While Donald Trump is busily moving ahead with ordering red states to rig elections and taking over our cities, his administration’s war on science hasn’t been forgotten. Here’s a pretty horrible example that we almost missed, f’rinstance: Last week, Energy Secretary and former fracking CEO Chris Wright told CNN that the administration is “updating” the National Climate Assessments. The goal, Wright explained, is to go back and make all the previous reports, all the way to the first one in 2000, more amenable to the administration’s new version of science.
The administration earlier this year shitcanned all the scientists working on the Sixth National Climate Assessment, and apparently won’t bother publishing it at all. The NCA is a congressionally mandated overview of how climate change is affecting the US, written by hundreds of scientists — working without pay — in a carefully peer-reviewed process that takes place over four to five years. Each NCA collects the very best work of American climate scientists, reflecting the current scientific consensus on how planetary warming will impact human health, agriculture, water supplies, the economy, and air pollution. They also round up how the US is doing in reducing greenhouse gases and preparing to mitigate the effects of warming. Last month, the administration also shut down the website that hosted the reports, too.
Wright told CNN’s Caitlin Collins on “The Source” that the administration deep-sixed the reports because “we’re reviewing them, and we will come out with updated reports on those and with comments.” Translation: The reports need to be completely BLSed, like a recent “report” from Wright’s energy Department, as we’d always expected they’d be.
UPDATE: Hey, the 30-day public comment period for that report is still open. The Department does have to read all the comments and address them before ignoring them.
He also told Collins, with a straight face, that the conclusions of all five previous NCA reports “weren’t fair in broad-based assessments of climate change.” Like, they didn’t even mention that CO2 is what plants crave, and so we need a lot more of the stuff everywhere. So clearly, those reports need some fixin’.
Wright said that it simply made sense for the administration to tinker with 20 years of climate reports now, because that’s just what new fascist governments bent on remaking reality to conform with their ideology do, although he put it more vaguely, explaining, “When you get into departments and look at stuff that’s there and you find stuff that’s objectionable, you want to fix it.”
Besides, what his hand-picked team of five climate cranks did with their very special report, and will do to the previous NCAs, is no different from what the global scientific consensus on climate does, because it’s all about fairness and covering “both sides.”
“We want to have a real debate and discussion about climate change, and get away from the cancel-culture Orwellian, if you don’t say the thing that approved Climate Church says you’re silenced. That just crushed science. That just crushed progress.”
Secretary Wright is apparently unfamiliar with the real balance of the “debate” on climate, which John Oliver brilliantly illustrated way back in 2014 by talking to Bill Nye the Science Guy, then bringing out three climate deniers to debate him … as well as another 96 real scientists. (Subsequent research pushed that consensus to 99 percent, demonstrating that science is always reaching new conclusions based on better data. No rigorous study has reversed that finding.) We’ve cued up the segment to the key moment:
And of course, nobody’s “crushing” science by sticking to the established facts that greenhouse gases warm the planet, any more than NASA is engaging in “Orwellian cancel culture” by not hiring flat-earthers to program satellite orbits. At least not yet. Science is all about checking new data against the old, but that’s not what the Energy Department “report” was out to do. As Texas A & M atmospheric science professor Andrew Dessler put it, Wright’s handpicked guys assembled the equivalent of a “law brief from attorneys defending their client, carbon dioxide.” It put together the best evidence that CO2 is nothing to worry about, ignoring all the data showing otherwise. Wright didn’t mention that, and told Collins that his cherry-picked climate deniers had presented a “summary of what do we know from the data,” implying that it’s an actual scientific report.
Hilariously, Wright said his five “experts” only needed four months and no peer review — well, they read each other! — to overturn the established science on climate because they’ve “been commenting and writing on climate change for decades” and therefore could whip up “a reasonable overview of what we know in climate change” without re-examining all the science from step one.
The same will presumably go for any administration rewrite of the five National Climate Assessments, although after Wright appeared on CNN, Energy Department spokesperson Andrea Woods clarified, “The National Climate Reports are published by NOAA, not DOE. He was not suggesting he personally would be altering past reports.”
Actual climate scientists, understandably, were disgusted but not terribly surprised by Wright’s disclosure. Michael Mann, who directs the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, simply told the Guardian, “This is exactly what Joseph Stalin did.”
In a statement, Dr. Rachel Cleetus (if you search her name in an Apple browser, that would be a Cleetus Safari), the policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that Wright’s comments
“just confirmed our worst fears – that this administration plans to not just bury the scientific evidence but replace it with outright lies to downplay the worsening climate crisis and evade responsibility for addressing it. […]
“People across the country are already reeling from climate-fueled worsening heatwaves, floods, wildfires and storms. Lying about that reality doesn’t change it; it just leaves people in harm’s way.”
Cleetus, who was one of the lead researchers for the now shitcanned Sixth NCA, also called on Congress to take action to protect the NCA reports and restore scientific integrity, if it’s allowed to.
In his CNN interview, Wright also pretended the administration wasn’t hiding the science, don’t be ridiculous! Sure, the federal website hosting them is gone, but Wright insisted that if someone “can’t find the National Climate Assessment report, they just got to Google a little better.”
He is, of course, full of shit. The reports do remain online, but it takes some looking.
The top Google results for “national climate assessment,” including AI summaries, mostly link to the now-deleted federal site (you’ll get an error message), as do virtually all magazine articles previously written about the assessments before the site vanished. The easiest ways to find them now are at the Wikipedia page, now updated with archived versions of the five reports, and at the archive sites set up by various nonprofits, like this collection at the Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center.
Fortunately, Wright is right about one thing: The real science is still going forward, just outside the Trump administration, and shortly after the researchers working on NCA6 were given their walking papers, the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union announced an effort to produce a peer-reviewed collection of climate papers that would “sustain the momentum” of the suspended NCA project.
The fight for reality will continue.
EPA All Whoops Hahaha Global Warming What? Also F*ck You.
Planet Doesn’t Read Trump Press Releases, So Climate Change Remains A Thing
Oil And Fracking, Our Misunderstood Friends
[CNN transcript / Guardian / CNN / Guardian / SECAS Climate Assessment Report collection / AGU and AGS press release]
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