According to internal guidelines obtained and reviewed by various sources including Politico, The Hill and The Guardian, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has begun removing references to climate change on its webpages and sites, including the U.S. Forest Service website.

As The Guardian reported, the internal memo stated that the department must “identify and archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change” and record all instances of references in a spreadsheet by Friday for further review.

Trump orders USDA to take down websites referencing climate crisis

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— The Guardian (@theguardian.com) January 31, 2025 at 5:30 PM

At the time of this writing, some of the pages and sites are still online, including the Climate Hubs page and a general information page on climate change adaptation in agriculture. However, one Forest Service webpage on climate change that The Hill had pointed out as being online as of 6 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 31 has since been removed. Now, visiting that link prompts a message that reads, “You are not authorized to access this page.”

Many of the former USDA pages and sites mentioning climate change provided important information regarding wildfires and climate resiliency in agriculture, Politico reported. A webpage with information on vulnerability assessments for wildfires is also gone, despite the recent deadly wildfires that blazed around Los Angeles.

The removal of climate change references on official government websites follows executive orders from President Donald Trump that have targeted sustainability goals and actions as well as what content departments and agencies can share on government websites.

Already, the new administration has removed climate change-related information from official WhiteHouse.gov and other official websites. For instance, the Department of Homeland Security’s webpage on addressing climate change now shows that it has been archived. 

Searching the official White House website for the term “climate change” currently produces four results, including an order on “Unleashing American Energy” (which includes reversing the EV mandate and promoting fossil fuels, among other actions) and “Putting America First In International Environmental Agreements” (which withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement for a second time).

The removal of climate change and sustainability references on U.S. government websites is not a surprise, as this happened the first time that Trump held office.

But the censorship by the new administration is extensive, with additional orders given for governmental staff in the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) told to remove pronouns from their email signatures and disband gender resource groups, The Guardian reported.

Information on contraceptives, support for transgender and non-binary schoolchildren and National Transgender HIV Testing Day, among several other details related to health and safety, have also been removed from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website, The Guardian reported.

Federal health agencies have also been ordered to pause communications, Axios reported, and Trump withdrew the U.S. from the World Health Organization.

Experts are concerned over how these actions will affect health in the face of extreme weather events and disease spread, all of which is worsened by climate change.

“In my lifetime, in the United States I don’t know of another situation where researchers have been this concerned about losing access to data that they’ve had access to their whole career. It’s dire,” Jonathan Gilmour, a data scientist researching the impacts of climate change on human health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told The Journalist’s Resource. “It’s really important to understand that we can’t have a full picture of what’s going on in the United States and around the world if we stop making data available. I don’t want to start thinking about or listing the risks if we don’t have this data, because it imperils our way of life.”

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A recent analysis of the Amazon Rainforest has revealed that while deforestation declined in 2024, the level of degradation from factors like wildfires and logging increased 497% in the same time period.

According to Amazon Institute of People and the Environment (Imazon), a nonprofit and research institute based in Brazil, deforestation, or the complete clearing of vegetation, declined by 7% in 2024 compared to 2023. This marked the second consecutive year of declining deforestation numbers.

However, over 36,379 square kilometers of the rainforest were degraded last year, compared to the 6,092 square kilometers affected by land degradation in 2023. Degradation in 2024 was the highest since 2009, Imazon reported.

Forest fires were a major contributor to land degradation, according to Imazon. The Rainforest Foundation reported that 2024 had the highest number of fires in the Brazilian Amazon since 2005, burning an area of land larger than the state of California.

As Mongabay reported, extreme drought over two years made some areas more prone to burning, and ongoing effects of climate change could continue to impact precipitation patterns and damage the rainforest ecosystem. 

Experts expect some relief from fires over the winter, when higher rainfall will keep degradation from wildfires at bay. But they also emphasize a need for more conservation areas to reduce other degradation factors, such as logging.

“At the beginning of 2025, we recommend that managers take advantage of the rainy season, known as the ‘Amazon winter,’ to organize the strengthening of actions to protect the Amazon, since the tendency is for deforestation to return as soon as the rains reduce,” Carlos Souza, coordinator for Imazon’s Amazon Monitoring Program, said in a statement. “In addition to monitoring measures and punishing illegal deforesters, it is essential to allocate public lands that do not yet have a defined use for conservation, a measure to combat land grabbing.”

While degradation increased sharply, data provided by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) in November 2024 showed that deforestation fell 30.6% from July 2023 to July 2024, reaching a low not seen since 2015, Reuters reported.

But deforestation, even when in decline, remains a major problem for the Amazon. According to Imazon, the amount of land affected by deforestation in 2024 still totaled 3,739 square kilometers, which equated to more than 1,000 football fields of forest lost each day. In some areas of Brazil, deforestation even increased last year. 

Pará had 3% more land lost in 2024 compared to 2023, and the state had the highest amount of deforestation in Brazil for the ninth year in a row. Pará also led the country for the highest amount of forest degradation for 2024.

The extensive damage through degradation and deforestation has experts concerned that the Amazon could soon reach a tipping point, described by Carbon Brief as a time when the Amazon experiences enough stress to trigger major vegetation die-offs that turn the ecosystem into a dry savannah, permanently.

“The fires and drought experienced in 2024 across the Amazon Rainforest could be ominous indicators that we are reaching the long-feared ecological tipping point,” Andrew Miller, advocacy director at Amazon Watch, told The Associated Press. “Humanity’s window of opportunity to reverse this trend is shrinking, but still open.”

Degradation and forest loss is not only a concern in the Amazon Rainforest. Globally, land degradation is increasing by about 1 million square kilometers per year, roughly the size of Egypt, according to a recent report from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). Already, PIK has warned that original forest cover globally is at about 60%, but the safe planetary boundary requires about 75% of original forest cover.

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As microplastics become more and more prevalent, even showing up in seafood, clouds and human testicular tissue, scientists are working to further understand how these plastic particles could impact ecosystems and human health. Based on a new study, scientists are now concerned about how microplastics could affect our brains after finding that the particles can block blood flow in mice brains in the lab.

The study, published in Science Advances, involved the tracking of fluorescent polystyrene in mice blood and brains. The polystyrene, which is common in packaging like clear food containers and insulated beverage cups, was mixed with water and given to the mice. The researchers used miniature two-photon microscopy on mice to track the movement of the microplastics through clear screens placed in their skulls.

The researchers observed that the microplastics accumulated in immune cells, which then created blockages “like a car crash in the blood vessels,” Haipeng Huang, a biomedical researcher at Peking University in Beijing, said in a statement.

Sometimes, these blockages, which were similar to blood clots according to the research team, would clear on their own. However, other blockages remained for four full weeks.

Whether they lasted short-term or for the entire duration of the observation period, mice with microplastic blockages experienced reduced blood flow and moved slower and with less coordination compared to control mice, Yale Environment 360 reported.

The research team has also observed microplastic blockages in mice hearts and livers, but those studies have not yet been published.

The scientists also cautioned that while these results can bring up concerns over how microplastics may affect human health, the findings cannot conclusively be applied to humans because of the differences in blood circulation volume and vessel sizes between humans and mice. However, they did note that the research could provide foundational information for future studies.

“The potential long-term effects of [microplastics] on neurological disorders such as depression and cardiovascular health are concerning,” the authors stated. “Increased investment in this area of research is urgent and essential to fully comprehend the health risks posed by [microplastics] in human blood.”

According to a separate study published in April 2024, ingested microplastics were found to move from the human gut to the brain. Another study published in August 2024 further found microplastics in human livers, kidneys and brains, with alarming levels of these particles in the human brain samples.
In yet another recent study published this month, scientists determined that microplastics could pose risks to various human functions outside of the brain, including the respiratory system, the digestive tract and the reproductive system.

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Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, have taken on the nickname “forever chemicals” for their inability to break down in the environment. These chemicals, which are found in everything from food packaging to camping gear, are popular for their stain-, moisture- and grease-resistant properties, but they have been found to accumulate in the environment and in human bodies. 

But now, researchers may have cracked a way to break down these chemicals and even some of their byproducts, which can be toxic, by using strains of bacteria.

A team of scientists led by University of Buffalo researchers found that the bacteria Labrys portucalensis F11 was effective at breaking down at least three types of PFAS, including the most common forever chemical, perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS), as well as 5:3 fluorotelomer carboxylic acid (FTCA) and 6:2 fluorotelomer sulfonate (FTS).

Professor Diana Aga, the study’s corresponding author, says the bacteria could one day be deployed to break down PFAS in wastewater treatment plants. Meredith Forrest Kulwicki / University at Buffalo

The bacteria was the most effective at breaking down PFOS, a chemical that was designated as hazardous by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2024. It degraded more than 90% of the compound over a 100-day exposure and removed up to 96% of the PFOS after 194 days. During the first 100 days, the bacteria broke down as much as 58% of FTCA and 21% of FTS. The scientists published their findings in the journal Science of The Total Environment.

“The bond between carbon and fluorine atoms in PFAS is very strong, so most microbes cannot use it as an energy source,” Diana Aga, corresponding author of the study, said in a statement. “The F11 bacterial strain developed the ability to chop away the fluorine and eat the carbon.”

In addition to breaking down the PFAS, the bacteria also broke down the metabolites that occur after the PFAS degradation, with Labrys portucalensis F11 even breaking down or fully removing fluorine in some of the study results. 

“Many previous studies have only reported the degradation of PFAS, but not the formation of metabolites. We not only accounted for PFAS byproducts but found some of them continued to be further degraded by the bacteria,” explained Mindula Wijayahena, first author of the study and a Ph.D. student in Aga’s lab.

Mindula Wijayahena, the study’s first author, analyzed the samples containing PFAS and the bacteria following incubation in Portugal. Meredith Forrest Kulwicki / University at Buffalo

This particular bacteria strain has been previously revealed to degrade fluorobenzene, a flammable and hazardous compound sometimes found in insecticides.

The discovery offers a novel method for cleaning up PFAS; other methods have primarily focused on adsorbing and removing the PFAS, but the bacteria could help break down these chemicals and minimize the amount of time they spend in the environment.

A 2024 study uncovered a way to track PFAS contamination to the source, and a separate study published in 2023 a potential water treatment that would use adsorbing materials and electro- and photochemical processes to destroy PFAS contaminants in drinking water supplies. Yet another separate study published in 2022 found a plant-based material that could help adsorb PFAS, which would then be digested by fungus.

The study authors using Labrys portucalensis F11 for PFAS metabolization will continue their research, noting that although the bacteria did break down the PFAS, it took nearly 200 days, and that was without other food sources present.

“We want to investigate the impact of placing alternative carbon sources alongside the PFAS. However, if that carbon source is too abundant and easy to degrade, the bacteria may not need to touch the PFAS at all,” Aga said. “We need to give the F11 colonies enough food to grow, but not enough food that they lose the incentive to convert PFAS into a usable energy source.”

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A type of geoengineering technology designed to oxidize atmospheric methane is not effective enough to reduce the impact of emissions, a new study has revealed.

Atmospheric scientists at the University of Utah were not convinced of a recent proposal to put hydrogen peroxide into the atmosphere as a way to oxidize methane emissions and improve air quality. 

To test whether this method could work, the scientists used GEOS-Chem, a global chemical-transport 3D model, to model the use of aerosolized hydrogen peroxide, which would be sprayed from 50 600-meter-tall towers around North America.

Researchers modeled what would happen if each tower sprayed 612 grams of the hydrogen peroxide per second for 10 hours daily over the course of one year, a scenario based on a real proposal by an unnamed company.

However, the models showed that this scenario did not make much of a dent in the methane levels, and the technology could even lead to higher amounts of particulate matter pollution in areas that already had poor winter air quality. The scientists published their findings in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

“This proposed solution just won’t remove any meaningful amount of methane from the atmosphere. It’s not going to solve global warming. At most, we found 50 towers could reduce 0.01% of annual anthropogenic methane emissions,” Jessica Haskins, co-author of the study and an assistant professor of atmospheric sciences at University of Utah, said in a statement. “You’d need about 352,000 of them to remove 50% of anthropogenic methane. It’s an insane number. And if you did 50 high-emission towers, you’d still need about 43,000.”

As Haskins explained, the hydrogen peroxide would break down in the presence of sunlight and produce hydroxyl radicals (OH), which speed up the conversion of methane into carbon dioxide. While carbon dioxide emissions are also a concern for climate change, methane has a greater warming potential of up to 84 times compared to carbon dioxide, according to the European Commission.

But in the environment, the researchers explained that the hydroxyl radicals tend to react more to common double-bonded compounds found in the atmosphere, rather than the single-bonded methane molecules.

“OH doesn’t react fast with methane,” Haskins explained. “It’s reacting with so many other things.”

According to the study, multiple companies and organizations are exploring geoengineering to oxidize methane and other greenhouse gas emissions, primarily through iron-salt aerosols and hydrogen peroxide.

However, more research is being done to reveal how these potential technologies could actually impact the atmosphere and climate change.

A separate study, pre-printed in December 2024, also used modeling to explore how using tropospheric hydroxyl radicals (OH) or chlorine (Cl) in the atmosphere could decrease greenhouse gas emissions, including methane. The author concluded that using hydrogen peroxide was likely not feasible based on the amount needed to actually decrease atmospheric methane levels. Further, the research showed that all geoengineering methods analyzed in the study led to an increase in particulate matter pollution, which even exceeded air quality standards in some locations.

“We could buy ourselves about 50 years and avoid some of the immediate impacts of climate change if we did this, but no one had actually previously done any side-effects studies to see what was going to happen,” Haskins said. “This is very first paper to assess any air quality side effects of such geoengineering solutions.”

The study authors are not completely discrediting these technologies, but they do warn that more research and consideration is necessary before actually executing these methods.

“There’s potential that future research could show that the air quality impacts of placing these towers close to methane point sources is minimal if they’re activated at certain times of the year, and far from large population centers,” said Alfred Mayhew, co-author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher with the Wilkes Center for Climate Science & Policy at University of Utah. “If that’s the case, then this technology (or similar approaches) could play a very small role in combatting warming, but it’s clear from our work that the air-quality side effects should be placed as a central consideration for any proposed real-world implementation of technology like this.”

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