White House to Select Federal Scientists to Re-Evaluate Government Climate Results, Says Sources

The White House plans to create a special group of selected federal scientists to reassess the government's climate analysis and counter its findings that the continued burning of fossil fuels is hurting the planet, say three government officials .

The National Security Council's initiative would include scientists who question the severity of climate impacts and the extent to which humans contribute to the problem, according to these people, who asked for anonymity for discuss internal deliberations. The group would not be subject to the same level of public disclosure as a formal advisory committee.

This decision would be the most powerful effort the Trump administration has made so far to challenge the scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions contribute to global warming and that the world could face to terrible consequences if countries do not reduce their carbon production in the coming decades.

The idea of ​​a new working group, discussed Friday in the White House meeting room and evoked by senior administration officials, represents a modified version of a previous plan to create a federal advisory committee on climate and national security. This plan – advocated by William Happer, NSC's principal director and physicist who disputed the idea that carbon dioxide could harm the planet – would have created an independent federal advisory committee.

The Federal Advisory Committees Act imposes a number of ground rules for these committees, including that they meet in public, that they are subject to requests for public registers, and that their members are representative.

Although the plan is not finalized, NSC officials have announced that they will take steps to establish a group of researchers within the government. The group will not be tasked to analyze recent assessments of climate change by the intelligence community, according to officials familiar with the plan.

The National Security Council refused requests for comment.

[Champion of new White House climate group calls CO2 ‘not a pollutant’]

At the meeting on Friday, officials said Deputy National Security Advisor Charles Kupperman said Trump was unhappy that his administration had published the national climate assessment, which must be published regularly. under federal law. Kupperman added that Congressional Democrats had seized the report, produced by more than a dozen agencies, to advocate for a reduction in carbon emissions under the Green New Deal.

Session participants, which included Acting Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt, and senior officials from across the government, debated how best to create a group of researchers to examine the issues. recent federal climate reports.

Happer, who led a pressure group called CO2 Coalition before joining the administration in the fall, challenged the scientific consensus on climate change within and outside the government.

The public records show that the coalition, which describes its mission as informing policymakers and the public of "the important contribution carbon dioxide makes to our lives and the economy," received the award. money from far-right organizations and donors with interests in fossil fuels.

In 2017, according to federal tax returns obtained by the Climate Investigations Center, the group had received $ 170,000 from the Mercer Family Foundation and over $ 33,000 from the Charles Koch Institute.

A senior administration official said the president was seeking "a mixture of opinions" and challenged a massive inter-agency report issued in November that described the intensification of climate change as a threat to states. -United.

"The president wants people to decide for themselves," said the assistant.

Several scientists, however, have stated that recent federal findings on climate change had have been carefully reviewed by other researchers in the field prior to publication.

Christopher Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute and a member of the review committee of the scientific report that served as the basis for the climate assessment of the National Academy of Sciences last year, said that the committee had met several times "to make a careful assessment page by page throughout the report. "

"The entire review process is conflictual from the start, but it is based on scientific credibility, on a chain of evidence traceable through publications," said Field, a professor of Earth Sciences and Biology.

Trump officials had considered the possibility of conducting a "red team" exercise on climate change, an idea advocated by Scott Pruitt, then head of the Environmental Protection Agency, during first months of administration. The White House assistants, including John F. Kelly, then chief of staff, blocked this idea and at one point discussed the opportunity to "ignore" the climate research being conducted. by federal scientists.

Government researchers from various disciplines have identified climate change as a serious threat over the past two decades, under Republican and Democratic administrations.

In 2003, the Pentagon commissioned a report on the impact of a sudden change in climate on America's defense capabilities: the authors concluded that it "should be erected beyond the scientific debate in America". rank of national security concern of the United States.

Last year, an army-funded study warned against rising sea levels and other climate impacts could make more than a thousand low islands of 39; ;Pacific Ocean "Inhabitable" mid-century, including an atoll with a missile defense site.

Last month, the National Intelligence Director released a global assessment of the threats that "climate hazards", including extreme weather, forest fires, droughts and ocean acidification, are likely to occur. aggravate, "threatening infrastructure, health, water security and food security".

Judith Curry, a former Georgia Tech climatologist, who Republicans wanted to testify on climate change because she often pointed out the remaining uncertainties, said in an e-mail that she supported the idea of An independent evaluation of government climate reports, provided that participants a range of perspectives and are not activists on both sides of the debate.

Retired Vice Admiral David Titley, who was a marine oceanographer and chief of operations for the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, said the new initiative could endanger national security by obscuring "truthful assessments" risks related to the changing climate ".

"I would never have thought of living the day in the United States where our own White House is attacking the scientific agencies that can help the president understand and manage the climate risks that threaten the security of the country." "Today and tomorrow," said Titley, sitting on the advisory board of the Center for Climate and Security, a nonpartisan group focused on climate – related risks. "Such attacks are anti-American."