Trump team’s search for climate science sceptics
Move follows Trump’s anger over report’s findings
The White House plans to create an ad hoc group of select federal scientists to reassess the Government’s analysis of climate science and counter its conclusions that the continued burning of fossil fuels is harming the planet, according to three Administration officials.
The National Security Council initiative would include scientists who question the severity of climate impacts and the extent to which humans contribute to the problem, according to these individuals, who asked for anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. The group would not be subject to the same level of public disclosure as a formal advisory committee.
The move would represent the Trump Administration’s most forceful effort to date to challenge the scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are helping drive global warming and that the world could face dire consequences unless countries curb their carbon output over the next few decades.
The idea of a new working group, which top Administration officials discussed on Saturday in the White House Situation Room, represents a modified version of an earlier plan to establish a federal advisory panel on climate and national security. That plan — championed by William Happer, an NSC senior director and a physicist who has challenged the idea that carbon dioxide could damage the planet — would have created an independent federal advisory committee.
The Federal Advisory Committee Act imposes several ground rules for such panels, including that they meet in public, are subject to public records requests and include a representative membership.
The new working group would not be subject to any of those requirements.
While the plan is not finalised, NSC officials said they would take steps to assemble a group of researchers within the Government. The group will not be tasked with scrutinising recent intelligence community assessments of climate change, according to officials familiar with the plan.
The National Security Council declined requests to comment on the matter.
During the meeting, these officials said, deputy national security adviser Charles Kupperman said President Donald Trump was upset that his Administration in November had issued the National Climate Assessment, which must be published regularly under federal law.
Kupperman added that congressional Democrats had seized upon the report, which is the product of more than a dozen agencies, to bolster their case for cutting carbon emissions as part of their Green New Deal.
Attendees at the session, which included Acting Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and senior officials from throughout the Government, debated how best to establish a group of researchers that could scrutinise recent federal climate reports. More than one participant suggested that they might face a challenge establishing an independent outside panel that would question central findings of the National Climate Assessment and other landmark federal reports, said one official familiar with the discussion.
Happer, who headed an advocacy group called the CO2 Coalition before joining the Administration last year, has challenged the scientific consensus on climate change inside and outside of government.
Public records show the coalition, which describes its mission as informing policymakers and the public of the “important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy”, has received money from far-right organisations and donors with fossil fuel interests.
In 2017, according to federal tax filings obtained by the Climate Investigations Centre, the group received US$170,000 ($247,675) from the Mercer Family Foundation and more than US$33,000 from the Charles Koch Institute.
One senior administration official said the president was looking for “a mixture of opinions” and disputed the National Climate Assessment, a massive interagency report, in November that described intensifying climate change as a threat to the United States.
“The President wants people to be able to decide for themselves,” the aide said.
Several scientists, however, said the federal Government’s recent findings on climate change had received intense scrutiny from other researchers in the field before they became public.
Christopher Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute who served on the National Academy of Sciences review panel for the scientific report that formed the basis of last year’s climate assessment, said the committee met several times “to do a careful, page by page evaluation by the entire report”.
“The whole review process is confrontational from the very get-go, but it’s based in scientific credibility, in a traceable chain of evidence through publications,” said Field, an earth system science and biology professor.
Government researchers in a range of disciplines have identified climate change as a serious threat for the past two decades, under Republican and Democratic administrations.