President Donald Trump said this week that the Earth is “cooling.” The remark, reported by multiple news outlets in late April 2026, has not been preserved in a publicly available transcript, social media post, or video clip, so the exact phrasing and context remain unverified. What is verifiable is the federal data released days earlier: March 2026 was the hottest March ever recorded across the contiguous United States, by a significant margin.
The National Centers for Environmental Information, a division of NOAA, reported that the lower 48 states averaged 50.85 degrees Fahrenheit for the month, a full 9.35 degrees above the 20th-century baseline. That is the largest March departure in 132 years of continuous recordkeeping, which stretches back to 1895. Average daytime highs ran 11.4 degrees above normal, according to The Associated Press, which obtained the figures from NOAA’s operational data.
“Climate change is kicking our butts,” Andrew Pershing, vice president for science at Climate Central, told the AP.
A record that did not stand alone
The domestic record was not an isolated spike. Globally, NOAA’s separate monthly climate report found that March 2026 tied with March 2024 as the second-warmest March on record worldwide, with the global land-and-ocean surface temperature running 2.36 degrees Fahrenheit (1.31 degrees Celsius) above the 20th-century average. Only March 2025 ranked higher, and by just 0.02 degrees Fahrenheit. Three consecutive years have now produced three of the hottest Marches ever measured, a clustering that reinforces the long-term warming trend rather than suggesting any reversal.
These figures are not model projections or estimates. They come from NOAA’s NOAAGlobalTemp dataset, which blends thousands of land-station observations with ocean-surface measurements. The methodology has been documented in peer-reviewed journals published by the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union. The domestic record draws on a network maintained continuously since 1895; the global series extends back to 1850.
What Trump said, and what he did not cite
Because no primary-source recording or transcript of Trump’s remark has been published, it is impossible to determine whether he was describing a short-term regional weather pattern, citing an alternative dataset, or making a broader assertion about the climate system. This article treats the “cooling” claim as it has been reported in secondary accounts while noting that the precise wording and supporting rationale, if any, remain unknown.
What is clear is that no identified dataset supports a global cooling trend. NOAA’s Climate at a Glance portal, which allows anyone to download and chart temperature anomalies going back more than 170 years, shows a pronounced upward trajectory. Short-lived plateaus and minor year-to-year dips do appear in the record, and individual regions can experience cold snaps even during globally warm months. But those fluctuations sit on top of a steep long-term rise, exactly the pattern climate scientists have projected in a warming world. No sustained cooling signal exists in the federal record.
NOAA has not issued a public response to the president’s claim. The agency’s reports speak through data rather than political rebuttal, and no spokesperson statement addressing the “cooling” language appears in the available record.
On-the-ground stakes of record March heat
Record warmth in March is not an abstraction. Across the western United States, above-average temperatures accelerate snowmelt, reducing the snowpack that feeds rivers and reservoirs through summer. In the Plains and the Southeast, early heat can stress winter wheat during a critical growth window and dry out vegetation ahead of wildfire season. Emergency managers, water utilities, and agricultural planners all rely on NOAA’s monthly climate data to calibrate their forecasts and allocate resources.
Pershing, the Climate Central analyst, noted in the AP report that the scale of the March anomaly was striking even by the standards of recent record-breaking years. Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy and a climate researcher at Texas Tech University, has said in public remarks that consecutive record-warm months compound risks for farmers and fire managers because ecosystems have less time to recover between heat events. That compounding effect is visible in NOAA’s own data: the three warmest Marches on record have now arrived back to back to back.
When record heat is publicly reframed as “cooling” without supporting evidence, it risks muddying the information environment that planning decisions depend on. The NOAA datasets do not prescribe policy responses, but they define the physical conditions within which any response must operate. Dismissing them does not lower the temperature; it only narrows the window for preparation.
How to check the data yourself
For readers who want to evaluate the competing claims directly, NOAA publishes monthly and annual temperature anomalies in exportable formats through its Climate at a Glance tool. The raw numbers can be loaded into any spreadsheet, charted, and compared across years or decades. The March 2026 domestic figures are fully documented in NOAA’s published national climate summary for the month. The global figures appear in a separate monthly report; the interactive download portal typically incorporates the newest month after a short processing lag.
Other major climate agencies maintain independent temperature records that can serve as cross-checks. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies publishes its own global analysis, and the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service produces the ERA5 reanalysis dataset. All three records, built from overlapping but not identical source data, have tracked closely for decades and all show the same broad trajectory: a planet accumulating heat, with recent years clustered at the top of the historical range.
Against that backdrop, a claim of “cooling” that arrives without a named source, a methodology, or a chart is not a conclusion. It is a question waiting for evidence that, as of May 2026, has not appeared.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
