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https://www.eenews.net/articles/its-the-gold-standard-of-us-climate-research-contrarians-could-write-the-next-one/

It’s the gold standard of US climate research. Contrarians could write the next one.

By Scott Waldman | 12/22/2025

Researchers who have downplayed the threat of global warming have been asked to author the next National Climate Assessment.

The Trump administration has invited a small group of climate contrarians to help write the next installment of the National Climate Assessment, the nation’s preeminent report on global warming, says one of the researchers involved.

The move would advance efforts by the White House to inject widely disputed ideas about climate change into the federal government’s official appraisal of global warming. And it would almost certainly provoke a response from the hundreds of mainstream climate scientists who have worked for years on the National Climate Assessment.

Judith Curry, a former climatologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is one of the climate contrarians in line for the new assignment. Earlier this year, Curry joined with four like-minded researchers to produce a separate report for Energy Secretary Chris Wright that downplayed the threat of global warming and called into question the basic tenets of climate science.

Now Curry says that same team — known as the Climate Working Group — has been asked to write the next installment of the National Climate Assessment, or NCA, a congressionally mandated report that comes out every few years and outlines the many ways that global warming is expected to impact the United States and its people.

“The Climate Working Group has been contacted about the NCA,” said Curry, who added that she was open to the idea. “Personally, I would work with whoever’s in charge to get a reasonable outline and get reasonable authors.”

Curry said she expected all five members of the Climate Working Group to work on the National Climate Assessment.

Three of the other authors did not respond to requests for comment from POLITICO’s E&E News. The fourth, Canadian economist Ross McKitrick, said late Sunday that he had not yet been contacted about working on the assessment but declined to comment as to whether he would participate in the next version.

Curry also said that the Trump administration was looking to revive the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the initiative in charge of producing the National Climate Assessment. Earlier this year, the Trump administration dismantled the program and dismissed hundreds of scientists who were already at work on the sixth version of the National Climate Assessment.

Curry said the new effort is starting to take shape. She said the Trump administration already has interviewed candidates for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, and she expected the administration would name a new program chief as soon as next month.

“I think in January, we should have a director of the USGCRP in place,” she said.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment from E&E News. Nor did the Energy Department nor the Office of Management and Budget.

But there’s at least one other sign the Trump administration is looking to write a new version of the National Climate Assessment.

Ryan Maue, who served as chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration during the first Trump administration, said last week on the social media site X that he was working on the new climate report.

He described it as a “volunteer effort” and said it would be “mostly completed before end of 2025.”

Maue did not respond to requests for comment from E&E News. But he wrote on X that he was enlisting artificial intelligence to help with the latest National Climate Assessment. He cited the Gemini 3 Pro program as well as Grok, an AI chatbot developed by xAI, the artificial intelligence company led by tech tycoon Elon Musk.

Grok in the past has downplayed the danger of global warming when compared with other AI programs.

The Trump administration’s push to revive the National Climate Assessment and resurrect the U.S. Global Change Research Program adds a new twist to the complicated history of the long-running research effort.

The program was created by Congress in 1990 and signed into law by Republican President George H.W. Bush. Its most visible product is the National Climate Assessment, which comes out roughly every four years and is used to help shape environmental rules, legislation and infrastructure projects.

Five installments of the National Climate Assessment have been published since 2000. The reports explore more than just climate change — they also examine land productivity, water resources, fisheries, ecosystems and the atmosphere.

But earlier this year, the Trump administration fired the federal employees who work for the research program — and it was effectively shuttered. The administration also deleted interactive webpages for the first five versions of the National Climate Assessment and then buried the documents on government websites.

The moves prompted a sharp outcry from the scientific community in part because the National Climate Assessment has earned a reputation for top-notch research. The document includes hundreds of peer-reviewed studies to inform its conclusions, and it relies on the work of hundreds of scientists to write its contents and review its findings.

In contrast, the Energy Department report written by Curry and her colleagues involved a much smaller group of researchers.

Her four co-authors were: McKitrick; Steven Koonin, a former chief scientist for BP who also served as an undersecretary at the Energy Department during the Obama administration; as well as John Christy and Roy Spencer, atmospheric scientists at the University of Alabama, Huntsville.

One climate scientist said the size of that group was indicative of how far the team members’ views fall outside the scientific consensus.

“Serious experts agree and action (on climate change) is needed as soon as possible,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University who has served as a lead author on multiple versions of the National Climate Assessment.

If the Trump administration wants “people who are not going to tell them those truths,” she added, “those are the only people they have.”

The Energy Department report written by Curry and the rest of the Climate Working Group has been roundly criticized by climate scientists for its reliance on cherry-picked data and its omission of research that disproved its claims.

Scientists whose work was cited in the report said their research was distorted and manipulated. Dozens of scientists produced a 450-page report challenging its claims, and the National Academies offered its own rebuttal of the report as well.

Hayhoe said it’s critical the United States and its leaders get a clear-eyed view of climate change and its impacts.

“This is a matter of safety, security, well being, resilience and preparation for a better future for everyone,” she said. “Regardless of where they live and regardless of how they vote.”

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EPA attacks climate science. Here are the facts.

by Chelsea Harvey, Scott Waldman | 07/30/2025 06:20 AM EDT

EXPERIENCE E&E NEWS FIRSTHAND

REF

E AND E POL

Meet the scientists Trump could tap to undermine climate regulations

:{By Scott Waldman, Zack Colman | 03/19/2025 :

Some downplay the threat of global warming. Others question the efficacy of climate policy. All could be of interest to the new administration.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has made it his mission to destroy what he calls the “holy grail” of U.S. climate policy.

But President Donald Trump’s EPA chief can’t do it alone. To smash the holy grail, Zeldin needs help from a rare kind of scientist — the kind who believes climate change isn’t that bad or might even be good for humanity.

Those scientists aren’t easy to find. The overwhelming scientific consensus is that the burning of fossil fuels is heating up Earth, and the planet’s rapid change is putting people at risk for a wide range of calamities — from more extreme storms to rising sea levels to more intense heat waves.

Those threats underpin what’s known as the “endangerment finding” — Zeldin’s holy grail. The 2009 declaration by EPA made clear that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are the root cause of climate change, and that EPA has the authority to regulate them under the Clean Air Act because they can harm human health.

The endangerment finding has empowered EPA to establish landmark climate regulations, including limits on the emissions produced by cars or power plants. Rolling back these regulations — and the endangerment finding itself — would require an attack on the climate science that serves as their foundation.

Enter the climate naysayers.

The Trump administration is looking to recruit scientists who could cast doubt on climate science or climate policy, or who view global warming as either a small inconvenience or a boon to humankind.

Once selected, these scientists could add their perspective to a bedrock climate report that comes out every few years, known as the National Climate Assessment. Their contributions to the report, in turn, could be cited as evidence in future efforts to undermine the endangerment finding — all of which would make it easier to quash climate regulations.

The scientists even could help author a second endangerment finding. A Trump-era endangerment finding might, for example, selectively highlight areas of doubt in climate science or tout the perceived benefits of global warming.

To do that, a Trump-approved body of climate findings would center around future scenarios based on lower carbon scenarios than the world is currently experiencing.

It also could emphasize less severe climate trajectories than those envisioned in the original finding, said Roger Pielke Jr., a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

“Being able to tease out signals of human-caused climate change in extreme weather — which everybody cares about — are going to be much more challenging with a lower emissions trajectory than a higher one,” said Pielke Jr., who is not involved in any of the efforts and has questioned how scientists can link human-driven warming to specific extreme weather events.

There is a relatively small pool of researchers who could — or would be willing to — engage in such an effort because it would misrepresent decades of climate science by the world’s top science agencies.

“It’s a very small group of people. It’s the same people who have been there for the last 20 years,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University. “It’s this endlessly recycled group of people who have been making the same arguments that are unable to convince anybody in the scientific community.”

The White House has not announced its plan yet nor the researchers who might be involved, and it did not respond to a request for comment.

In a statement, an EPA spokesperson said that as “part of this reconsideration process, EPA will leverage the expertise of the White House Budget Office, including the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other relevant agencies.”

Here are some of the scientists who have spent years downplaying climate risks or criticizing climate regulations, and could be tapped by the Trump administration to help Zeldin destroy the “holy grail” of U.S. climate policy.

David Legates

David Legates (second from right) appears at a 2016 event in Washington. | Kris Connor/AFP via Getty Images MORANO

Legates likely would be a key leader. He has worked with Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought on a series of proposals to tear down NOAA and to recruit industry and think tank researchers that oppose climate rules to write a government science report.

The two men authored a key chapter outlining their plans in the Project 2025 conservative policy playbook.

Legates, who was the former state climatologist for Delaware until he was asked to step down, served as a top NOAA official in Trump’s first term. He was also detailed to the Office of Science and Technology Policy, but was later removed from that position after attempting to publish a series of research memos that distorted climate science.

For years, Legates has turned a partisan lens to research, claiming that climate change will benefit humanity while climate policy will hurt people. He is affiliated with the Cornwall Alliance, a group of conservative Christian scholars “dedicated to educating the public and policymakers about Biblical earth stewardship.”

Legates declined to comment for this story.

Steve Kooni

Koonin, a New York University physicist and former top scientist at BP, has long pushed to conduct a “red team, blue team” review of climate science, which would pit two groups of scientists against each other to debate a scientific report, such as the National Climate Assessment.

One group would defend the report while the other would highlight its alleged scientific weaknesses. Koonin worked on putting together the effort during the first Trump administration, but the project was eventually scuttled by the White House because some officials were concerned about Trump’s reelection chances.

Koonin said he would prefer to take on the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to highlight areas of doubt.

“Anything that I can do to help make the science more transparent, you know, that’s been my goal, and remains my goal, for a long time,” he said.

Richard Lindzen

The retired Massachusetts Institute of Technology atmospheric scientist told POLITICO that he would “of course” help the Trump administration challenge the endangerment finding. Lindzen was dismayed that the red team, blue team exercise to publicly debate established climate science never took off during Trump’s first term.

A longtime critic of accepted climate science, Lindzen applauded Zeldin for calling “bullshit” on a “fake issue” of the severity of rising temperatures. But he acknowledged there may be little upside given how much the scientific community has supported the conclusion that human activity is driving climate change, even if he disagrees with it.

Lindzen argued the courts may offer the most direct route, where he said EPA should argue there “was never any evidence in the first place” to suggest greenhouse gases meet a legally defined standard of dangerous.

“I have no idea what they’re going to do,” he said. “But I think it’s pretty obvious when Trump is running on the issue of ‘Drill, baby drill,’ that he is not going to pay any attention to what is claimed to be the science.”

Ryan Maue

Maue has not had any communication with the Trump administration about serving in any science advisory or agency role, he wrote in a text message. But the libertarian meteorologist would be a natural fit: He served at NOAA and the Office of Science and Technology Policy in Trump’s first term.

Maue agrees that humans are warming the planet, but he has pushed back against stringent government policies to rein in greenhouse gases.

He has often used his large social media following on X to dispute the connections between climate change and specific extreme weather events. He has repeatedly cautioned that the world is not following the worst-case scenario climate trajectory, calling it “highly implausible” — a view that could align with Trump administration thinking to emphasize less dire forecasts.

Judith Curry

Curry said she would help the Trump administration reconsider the endangerment finding if she could work from home, but noted there’s been no outreach from Trump’s team.

The Georgia Tech professor emerita argued the original endangerment finding was “politically driven,” and that its reliance on worst-case climate scenarios compelled more drastic policy than necessary. Despite U.S. greenhouse gas reductions falling 17 percent below 2005 levels, the nation is still off-track of the U.S. share of reductions needed to stabilize global temperatures.

An additional 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit of warming by 2100 — which is aligned with current trajectories — “isn’t a big deal because it’s what we’ve seen over the last 100 years, and we’re doing just fine,” said Curry, who is now president of consulting firm Climate Forecast Applications Network.

Scientists have said such increases have brought and would bring massive biodiversity loss, more intense extreme weather events, deadlier heat waves and economic harm through natural disaster damage, lost labor productivity, food insecurity and deteriorating health.

While Curry said there are “plenty of reasons not to like fossil fuels” and that clean energy investment is needed, she claimed “policy isn’t going to help here.” An endangerment finding that reflected less severe consequences for failing to deal with climate change “takes away the urgency for doing all of this” through government policy, she said.

John Christy

Christy is a climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a former lead IPCC author. He has questioned whether humans are driving the observed warming trends in recent decades — something the world’s top science agencies have long confirmed.

He opposed the endangerment finding in 2009 and has questioned the climate models on which it was based in congressional testimony. He is also a longtime proponent of applying a red team, blue team exercise to climate science.

Christy said he believed he could identify weaknesses in the first endangerment finding and that he could use research from the last 15 years to further his argument if the Trump administration pursued a second endangerment finding.

“I would like to see a very clear demonstration that climate models are not capable of telling us about the future of climate to the level of the CO2 forcing that is occurring in the atmosphere,” he said.

In fact, climate scientists have tested the models on which they rely and have found a notable amount of accuracy, particularly the latest versions, which are far more sophisticated than the models of the past.

Will Happer

Happer was part of Trump’s National Security Council in the first term, who mostly worked on classified military projects. He is a professor emeritus of physics at Princeton University, though not a climate scientist.

Happer is one of the few scientists who have given Trump a briefing on climate research, though his views are not supported by the world’s leading science agencies. Happer has long cast doubt on the role humans play in driving global warming and has been a vociferous opponent of climate policy.

In Trump’s first term, Happer worked on the effort to conduct an adversarial review of climate science with Koonin. After that effort was torpedoed by White House officials, Trump told Happer that he wanted to bring him back for a red team, blue team effort in his second term. Trump even discussed a potential nationally televised science “debate,” Happer told POLITICO.

“If I see an opportunity to help, I will,” Happer said. “I think it’s long overdue.”

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OMG inside the wire

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/10/trump-climate-change-denial-noaa

w/ Election Day just a single-digit number of days away, the Trump administration is moving on what could be their final chance to undermine government action against climate change. President Donald Trump recently delivered a series of blows to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the New York Times reported, starting with ousting the agency’s acting chief scientist last month. 

NOAA’s chief of staff Erik Noble, a former White House policy adviser and one of several employees recently installed by the Trump administration, removed agency scientist Craig McLean after McLean sent an email to some of the new appointees requesting their acknowledgement of the agency’s rules on scientific integrity, which “prohibits manipulating research or presenting ideologically driven findings.” Noble responded with an ask: “Respectfully, by what authority are you sending this to me?” McLean answered that as acting chief scientist, he was responsible for ensuring the scientific integrity policy was upheld. The next day, Noble wrote back to tell McLean that “you no longer serve as the acting chief scientist for NOAA” and that his replacement had already been appointed.

McLean’s replacement is Ryan Maue, a research meteorologist who, per the Times, “has criticized climate scientists for what he has called unnecessarily dire predictions.” Maue is not the only climate-change critic among the new political hires: David Legates, a University of Delaware professor who, like Trump, has long questioned the existence of human-caused global warming, joined as deputy assistant secretary last month, a role that reportedly did not exist before his appointment. “The positions that these individuals are in gives them the perfect opportunity to suppress, distort and cherry-pick information to make it whatever the party line is,” Jane Lubchenco, a former Obama-era NOAA administrator, said of the recent appointments. The eleventh-hour replacement is in line with Trump’s desired purge of the FBI, CIA, and Pentagon, post-election plans reported by Axios last week.

The Times notes that the NOAA “has, so far, remained remarkably independent in its ability to conduct research about and publicly discuss changes to the Earth’s climate” under an administration known for rolling back environmental protections and questioning climate science.But the freedom that the agency has enjoyed is now threatened under the administration’s recent changes, which are reportedly aimed at undercutting the National Climate Assessment, an account the government is legally required to issue every four years that sets the standard for American knowledge about climate change and underpins federal regulations to combat it.If Trump is re-elected, further changes at the NOAA reportedly include replacing longtime authors of the report with writers who argue against accepted facts about climate science, as well as “shifting NOAA funding to researchers who reject the established scientific consensus on climate change and eliminating the use of certain scientific models that project dire consequences for the planet if countries do little to reduce carbon dioxide pollution.”

Along with McLean’s removal, the installment of staff who have argued against accepted facts about global warming, and the threatened credibility of the climate assessment, the Trump administration is also placing restrictions on internal and external messages at the agency. The policy change requires all communications—from social media posts to press releases to agency-wide emails—to be approved by political staff at the Commerce Department at least three days before they are released, a move meant to ensure communications “serve the needs of your employees and mission while aligning with the over-arching guidance from the White House and Department,” a memo issued by the department said. The new limits underscore the environmental implications of next week’s vote—and offer a grim preview of what a second Trump term would look like for climate research.

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an 1123

...right-wing media figures and climate deniers have used the cancellation of two major wind projects that were set to be built off the coast of New Jersey to make misleading claims about renewable energy as a whole. In addition to falsely claiming that there is evidence offshore wind projects are killing whales, they are using the project challenges to misleadingly attack the Biden administration’s climate agenda and argue against renewable energy subsidies.

On October 31, Danish global offshore wind developer Orsted announced it would be canceling Ocean Wind 1 and 2, citing high inflation, rising interest rates, and a choked supply chain.

Some right-wing media are calling the scrapped projects a “tremendous winfor all New Jerseyans,” even though they would have provided 15,000 jobs. Ocean Wind 1 and 2 would have also provided2.2 gigawattsof electricity to 1 million homes to help meet the Biden administration’s goal of deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030. It would have also helped New Jersey meet its goalof reaching 100% clean energy by 2035.

Below are some examples of how bad actors spun the setback to deride renewable energy and omitted important facts and context:

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https://yyy.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jun/25/30-years-later-deniers-are-still-lying-about-hansens-amazing-global-warming-prediction

guk many lnx

30 years later, deniers are still lying about Hansen’s amazing global warming prediction

Koch paychecks seem to be strong motivators to lie

Dana Nuccitelli

Mon 25 Jun 2018 06.00 EDT Last modified on Wed 27 Jun 2018 00.39 EDT

[In this May 9, 1989 file photo, Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, testifies before a Senate Transportation subcommittee on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., a year after his history-making testimony telling the world that global warming was here and would get worse.

Thirty years ago, James Hansen testified to Congress about the dangers of human-caused climate change. In his testimony, Hansen showed the results of his 1988 study using a climate model to project future global warming under three possible scenarios, ranging from ‘business as usual’ heavy pollution in his Scenario A to ‘draconian emissions cuts’ in Scenario C, with a moderate Scenario B in between.

Changes in the human effects that influence Earth’s global energy imbalance (a.k.a. ‘anthropogenic radiative forcings’) have in reality been closest to Hansen’s Scenario B, but about 20–30% weaker thanks to the success of the Montreal Protocol in phasing out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Hansen’s climate model projected that under Scenario B, global surface air temperatures would warm about 0.84°C between 1988 and 2017. But with a global energy imbalance 20–30% lower, it would have predicted a global surface warming closer to 0.6–0.7°C by this year.

The actual 1988–2017 temperature increase was about 0.6°C. Hansen’s 1988 global climate model was almost spot-on.

[Scenario B from Hansen’s 1988 paper, with the trend reduced by 27% to reflect the actual radiative forcing from 1984 to 2017, compared to global surface temperature data from Cowtan & Way.

In the WSJ, deniers again lie about Hansen

The incredible accuracy of Hansen’s climate model predictions debunks a number of climate denier myths. It shows that climate models are accurate and reliable, that global warming is proceeding as climate scientists predicted, and thus that we should probably start listening to them and take action to address the existential threat it poses.

Hansen’s predictions have thus become a target of climate denier misinformation.It began way back in 1998, when the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels – who has admitted that something like 40% of his salary comes from the fossil fuel industry – arguably committed perjury in testimony to Congress. Invited by Republicans to testify as the Kyoto Protocol climate agreement was in the works, Michaels was asked to evaluate how Hansen’s predictions were faring 10 years later.

In his presentation, Michaels deleted Hansen’s Scenarios B and C – the ones closest to reality – and only showed Scenario A to make it seem as though Hansen had drastically over-predicted global warming. Deleting inconvenient data in order to fool his audience became a habit for Patrick Michaels, who quickly earned a reputation of dishonesty in the climate science world, but has nevertheless remained a favorite of oil industry and conservative media.

Last week in the Wall Street Journal, Michaels was joined by Ryan Maue in an op-ed that again grossly distorted Hansen’s 1988 paper. Maue is a young scientist with a contrarian streak who’s published some serious research on hurricanes, but since joining the Cato Institute last year, seems to have sold off his remaining credibility to the fossil fuel industry.

In their WSJ opinion piece, Michaels and Maue claimed:

Global surface temperature has not increased significantly since 2000, discounting the larger-than-usual El Niño of 2015-16. Assessed by Mr. Hansen’s model, surface temperatures are behaving as if we had capped 18 years ago the carbon-dioxide emissions responsible for the enhanced greenhouse effect.

They provided no evidence to support this claim (evidence and facts seem not to be allowed on the WSJ Opinion page), and it takes just 30 seconds to fact check. In reality, global surface temperatures have increased by about 0.35°C since 2000 – precisely in line with Hansen’s 1988 model projections, as shown above. And it’s unscientific to simply “discount” the El Niño of 2015-16, because between the years 1999 and 2014, seven were cooled by La Niña events while just four experienced an El Niño warming. Yet despite the preponderance of La Niña events, global surface temperatures still warmed 0.15°C during that time. There’s simply not an ounce of truth to Michaels’ and Maue’s central WSJ claim.

Andrew Dessler

(@AndrewDessler)

Dumbest sentence in WSJ oped: "Global surface temperature has not increased significantly since 2000, discounting the larger-than-usual El Niño of 2015-16."

Translation: "Temperature has not increased if you omit the data showing it has increased."

June 22, 2018

It’s also worth noting that Hansen’s 1988 paper accurately predicted the geographic pattern of global warming, with the Arctic region warming fastest and more warming over land masses than the oceans. And climate deniers in the 1980s like Richard Lindzen were predicting “that the likelihood over the next century of greenhouse warming reaching magnitudes comparable to natural variability seems small.” If anyone deserves criticism for inaccurate climate predictions, it’s deniers like Lindzen who thought there wouldn’t be any significant warming, when in reality we’ve seen the dramatic global warming that James Hansen predicted.

Michaels’ and Maue’s misinformation didn’t stop there:

"And it isn’t just Mr. Hansen who got it wrong. Models devised by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have, on average, predicted about twice as much warming as has been observed since global satellite temperature monitoring began 40 years ago.

Once again, this unsupported assertion is completely wrong. I evaluated the IPCC’s global warming projections in my book, and showed in detail that theirs have been among the most accurate predictions. The climate model temperature projections in the 1990, 1995, 2001, and 2007 IPCC reports were all remarkably accurate; the IPCC predicted global warming almost exactly right.

Why lie? To keep cashing Koch paychecks

We don’t even have to guess at the motivation behind Michaels’ and Maue’s misinformation; they give it away toward the end of their opinion piece, asking:

Why should people world-wide pay drastic costs to cut emissions when the global temperature is acting as if those cuts have already been made?

Michaels and Maue don’t want us to cut carbon pollution, and it’s easy to understand why. They work for the Cato Institute, which was co-founded by and is heavily controlled by the Koch brothers, who have donated more than $30 million to Cato. As Michaels admitted, they’re basically fossil fuel industry employees.

But the answers to their question are simple. As climate scientists have predicted for decades, global temperatures are rising dangerously rapidly. Moreover, research has shown that the economic benefits of cutting carbon pollution far outweigh the costs.

Michaels and Maue want us to bet the future of all life on Earth. They want us to put all our chips on black – a bet that burning billions of barrels of oil and billions of tons of coal every year won’t cause dangerous climate change. They want us to make that bet even though their arguments are based on unsupported lies, whilst they cash paychecks from the Koch brothers.

We would have to be incredible suckers to take their bet.

==

==

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/05/us-think-tank-shuts-down-prominent-center-challenged-climate-science

:{:{E&E News:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:

The Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., quietly shut down a program that for years sought to raise uncertainty about climate science, leaving the libertarian think tank co-founded by Charles Koch without an office dedicated to global warming.

The move came after Pat Michaels, a climate scientist who rejects mainstream researchers’ concerns about rising temperatures, left Cato earlier this year amid disagreements with officials in the organization.

“They informed me thatthey didn’t think their vision of a think tank was in the science business, and so I said, ‘OK, bye,’” Michaels said in an interview yesterday. “There had been some controversy going around the building for some time, so things got to a situation where they didn’t work out.”

A spokeswoman said Cato’s shuttering of the Center for the Study of Science does not represent a shift in the institute’s position on human-caused climate change. But the think tank moved decisively to close down the science wing that was overseen by Michaels. Ryan Maue, a meteorologist and former adjunct scholar, also left the center.

“While it is true that, with the departure of Pat Michaels, we have deactivated our Center for the Study of Science, we continue to work on science policy issues,” Khristine Brookes, the spokeswomen, wrote in an email. She didn’t mention climate change.

Michaels is among a small number of academics with legitimate climate science credentials who downplay the human contribution to rising temperatures. He is a frequent guest on Fox News and other conservative outlets, and he has spent years attacking efforts to address climate change. He was influential in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, and he helped turn the GOP away from climate policy at a time when conservatives were embracing it (*Climatewire*, Dec. 5, 2018). That shift has endured.

Cato also is no longer affiliated with Richard Lindzen, an emeritus professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has long been critical of established climate science. Lindzen was a distinguished fellow at the think tank. It’s unclear when he left Cato, and Brookes declined to comment on personnel issues.

Maue, who worked with Michaels, said other think tanks cultivated closer relationships with the Trump White House.

“In terms of climate change and regulation, Cato was not a big player at all in the Trump administration,” he said.

Michaels was not asked to take part in the White House plan for an “adversarial” review of climate science related to the National Climate Assessment. Michaels has been critical of government climate reports for decades and has published research in major scientific journals. Both of those are seen as attributes by recruiters in charge of finding experts for the White House panel.

Michaels has spent years attacking climate modeling, which he claims ran hot, despite evidence from NASA that contradicted his claims and demonstrated that models were largely accurate. He has also portrayed academic researchers in climate-related fields as beholden to funding that incentivizes them to produce alarming research. The Cato Institute has received millions of dollars from the Koch network, the Mercer Family Foundation, Exxon Mobil Corp. and other foundations that oppose regulations.

Maue said theNiskanen Center,which was founded by Cato alumnus Jerry Taylor, has attracted conservative followers with its middle-of-the-road climate policy. That’s appealing to businesses that help fund think tanks and to those that might support policy positions on climate in the post-Trump era, he said.

“That’s attractive to business and politicians who don’t really want to see the climate flame wars continuing on,” Maue said in an interview. “I think many businesses have taken an approach to what’s going to happen and, assuming Trump isn’t around in 2021, what’s coming down the pike.”

Still, Maue said that one of Michaels’ lasting contributions in the climate policy debate was to create a position where one can accept that humans are affecting the climate but not as much as the vast majority of scientists claim. It’s now a de facto position for many Republican lawmakers who acknowledge that humans are contributing to climate change but don’t want to restrict fossil fuel use.

“Where Pat’s influence is is in the term ‘lukewarming,’” Maue said. “Lukewarming is not climate denial; it’s just that he’s taking, and most of us on this side of the issue believe in lower climate sensitivity. We don’t believe there’s going to be 5 degrees of warming; we figure it’s at the lower end of 1.5 degrees.”

The vast majority of climate scientists believe that the world could warm 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels within the next two decades and accelerate through the end of the century, with some estimates placing warming above 5°C.

Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. Copyright 2019. E&E provides essential news for energy and environment professionals at www.eenews.net