What happened: A major inter-agency report on climate change, the Fifth
National Climate Assessment, had a key step – the solicitation of authors –
delayed for several months by the Trump administration.
Why it matters: The National Climate Assessment is one of the government’s
most important efforts to provide the latest scientific information to the
public about climate change. Delaying an important step in this report’s
production process will impede the ability of the report to be released in a
timely manner. As a result, our future response to combating the harmful and
widespread impacts of climate change will be undermined since decisionmakers
will face delays in obtaining the best available climate science.
The Trump administration delayed the solicitation of
authors for
several months for one of the government’s most important reports on climate
change, the Fifth National Climate Assessment. The National Climate
Assessment
is a report that is mandated by Congress every four years to assess the “state
of the Union” about climate change. It is unclear how delays in recruiting
climate scientists will affect the lengthy production of the report and
previous versions of the report
have also faced delays and missed the four-year mark.
According to the timeline on the report’s official
website, the call for authors should have
been completed in the Spring/Summer of 2020. On October 5, Donald Wuebbles – a
climate scientist at the University of Illinois – who was one of the authors of
the previous version of the report (the Fourth National Climate Assessment)
sounded the alarm to E&E News. The
Trump administration still had not issued a call in the Federal Register for
researchers to produce the fifth version of the report. According to Wuebbles,
“It's not being approved to go out, so therefore they're just sitting on it. And
I don't know if it's NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] or
the White House, but somebody's sitting on it, so that's just holding up getting
up the NCA 5 going.”
This delay led to public outcry for the administration to carry out this
important step. For instance, the Center for Biological
Diversity
filed a Freedom of Information Act request on October 13 to seek records on
delays in preparing the Fifth National Climate Assessment. On October 15, NASA
published the request for authors in the Federal
Register
and opened the submission process for 30 days. According to
Wuebbles,
Kelvin Droegemeier, the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy
(OSTP), was doing everything he could behind the scenes to ensure that the
report proceeded smoothly. However, Wuebbles was still concerned that political
interference could affect the process.
There are major reasons to suspect that the Trump administration is trying to
politically interfere with the Fifth National Climate Assessment. In late
October, the Trump administration removed Craig McLean, NOAA’s chief
scientist,
from his position and replaced him with Ryan Maue. In the past, Maue has
criticized climate scientists for what he called unnecessarily dire predictions.
Maue’s hiring in late September coincided with the White House installing David
Legates – who has claimed that rising carbon dioxide levels would make the earth
more hospitable to humans – to a senior position at NOAA. According to Science
magazine,
Trump administration officials approached multiple researchers that had a
history of questioning or denying aspects of climate change in order to
undermine mainstream science at NOAA. According to people with close ties to the
Trump administration, the primary
goals
of these three individuals were to undercut the Fifth National Climate
Assessment.
In 2018, the Trump administration tried to undercut the Fourth National Climate
Assessment by releasing the report on the day after Thanksgiving. According to
one former administration official, William Happer, the release date was
purposefully chosen to bury its
findings and that President Trump
was angered after the report’s release. Trump administration officials then
spent months preparing an adversarial
review of the report’s findings.
President Trump later scuttled the effort but said that he may revive it after
the November election.
The National Climate
Assessment
integrates and synthesizes hundreds of peer reviewed studies related to climate
change and is vetted by 13 federal agencies. It is designed to inform the nation
about already observed climate changes, the current status of the climate, and
anticipated trends for the future. The National Climate Assessment’s importance
to decisionmakers, the public, and scientists is hard to overemphasize, as the
report often serves as an underlying basis for policymaking at all levels of
governments; establishes consistent methods for evaluating climate impacts; and,
provides authoritative, vetted, and reliable information for understanding and
communicating climate change science and impacts in the US.
The Trump administration’s decision to delay a key step in this important and
congressionally-mandated climate report will likely delay the report’s release
or otherwise hamper the report’s production process. The impacts of climate
change, such as more intense hurricanes and mega wildfires, are already being
seen today and therefore a delay in the publication of the Fifth National
Climate Assessment is likely to cause a delay in using the best available
science to combat this growing threat.