Energy

Someone ‘Leaks’ Major Climate Study To NYT Fearing Trump Would Suppress It

New York Times (Credit: Torrenegra/Flickr, no changes made) https://flic.kr/p/5PUDGb

The New York Times obtained a copy of an unreleased “sweeping federal climate change report” that some government scientists feared the White House would suppress.

“One government scientist who worked on the report” told TheNYT on condition of anonymity “he and others were concerned that it would be suppressed.” The so-called National Climate Assessment will be released once the Trump administration approves it.

Thirteen federal agencies assemble the National Climate Assessment every four years to report on global warming’s impact in the U.S. and to predict what could happen down the road. The Obama administration published the last climate assessment in 2014.

“The average temperature in the United States has risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, and recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years,” TheNYT reported Monday evening.

The Times’ report is only the latest in a series of leaks to the media alleging President Donald Trump’s political appointees are muzzling federal researchers who work on global warming science.

Some activists even predicted Trump would delete scientific data counter to his views on global warming, though there’s so far been no evidence of the administration data tampering or silencing scientists.

Interestingly enough, a former Environmental Protection Agency official warned Obama administration holdovers had quietly pushed the National Climate Assessment to “parrot an alarmist view of the ‘settled’ science.”

“The Research Plan was published days before President Trump took office,” former EPA official David Schnare wrote in a recent op-ed.

“Both the Research Plan and the Assessment need to go back to ground zero and be redone, and a properly appointed [Office of Science and Technology Policy] leadership and staff have all the authority and tools needed to reexamine the science,” Schnare wrote.

TheNYT reports the unreleased climate assessment “directly contradicts claims by President Trump and members of his cabinet who say that the human contribution to climate change is uncertain and that the ability to predict the effects is limited.”

“How much more the climate will change depends on future emissions and the sensitivity of the climate system to those emissions,” reads the draft report obtained by TheNYT.

It’s not really clear how this one statement contradicts the Trump administration’s take on climate science, but The Times goes on to report “even if humans immediately stopped emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the world would still feel at least an additional 0.50 degrees Fahrenheit of warming over this century compared with today,” according to the draft assessment.

TheNYT also noted the draft assessment found “it is possible to attribute some extreme weather to climate change,” despite the problems with using model-based counterfactuals, especially on the regional level.

All in all, the draft climate report says it’s “extremely likely” that “more than half of the global mean temperature increase since 1951 can be linked to human influence,” TheNYT reported.

The White House did not respond To The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Update: NYT’s incorrectly reported they had exclusively obtained a draft copy of the NCA report. That’s incorrect, it’s been online for months now.

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