The National Climate Assessment, the United States’ main contribution to climate knowledge, stands out for many reasons: Hundreds of scientists from the federal government and academia join forces to compile the best available insights into climate change. The results, released only twice a decade or more, shape years of government decisions.
Now, as time goes by in President Trump’s time in office, climate assessment has gained a new distinction: it is one of the few major climate initiatives that his government has tried, but largely failed, to undermine.
How the Trump White House tried to put its mark on the report, and why these efforts failed, demonstrates the resilience of federal climate science, despite random government efforts to stop it. This article is based on interviews with nearly a dozen current and former government officials and others familiar with the process.
In November, the government removed the person responsible for the next edition of the report and replaced him with someone who underestimated climate science, although by now it seems to be too late. But efforts began in 2018, when officials pushed a senior official and relied on scientists to soften their conclusions – the scientists refused – and then tried to bury the report, which also didn’t work.
“Thank God they didn’t know how to run a government,” said Thomas Armstrong, who during the Obama administration led the United States’ Global Change Research Program, which produces the assessment. “It could have been much worse.”
What makes the failure to hinder climate assessment notable is that Mr. Trump has prioritized reducing efforts to tackle climate change. And on most fronts, it has succeeded, reversing dozens of environmental rules, relaxing restrictions on air pollution and opening up new land for oil and gas drilling.
The national assessment has a unique highlight, bringing together the work of scientists from all over the federal government. The law requires a new one every four years.
For Trump, who called climate change a scam, the assessment posed a particular challenge. Trying to politicize or reject climate science is one thing when the warnings come from Democrats or academics. But this report comes from the government agencies themselves.
The first evidence of this tension came in the summer of 2018, when federal scientists completed the fourth National Climate Assessment. The report warned that climate change would jeopardize public security and economic growth. And he said that cutting emissions “can substantially reduce climate-related risks,” in contradiction to the Trump administration’s efforts to reverse those cuts.
Stuart Levenbach, a political appointee who was then chief of staff for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who oversees the assessment, pressured the scientists preparing the document to smooth out the findings in his report summary, according to people involved in the discussions.
Levenbach, who is now a senior adviser to the White House National Economic Council, said in a statement that he simply wanted the summary to be clearer about the assumptions on which it was based on future emissions.
The career team refused to make these changes. That refusal came at a cost: Virginia Burkett, a climate scientist at the US Geological Survey who was president of the Global Change Research Program, was forced to step down. Even so, the language of the report remained intact.
The White House referred questions about Dr. Burkett to the Geological Survey. A spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.
The government then released the document the day after Thanksgiving, in an apparent attempt to minimize attention. (A White House spokeswoman, who declined to be identified by name, said by email: “The day after Thanksgiving is a federal work day, and it is not uncommon for federal business to be conducted in days close to federal holidays. ”)
This approach backfired: many news organizations interpreted the moment as proof of the report’s importance, giving it prominent coverage.
Having failed to change or bury the report, Trump and his senior officials tried to reject it.
President Trump, asked about the conclusions of the assessment that global warming could devastate the economy, replied: “I don’t believe it.” His press secretary at the time, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said the assessment “was not based on facts”. Ryan Zinke, who was secretary of the interior at the time, said his findings emphasized “the worst case scenario”.
After the climate assessment was issued, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, which oversees the Global Change Research Program, decided it was best to stop talking about it, according to the people involved.
The office suspended any activities that could draw attention to the assessment. Additional reports, meant as periodic updates, have stopped being released. Plans for the authors to meet with local authorities in places threatened by climate change and discuss their findings have been shelved.
The White House spokeswoman called the descriptions of the White House actions “false”. She declined a request to make senior officials involved in the assessment available for an interview.
Urging the team not to talk about his work has managed to keep him off the radar of Trump and his senior officials, at least for a while. It helped that energy lobbyists focused on the actions of other parts of the government, whose regulations directly affected their business.
But the decision to avoid attention came at a cost, officials say, by reducing public awareness of the report’s findings and delaying work on the next one.
Another White House decision would also help keep the climate assessment out of the news: the head of the science office, Kelvin Droegemeier, delayed the launch of the next issue, to 2023 from 2022, according to people familiar with his decision. .
The Global Change Research Program website now says the “expected delivery” for the next report is 2023. The White House spokeswoman said the final timetable has not been set.
But that delay had a silver lining, said Jesse Keenan, a professor at Tulane University who edited two chapters for the previous assessment. Each report is based on the scientific research on which it is based – and under Trump’s administration, new climate research has slowed, Keenan said.
Delaying the launch of the next assessment “will give us the opportunity to catch our breath and get some production next year” from federal scientists, he said.
This year, the White House turned its attention to assessing the climate.
An important step in the creation of each new version is the call for authors, who shape the tone of the report. That warning, which usually also provides an outline of what topics will be covered, was postponed for months by the Trump administration, according to several people familiar with the decision. And when it was finally released in October, the language had changed: political appointees withdrew information on specific topics to be addressed.
Federal scientists concerned about the change have signaled a plan to truncate the scope of the assessment – allowing the government to comply with the letter of the law, while avoiding topics that might go against what the White House wants to hear.
The White House spokeswoman said that “organizing information into specific chapters remains a work in progress”.
These concerns were heightened in November, when the White House removed the head of the Global Change Research Program, Michael Kuperberg, a climate scientist at the Department of Energy. Dr. Kuperberg was replaced by David Legates, appointed by Trump at NOAA, who previously worked closely with groups that deny climate change.
The Department of Energy did not respond to a request for comment.
A second NOAA political official, Ryan Maue, who criticized climate scientists for what he called unnecessarily dire predictions, was transferred to a position at the White House that gave him authority over the climate program.
The nominations generated anxiety among scientists, who feared it would represent a government effort to learn from the failure to alter the previous assessment, installing supporters who could shape the next edition.
The White House declined to make Dr. Legates or Dr. Maue available for an interview.
But several people familiar with the process say it may not be too late for some type of bird maria to pass through the Trump administration – for example, rushing to select authors who can minimize the science of climate change or try to present that science as uncertain. This would force the Biden government to circumvent these authors or remove them, potentially inciting a political struggle.
But the most likely outcome, say current and former employees, is that recent hires are another example of how the Trump administration’s agenda has been hampered by its own shortcomings – the inability to understand how the programs he wanted to undermine really work, or change too late to make a difference.
The government should have acted earlier to put its stamp on climate assessment, said Judith Curry, a former president of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, who said she had contacted Maue and other officials.
“He just didn’t make the priority list,” said Curry. “Why they started doing this at the 11th hour, I honestly don’t know.”
John Holdren, who as President Obama’s scientific adviser helped oversee the climate assessment process, said he believed the Biden administration would be able to put him back on track and keep anyone who tried to undermine him.
“The remaining climate wafflers from the Trump period at any of the relevant agencies will be removed,” said Holdren. “Or, if that is not possible, stop.”