Trump administration proposes changes to Biden-era climate report

The Trump administration is looking to change a portion of a 2023 federal climate report.

The administration proposed to reframe how the Fifth National Climate Assessment sees its worst-case scenarios after U.N. scientists said earlier this year that a worst-case scenario was not plausible.

In a notice published this week , the Trump administration described the federal climate report’s high-emission scenarios as not representing “plausible policy-relevant baseline futures and should not be used to frame expected, likely, central, or business-as-usual conditions for federal decision making.”

It instructed federal agencies not to treat the worst-case scenario as “expected, likely, baseline, business-as-usual, central, or policy-relevant.”

Last year, the Trump administration also scrubbed the site where the report could be found. However, earlier this year, former employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration republished the report on their own website, climate.us .

While it is no longer on a public government website, the report may still be used to inform federal decisionmaking.

Reached for comment, the White House directed The Hill to a Daily Wire article quoting Matthew Wielicki, who directs the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which puts out the report, as saying that “if you look at the last national climate assessment, NCA5, a lot of the impact statements, if not even a majority, in many chapters rely on these now implausible scenarios to kind of inform policymakers about how to respond to climate change.”

Politico reported that Wielicki is a critic of climate science and assumed the role as head of the program earlier this year. Last year, the Trump administration dismissed the scientists working on the next iteration of the report.

The Trump administration’s latest proposal met some pushback.

“This proposed amendment is a clear politicization of climate science,” said Carlos Martinez, senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, in a written statement.

“Dangerous feedback loops, such as the release of methane from melting permafrost, means there is still a significant chance of exceeding 4 degrees Celsius of warming this century, in the range of warming predicted by high-end emission scenarios. Additionally, the latest science suggests that our climate may be more sensitive to emissions than we previously thought, which means that even lower emissions could ultimately induce significant warming similar to that assumed” in the scenarios the Trump administration won’t consider, Martinez added.

In a call with The Hill, Martinez also pointed out that climate scientists also stopped using their best-case climate scenario, saying the Trump administration was not similarly eliminating that consideration.

“It’s very interesting that this amendment is only focusing on the very high-end scenarios and not the low-end scenarios,” he said.

He said that changing the report was “unprecedented” and that the administration should instead make sure the next iteration of the report contains updated information.