The Trump administration on Thursday revoked a scientific finding that established that climate change poses a danger to public health, an idea that President Donald Trump called a “hoax.” However, repeated scientific studies indicate that this is documented and quantifiable damage.
Again and again, research has found an increase in illnesses and deaths — thousands each year — in a warming world.
The 2009 conclusion of the Environmental Protection Agency, under the Obama administration, has been the legal basis for almost all regulations aimed at combating global warming.
“It’s incredible that the administration is revoking the endangerment finding; it’s like insisting the world is flat or denying that gravity exists,” said Dr. Howard Frumkin, a physician and professor emeritus of public health at the University of Washington.
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Thousands of scientific studies have analyzed climate change and its effects on human health in the last five years and predominantly show that climate change is increasingly dangerous for people.
Many conclude that in the United States thousands of people have died and even more have become ill due to climate change in recent decades.
For example, a study on “Trends in heat-related deaths in the US, 1999-2023” published in the prestigious journal JAMA shows that the count and rate of annual heat-related deaths have more than doubled in the last quarter of a century, from 1,069 in 1999 to a record of 2,325 in 2023.
A 2021 study published in Nature Climate Change analyzed 732 locations in 43 countries, including 210 in the United States, and determined that more than a third of heat-related deaths are due to human-caused climate change. This means that more than 9700 deaths worldwide per year are attributed to global warming caused by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas.
A new study published this week found that 2.2% of summer deaths in Texas between 2010 and 2023 were related to heat “as climate change brings more frequent and intense heat to Texas”.
Research on this topic is booming
In the more than 15 years since the government first determined that climate change was a danger to public health, more than 29,000 peer-reviewed studies have been conducted that analyzed the intersection of climate and health, and more than 5,000 of them focused specifically on the United States, according to the PubMed research database of the National Library of Medicine.
More than 60% of those studies have been published in the last five years.
“Study after study documents that climate change endangers health, for a simple reason: it’s true,” said Frumkin, former director of the National Center for Environmental Health appointed by President George W. Bush.
In an event on Thursday at the White House, Trump disagreed, stating: “It has nothing to do with public health. This is all a scam, a gigantic scam.”
Experts strongly disagree.
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“Health risks are increasing because human-caused climate change is already present. Take the 2021 heat dome as an example, which caused the deaths of more than 600 people in the Northwest,” said Dr. Jonathan Patz, a physician who directs the Center for Health, Energy and the Environment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “New climate attribution studies show that the likelihood of this event occurring was 150 times greater due to climate change.”
Both Patz and Frumkin stated that the vast majority of peer-reviewed studies show health damage caused by climate change. These studies are considered the gold standard of science because other experts thoroughly analyze the data, evidence, and methods, demanding changes, questioning techniques, and conclusions.
