The Trump administration’s decision to revoke a long-standing Environmental Protection Agency finding that climate change endangers public health has triggered a renewed dispute between federal officials and researchers who say the scientific record shows warming is increasingly harming health. The move landed amid a White House event where President Donald Trump disputed the public-health framing for global warming, saying the idea has “nothing to do with public health” and calling it “a scam” and “a giant scam.”
The agency action reflects a rollback of an EPA determination made in 2009 under the Obama administration. That endangerment finding provided the “legal underpinning” for many regulations designed to fight global warming, according to the report, which describes the EPA finding as central to how federal rules have been justified. In his remarks, Trump rejected the approach that links climate and public health, while researchers pointed to a large and growing body of peer-reviewed work.
Dr. Howard Frumkin, a physician and professor emeritus of public health at the University of Washington, criticized the rescission in stark terms, saying, “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.” Frumkin also said, “Study after study documents that climate change endangers health, for one simple reason: It’s true,” and he described the broader research landscape as repeatedly finding increasing disease and deaths as the world warms.
Scientists cited heat as a major pathway. One analysis mentioned in the report, published in the JAMA journal, examined “Trends in heat-related deaths in the U.S., 1999-2023” and found that yearly heat-related death counts and rates more than doubled over the period studied, rising from 1,069 in 1999 to a record high 2,325 in 2023. Another study cited by the report, published in Nature Climate Change in 2021, looked at 732 locations in 43 countries—including 210 in the United States—and determined that more than a third of heat deaths are due to human-caused climate change. The report also highlights a newer study published this week that, in Texas, attributed 2.2% of summer deaths from 2010 to 2023 to heat related impacts framed as linked to climate change increasing the frequency and intensity of heat in Texas.
The experts also pointed to attribution methods designed to estimate the portion of health outcomes linked to human-caused warming. Dr. Jonathan Patz, a physician who directs the Center for Health, Energy and Environmental Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argued that “Health risks are increasing because human-cause climate change is already upon us,” and he referenced the 2021 heat dome as an example. Patz said attribution studies showed that event was “made 150-fold more likely due to climate change,” describing how modern research compares real-world outcomes to computer simulations of what would happen without human-caused greenhouse-gas increases.
Beyond heat and deaths, the report describes public-health research as covering a wider set of outcomes, including illnesses and injuries that may not be captured in death counts. It notes that studies can differ in the time periods examined, calculation methods, and which health outcomes are included, which can contribute to differences in final numbers across papers. Researchers also study disparities across populations and locations, and the report says the field includes “attribution studies” estimating what proportion of deaths or illness can be linked to human-caused climate change by comparing observed mortality and illness with simulations of a world without a spike in greenhouse gases.
Dr. Lynn Goldman, a physician and dean emeritus at the George Washington University School of Public Health, said the public-health concern extends past disease and death prevention to well-being and broader disruptions. She said, “Public health is not only about prevention of diseases, death and disability but also well-being,” and she added that researchers are increasingly seeing people displaced by rising seas, intensifying storms, and fires. Goldman also said, “We have only begun to understand the full consequences of a changing climate in terms of health.”
The report also addresses how cold can affect the overall accounting. It says cold-related deaths are decreasing, while still leaving, in the United States, far more temperature-related deaths from cold exposure than from heat exposure. It further notes that one study suggested total temperature-related mortality might not change much until the planet warms further, when increases in heat-linked deaths could outweigh declines in cold-related mortality—provided societies do not adapt enough to reduce heat exposure risks. The federal debate, the report suggests, is occurring while scientific research volume is expanding quickly, with the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed database cited for counts of peer-reviewed studies at the intersection of climate and health, including thousands focusing specifically on the United States.