After the warmest January ever recorded, scientists say they are “frankly terrified” about the rate of the Earth’s changing climate. Yet despite the alarming intel, President Donald Trump announced by executive order on his first day in office that he was withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement — for the second time.
In a recent survey by The Inquirer conducted on Feb. 6, 25 anonymous students across Diablo Valley College’s Pleasant Hill campus were asked about their feelings and awareness around the topic of the global climate accord and America’s removal from it.
Participating students were asked to rate their level of worry about the climate on a scale from 1 to 5. Alarmingly, but perhaps not so surprisingly, 80 percent placed their concerns at either 4 or 5.
However, just over half of the respondents, or 52 percent, said they knew anything about the international climate treaty known as the Paris Agreement. Among them, just over half said they were aware of the agreement but did not know what it required of the countries taking part in it.
The Paris Agreement serves as a historic landmark, unifying more than 195 nations around the consensus that climate change requires an immediate and drastic global response. The plan, adopted in 2015, seeks to address the urgent problem of planetary heating and enforce commitments from each country to cut their share of emitted greenhouse gases.
Greenhouse gases are by far the largest contributors to global warming. Fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas make up over 75 percent of these emissions, and form a blanket around the Earth’s atmosphere that traps in heat, leading to unusually warmer temperatures.
NASA confirmed 2024 to be the warmest year to date with a global temperature increase of 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century baseline. The treaty hinges on the international effort to limit rising global temperatures to less than 2 degrees Celsius.
By doing so, scientists claim that the most devastating and irreversible impacts for both humanity and the Earth could be avoided. This includes the collapse of tropical coral reef systems, the disappearance of mountain glaciers, and an influx of extreme weather hazards like floods and wildfires.
Valerie Greene, biology professor at DVC, said the science on climate change has spoken.
“We have so much data that supports all of the changes we’re seeing in our climate,” Greene said, which “come from monitoring this increased average global temperature. We have lots of different pieces of evidence that support that.
“All the changes we see, like warmer oceans, storms [that] are bigger [and] more powerful, it’s all directly correlated,” she added.
Weather extremes are becoming more common as the consequences of a warming climate, and are likewise having an increased economic impact. In one of the latest instances, the 2025 Los Angeles Wildfires left an estimated $250 billion in damages.
Greene advised changes she thought California could make to avoid future events like this getting even worse.
“The high-intensity fires we see as a climate change effect, but really if we want to live in these spaces, we have to think about how we’re [able to] live in harmony with nature, and manage the spaces in such a way that we promote low intensity fires, which are actually really good for forced ecosystems,” she said.
“Even if people are living where the fires burn close to the ground, they don’t burn down whole trees or rip through neighborhoods.”
The Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) zone is a term used in areas classified as high risk for wildfires, because they’re in transition between unoccupied land and human development.
Greene explained that “prescribed burns” in such areas are recommended. These small, controlled fires help clear out dead organic material and increase soil fertility, she added. The WUI is common across the United States and its deployment is growing rapidly to counter the threats posed by climate change.
The threats have been long in the making. The United States initially joined the Paris climate treaty in September 2016 under President Barack Obama’s leadership. Both the U.S. and China joined forces as major leaders in the plan, as the two countries together made up an estimated 40 percent of global emissions and also represented the two largest economies.
The cooperation between the global powerhouses to take responsibility and address climate change inspired other parties to join, including less developed countries.
Trump immediately withdrew the U.S. from the agreement when he entered office in 2017, and dismissed the climate issue during his first term, saying, “Under this agreement, we are effectively putting these reserves under lock and key, taking away the great wealth of our nation — its great wealth, its phenomenal wealth, not so long ago.” He continued to neglect the urgency of the planet’s climate state and attacked any ideas of global unity to tackle the issue during his administration.
After being elected president in 2020, Joe Biden directed the U.S. to rejoin the treaty in February 2021. But fast forwarding to January 2025, President Trump’s has again signed an executive removing America from the agreement, in the process joining just three other countries — Iran, Libya and Yemen — that are not signatories to the agreement
Despite President Trump’s efforts to downplay the causes and effects of our warming climate, the consequences of human behavior continue to grow — increasingly on a local level as well. For example, an estimate of more than 300,000 properties in the Bay Area showed an 80 percent chance of flooding in the next 30 years due to rising sea water levels.
According to Laura Walsh, a policy manager at the local environmental group Save the Bay, the consequences of not acting now are grave.
“It’s very inequitable to not plan for climate change,” Walsh said.
“If we don’t acknowledge that this is going to happen, and [don’t] plan for the future, people who lose are those who can’t afford to deal with the consequences, especially marginalized communities.”