Energy Sec. Chris Wright said Tuesday night the Trump administration is updating the National Climate Assessments that have been previously published, which the administration recently removed from government websites.
“We’re reviewing them, and we will come out with updated reports on those and with comments on those reports,” Wright told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in an interview on “The Source.”
Wright dismissed the past reports, saying “they weren’t fair in broad-based assessments of climate change.”
“When you get into departments and look at stuff that’s there and you find stuff that’s objectionable, you want to fix it,” he said.
Energy spokesperson Andrea Woods said, “The National Climate Reports are published by NOAA, not DOE. He was not suggesting he personally would be altering past reports.”
The interagency process and publication is overseen by the US Global Change Research Program, which was established by Congress.
The National Climate Assessments are congressionally mandated research reports authored by hundreds of scientists and experts, intended to inform the country of the latest climate science and the current and future impacts of climate change in the US. The reports take years to research, draft and publish and go through multiple rounds of peer review, with all 13 federal agencies that conduct climate research. An independent National Academy of Sciences panel signs off on the content.
The first Trump administration signed off on and released the Fourth US National Climate Assessment in 2018, although it attempted to bury the report’s news by releasing it on Black Friday. The current administration has deleted all previous reports from government websites, fired the scientists working on the next iteration of the report, and recently issued a separate report compiled by five researchers that questioned the severity of climate change.
Altering or revising previously published assessments would be a significant escalation in the administration’s attempts to wipe credible climate science off the record.
“That would be a very unusual approach, especially given the process that went into creating these,” said scientist Zeke Hausfather, the climate research lead at financial services company Stripe, who helped author the Fifth National Climate Assessment.
Wright played a large role in commissioning a new federal report that questioned the severity of climate change, authored by five researchers who are well-known climate contrarians. The report was issued last week, in conjunction with a proposed regulatory repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment finding,” a 2009 scientific finding that human-caused climate change endangers human health and safety.
Wright told CNN that he hand-picked the four researchers and one economist who authored the Trump administration report: John Christy and Roy Spencer, both research scientists at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, Steven E. Koonin of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Georgia Tech professor emeritus Judith Curry and Canadian economist Ross McKitrick.
“I just made a list of who do I think are the true, honest scientists,” Wright said. “I made a list of about a dozen of them that I thought were very senior and very well respected. I called the top five, and everyone said yes.”
Compared to the National Climate Assessments and international climate science reports that take years to compile and review, the recent DOE report took just two months to produce. It is now undergoing a public comment process.
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