The Trump administration on Thursday revoked a scientific finding that climate change is a danger to public health, an idea that President Donald Trump called “a scam.” However, repeated scientific studies have shown that climate change poses a documented and quantifiable harm to human health.
Research has consistently found increasing disease and thousands of deaths every year due to a warming world. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) endangerment finding in 2009, issued under the Obama administration, has served as the legal foundation for nearly all regulations aimed at combating global warming.
“It boggles the mind that the administration is rescinding the endangerment finding; it’s akin to insisting that the world is flat or denying that gravity is a thing,” said Dr. Howard Frumkin, a physician and professor emeritus of public health at the University of Washington.
Thousands of scientific studies have investigated the effects of climate change on human health over the past five years, and the majority show that climate change is increasingly dangerous to people. Many studies conclude that in the United States alone, thousands of people have died and many more have been sickened due to climate change over the past few decades.
For example, a study titled “Trends in heat-related deaths in the U.S., 1999-2023,” published in the prestigious JAMA journal, reveals that the yearly heat-related death count and rate have more than doubled in the past 25 years—from 1,069 deaths in 1999 to a record high of 2,325 in 2023.
A 2021 study published in *Nature Climate Change* examined 732 locations in 43 countries, including 210 in the United States. It determined that more than one-third of heat-related deaths are attributable to human-caused climate change. This equates to over 9,700 global deaths annually linked to warming from the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas.
A new study published this week found that 2.2% of summer deaths in Texas from 2010 to 2023 were heat-related “as climate change brings more frequent and intense heat to Texas.”
Since the government first determined climate change to be a public health danger more than 15 years ago, over 29,000 peer-reviewed studies have explored the intersection of climate and health, with more than 5,000 focused specifically on the United States, according to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed research database. Notably, more than 60% of these studies have been published in the past five years.
“Study after study documents that climate change endangers health, for one simple reason: It’s true,” said Dr. Frumkin, who also served as the director of the National Center for Environmental Health, an appointment made by President George W. Bush.
At a Thursday event at the White House, President Trump disagreed, stating: “It has nothing to do with public health. This is all a scam, a giant scam.”
Experts strongly dispute this claim. Dr. Jonathan Patz, a physician and director of the Center for Health, Energy and Environmental Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said, “Health risks are increasing because human-caused climate change is already upon us. Take the 2021 heat dome, for example, that killed more than 600 people in the Northwest.”
He added, “The new climate attribution studies show that event was made 150-fold more likely due to climate change.”
Both Patz and Frumkin emphasized that the vast majority of peer-reviewed studies show clear health harms from climate change. Peer-reviewed studies are considered the gold standard of science because other experts meticulously review the data, evidence, and methods, often requiring changes and questioning techniques and conclusions.
These studies examine various aspects of health. Some focus on deaths that would not have occurred without climate change, while others look at illnesses and injuries that did not result in death. Due to varying time periods, calculation methods, and specific health outcomes studied, the final numbers of these studies do not completely match.
Research also investigates disparities among different populations and locations. A growing field of attribution studies calculates the proportion of deaths or illnesses attributable to human-caused climate change by comparing actual mortality and illness rates to what computer simulations suggest would occur in a world without increased greenhouse gas emissions.
Last year, an international team of researchers reviewed past studies to estimate an annual health cost of climate change. Unlike many studies that only look at heat-related deaths, this team included a variety of climate change-related causes—heat waves, extreme weather disasters like 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, wildfires, air pollution, and diseases spread by mosquitoes such as malaria. Their findings suggested hundreds of thousands of climate change-related deaths worldwide each year.
Using the EPA’s own statistic on the dollar value of a human life—$11.5 million in 2014 dollars—they estimated a global annual cost “on the order of at least $10 billion.”
Studies also link climate change to waterborne infections causing diarrhea, mental health issues, and even nutritional problems, Dr. Frumkin explained.
“Public health is not only about prevention of diseases, death, and disability but also well-being. We are increasingly seeing people displaced by rising seas, intensifying storms, and fires,” said Dr. Lynn Goldman, a physician and dean emeritus at the George Washington University School of Public Health. “We have only begun to understand the full consequences of a changing climate in terms of health.”
The issue becomes more complex when cold-related deaths are taken into account. Although deaths from cold exposure are decreasing, studies show that in the United States there are still 13 times more deaths from cold exposure than from heat exposure.
Another study concluded that until the world warms another 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) from current levels, the total number of temperature-related deaths will not change significantly due to offsetting decreases in cold-related mortality and increases in heat-related deaths. However, the study warns that beyond this threshold, if society does not adapt to rising heat, “total mortality rises rapidly.”