Scientific American, 25 April 2025

Trump’s NOAA Has Downplayed an Alarming Finding: CO₂ Surged Last Year

Under the Trump administration, NOAA has minimized an announcement that climate-warming carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere grew at a record-breaking speed in 2024.

Climate-warming carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere grew at a record-breaking speed in 2024, surging by 3.7 parts per million, a recent NOAA data analysis has found.

It’s one of the agency’s biggest scientific findings of the year — yet the research largely has flown under the radar after NOAA officials took steps to minimize the announcement.

Instead of publishing a press release or a featured article online, the agency described the findings only in social media posts on Facebook and on X. And the posts failed to highlight the dataset’s most important finding: that last year’s CO₂ concentrations jumped by an unprecedented amount.