanes, has increased with climate change
MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) presents a briefing summarising the global climate each month – and in the first of these calls under the Trump administration, NOAA researchers avoided making any link between January’s record high global temperatures and climate change caused by human greenhouse gas emissions.
“It’s not great for science. It’s not great for truth,” says David Ho at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. He says greenhouse gas emissions from humans have unequivocally played a role in raising global average temperatures.
The monthly NOAA briefings generally include information on average temperatures both around the world and in the US, as well as updates on changes in the ocean, drought and any unusual events.
This month’s climate call included reports that global temperatures in January were 1.33°C above the 20th century average. This makes it the hottest January on record, coming on the heels of the hottest year on record. Each of the past 10 years is among the 10 hottest years on record.
The government researchers also explained these high temperatures in January came despite the cooling influence of a La Nina pattern in the Pacific Ocean, as well as unusually cool temperatures across much of the US. Other notable events mentioned included below average sea ice in both the Arctic and Antarctic.
However, the researchers did not make any mention of global warming due to human greenhouse gas emissions and whether this played any role in these record high temperatures, even in reply to direct questions about it.
In response to a question from New Scientist regarding the main drivers for the high global average temperatures, Russell Vose, the head of the monitoring and assessment branch at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information said: “We don’t tend to put out an explanation for why a specific month was warmer or colder than normal at a global scale.”
However, in previous climate update calls, NOAA researchers have freely discussed potential drivers of unusual temperatures, including referencing background warming from human-caused climate change.
Vose did offer a potential explanation for the broader trend in high temperatures in recent years. “The warmth that we saw last year and in more recent years was probably tied to reductions in air pollution over the ocean,” he said. He also mentioned a reduction in cloud cover as another driver.
Both changes in air pollution and cloud cover have been linked with a spike in the pace of warming seen since 2023, but numerous reports have found the overall rise in temperatures can only be explained on top of background warming due to rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
When New Scientist asked explicitly if human-caused climate change played any role in the record high temperatures, the NOAA press representative abruptly ended the call, saying, “I’m not seeing any more on-topic questions from the media.” The NOAA press office did not respond to a request for comment following the call.
NOAA, along with other US scientific agencies like the National Science Foundation and the Environmental Protection Agency, has faced scrutiny by the Trump administration for its role in sharing information about climate change. References to “global warming” and “climate change” have been removed from thousands of government web pages in the wake of orders from Trump to roll back climate action. And NOAA has reportedly been ordered to review grants that include terms such as “climate”, “carbon” and “greenhouse gas”. The Trump administration is widely expected to lay off employees at the agency.
In that context, Ho is sympathetic to the reasons climate scientists may not want to mention climate change and instead choose to focus on something like air pollution. “It’s a safe thing to mention because it has nothing to do with climate change,” he says. “Air pollution is not one of the key words.”
“There’s a lot of uncertainty, there’s a lot of fear,” Ho adds. “And it shouldn’t be this way. Studying environmental sciences is about studying our life support system.”
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