Under pressure: How Donald Trump's attacks on US climate agencies affect India

Dear reader,

One of the first things that Donald Trump did when he became president was to withdraw the US from the 2015 Paris climate agreement. This will come into formal effect on 27 January 2026, when the US will join Libya, Iran and Yemen as the only countries that do not recognize the agreement.

As we’ve written before, this was not unexpected, since Trump had done the same in his first term. What is different this time is the fact that the Trump administration seems to want to make this a clean break from any climate change responsibilities, i.e. withdraw from the UN international treaty that oversees the global effort to minimize climate change.

While the Trump administration hasn’t yet made any announcement about leaving the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), it seems to be acting as if it has. According to reports this past month, US officials have not been attending international climate forums that meet and work through the year. The buzz is that the Trump administration has withdrawn the US from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) process to decide on the latest global climate science reports. The climate body’s latest meeting in China reportedly didn’t have any US scientists present.

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While there is some ambiguity here, what the Trump administration is definitely doing is gutting the US’ premier climate agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa). On 27 February, hundreds of personnel at the agency were laid off. This is a setback not just for the US—the Noaa is the key agency for extreme weather forecasts in the country—but also for global climate science research.

Noaa’s world class climate data is used by scientists all over the world, leading to fears that efforts to produce more accurate weather forecasting, better climate monitoring and disaster preparedness will be hit. “For India, our monsoon forecasts, cyclone tracking, and climate projections rely heavily on Noaa’s models. Half of the Indian Ocean’s observational network is backed by Noaa. Without this backbone, early warnings for floods, heatwaves, and storms will weaken, putting millions at risk. This is more than a budget cut—it’s a direct threat to climate resilience, research, and preparedness worldwide. The world cannot afford to lose Noaa," wrote Indian atmospheric scientist Roxy Mathew Koll in a social media post.

State of the climate

By the end of February, parts of India had already entered the summer, much earlier than normal. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) warned of heatwave conditions in parts of the Konkan coast, including coastal Karnataka and north Kerala. On 25 February, Ratnagiri in Maharashtra recorded a daytime high of 38.9 degrees Celsius, nearly 7 degrees above normal. Mumbai’s Santa Cruz was 38.4 degrees Celsius, 6.4 degrees above normal. Kannur airport in Kerala recorded a high of 40.4 degrees Celsius, becoming the first place to touch 40 degrees in India in 2025.

A Hindustan Times report points out that while the IMD considers December-February to be winter months, its century-long data shows that the pre-winter season (October-December) is getting warmer by 1.01 degrees Celsius. The winter season, meanwhile, is getting warmer by 0.73 degrees Celsius. Summer months are getting warmer as well, but at a slower pace, with pre-monsoon (March-May) and monsoon (June-September) months warming by 0.62 and 0.45 degrees Celsius respectively.

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In effect, seasonal transition periods, like spring, are getting squeezed out. New Delhi is a city that has traditionally experienced distinct seasons through the year, including a spring and an autumn. But while March is normally considered to be a spring month in the city, hot days are beginning well before Holi. This is one of the many ways that we are feelingthe effects of global warming.

According to a Mint report, the early onset of the summer this year in south and west India is due to an extremely dry winter. In fact, US climate non-profit Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index has attributed the above normal temperatures in places like Goa and Mumbai to be the direct result of human-caused climate change.

The news in brief

-As the recent California wildfires have shown, a practical insurance plan against climate impacts is urgently needed. In this report, Mint’s Subhash Narayan writes how the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) is trying to develop a ‘single-peril parametric insurance’ product for India.

-At the Teri World Sustainable Development Summit last month, Vibha Dhawan, the director general of The Energy and Resource Institute, told Mint that with the US backtracking on climate under Donald Trump, there needs to be a focus on indigenous funding towards climate research.

-February temperatures in Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh were about 3-5 degrees Celsius above normal. In this report for Mint, Irfan Aman Malik writes how Kashmir’s snowless winter has triggered a water crisis.

Climate change tracker

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Global warming and India’s World Heritage Sites

I came across an extremely interesting study in the Communications Earth & Environmentjournal recently. Published in December 2024, a group of Chinese scientists analyse the effects of climate change on the UN’s Natural World Heritage Sites. These are regions that are so biodiverse and pristine that they are protected as world heritage sites. The study looks at the future effects of extreme climate events on 250 such sites (there are 266 in total), under 4 different greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions scenarios, ranging from low (SSP1-2.6) to very high (SSP5-8.5).

It finds that if climate impacts were to be divided into extreme heat, drought and extreme rainfall, then 33 out of the 250 sites would be at risk by the end of the century in a low emissions scenario (one that manages to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2100). So while 45% of the sites faced incidents of extreme heat between 2001-2015, under a low emissions pathway, this would fall to 2% by 2100. But under intermediate warming (SSP2-4.5) the number of sites affected would rise to 69% and up to 98% under the high emissions scenario (SSP3-7.0).

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And that’s just one category. Preserving our natural environment is extremely important, the study point out. While these 250 sites account for just 1% of the Earth’s area, they account for 20% of the planet’s biodiversity. The scientists warn that without drastic emissions cuts, many of the sites face a future of compound climate impacts—not just heat or drought or extreme rainfall events, but all three.

Also Read Climate change in 2025: An era of record heat and rising disasters

As far as India’s natural World Heritage Sites are concerned, Kaziranga National Park already faces heavy rains. Under intermediate warming it would face extreme heat, while under high warming, it would face extreme heat and heavy rain. In the highest warming scenario, it would experience both plus drought.

Similarly, the Western Ghats are already facing droughts. Since the Ghats are situated in the lower tropics and is highly sensitive, even under intermediate warming, they would face extreme heat, drought and extreme rain. Other sites, such as Nanda Devi National Park, Manas Wildlife Sanctuary or Sunderbans National Park face similar fates unless we act now.

Know Your Jargon

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Doomer

As writer and activist Rebecca Solnit wrote in an opinion piece a few years ago, a climate “doomer" means someone who is “surrendering in advance and inspiring people to do the same. If you announce that the outcome has already been decided and we’ve already lost, you strip away the motivation to participate—and of course if we do nothing we settle for the worst outcome."

Doomer is a useful category, as climate scientist Michael E. Mann showed in his 2021 book The New Climate War, to describe a more sophisticated form of climate denialism. Such people agree that climate change is real and is happening, but they insist that the worst outcomes are the only ones that are possible, and that there is no way to win the fight. As Mann points out in the book, sometimes even people writing in good faith about the urgency to combat climate change fall prey to it, saying that nothing has been done and that nothing can be done.

Prime Number

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11,700

When we frame the planet’s future under the effects of climate change, it is important to have a reference point to compare it to. That frame of reference is the Holocene era, a time of mild climate that began about 11,700 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age.

While Homo sapiens are believed to have started migrating out of Africa about 60,000 years ago, and were the only human species left about 40,000 years ago, they started settling down and giving rise to culture and civilization only once the Holocene began. Think about it: from the cultivation of crops to the domestication of animals to the Indus Valley Civilization, the Mauryan Empire and the Mughal Empire, all of it happened within that narrow band of time once the relatively higher temperatures of Holocene stabilised (by about 3000 BCE) to an average rate of 0.08 degrees Celsius of warming per 1,000 years.

During this time, the average CO2 concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere was about 260-280 parts per million (PPM). It stayed this way all the way till the Industrial Revolution. Since then, due to the intensive use of fossil fuels by humans, the CO2 levels have shot up to 424 PPM in 2025. Although we are still technically living in the Holocene, many scientists call the era since 1950 (when we started burning fossil fuels at a greater rate) Anthropocene.

Book of the month

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Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide by Bill McGuire

Celebrated volcanologist and climate scientist Bill McGuire has been called a doomer by some. And that’s mostly because of his landmark 2022 book Hothouse Earth. However, that couldn’t be further from the truth, since nowhere does McGuire say that this future hothouse is unavoidable.

What he does instead is show how different generations have experienced the global climate, and how this experience is going to change radically within a generation. This is because, as he unequivocally puts it, we are not going to be able to limit warming to a manageable rise of only 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100.

McGuire insists that this doesn’t mean that all is lost, nor should we not try to achieve this goal. Because every fraction of a degree counts, and the book portrays different future scenarios, what it would take to reach (or avoid) them, and how humans can balance emissions reductions and adapting to a hotter world. A must-read.

So that’s it for this edition of Climate Change & You, dear reader. See you again in a fortnight, when Sayantan will be writing the newsletter.

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