The administration proposed to reframe how the Fifth National Climate Assessment sees its worst-case scenarios after U.N. scientists said earlier this year that a worst-case scenario was not plausible.
In a notice published this week, the Trump administration described the federal climate report’s high-emission scenarios as not representing “plausible policy-relevant baseline futures and should not be used to frame expected, likely, central, or business-as-usual conditions for federal decision making.”
It instructed federal agencies not to treat the worst-case scenario as “expected, likely, baseline, business-as-usual, central, or policy-relevant.”
Last year, the Trump administration also scrubbed the site where the report could be found. However, earlier this year, former employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration republished the report on their own website, climate.us.
While it is no longer on a public government website, the report may still be used to inform federal decisionmaking.
Reached for comment, the White House directed The Hill to a Daily Wire article quoting Matthew Wielicki, who directs the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which puts out the report, as saying that “if you look at the last national climate assessment, NCA5, a lot of the impact statements, if not even a majority, in many chapters rely on these now implausible scenarios to kind of inform policymakers about how to respond to climate change.”
The Trump administration’s latest proposal met some pushback.
“This proposed amendment is a clear politicization of climate science,” said Carlos Martinez, senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, in a written statement.
“Dangerous feedback loops, such as the release of methane from melting permafrost, means there is still a significant chance of exceeding 4 degrees Celsius of warming this century, in the range of warming predicted by high-end emission scenarios."
Read more at TheHill.com.
