Premier climate study frozen by Trump administration as researchers get the boot

The Trump administration has put the nation’s most comprehensive climate study on hold and told hundreds of scientists working on it that their services are no longer needed.

An estimated 400 researchers, most of them academic experts volunteering to produce the sixth National Climate Assessment, received a brief email from the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the White House office which oversees the production of the assessment, thanking them for their service.

“At this time, the scope of the NCA6 is currently being reevaluated,” the email states. “We are now releasing all current assessment participants from their roles.”

“How incredibly disappointing,” said Kristie Ebi, a global health researcher at the University of Washington and, until Monday, a coauthor of the assessment’s chapter on air quality. “Every country in the world is doing some version of a national climate assessment.”

“To remove all of that information is going to put people, communities, businesses, in difficult situations, unable to take actions that are needed, which ultimately then will mean more people, more places, more businesses will be harmed,” Ebi added.

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Congress mandated in 1990 that a National Climate Assessment be put out every four years by scientific experts to provide a comprehensive look at climate change, its impacts, and potential solutions.

The reports, written for a general audience, sum up the impacts of a hotter climate on each region of the United States and what people can do about it.

An outline for the sixth assessment, which was to be published in 2028, includes 32 chapters on topics including human health, national security, agriculture, water, forests, and oceans.

University of Washington senior scientist Meade Krosby was, until Monday, coauthoring the assessment’s chapter on the Pacific Northwest.

“I was hugely disappointed,” Krosby said, “because it's an honor to be able to serve the country in this way, to help protect our communities from these impacts that we're already feeling, that are getting worse.”

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The Global Change Research Program, which has had staff and funding cuts, did not respond to KUOW's requests for comment.

A banner across the top of the agency’s homepage states, “The operations and structure of the USGCRP are currently under review.”

It’s not the first time the White House has tried to quash the scientific report.

The first Trump administration released the 2018 assessment at 5 p.m. on the Friday after Thanksgiving in an apparent attempt to bury it.

In 2006, environmental groups successfully sued the Bush administration to force it to produce the second National Climate Assessment.

Ebi has worked on all six assessments over the past quarter century.

“We know that this is mandated by law,” she said. “I assume the next step is going to be probably a court challenge saying that you can't pause a national climate assessment.”

With the future of the assessment uncertain, Krosby said she was concerned that, with the experts removed, the White House may produce misinformation instead.

“They're either perhaps scrapping the report altogether or may have plans to produce a report of questionable scientific integrity. But either scenario leaves our communities less prepared to respond to climate risks,” Krosby said.

Trump has, famously and falsely, called climate change a hoax, while his top environment official, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, said in March that climate change was a “religion” that the administration was “driving a dagger straight into the heart of.”

During his first 100 days, Trump has attempted to broadly curtail regulations of fossil fuels and other pollution sources and stop funding work to slow, understand, or adapt to the world’s rapidly changing climate.