The White House will set up a panel of scientists to re-evaluate the government’s findings on climate change and the negative impacts of burning fossil fuels, three senior administration officials said.
The officials noted that the “ad hoc group” would include scientists who are skeptical of climate change and humans’ contribution to the issue. It is the latest and probably the most forceful effort by President Donald Trump to challenge the scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are causing global warming and that this trend would have severe consequences unless the carbon footprint is significantly reduced.
The decision to establish the group is a version of a previous plan to set up a federal advisory panel on climate and national security. Under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, such panels must meet in public and are subject to public records requests. However, this group would not be subject to the same level of public disclosure as a formal advisory committee, The Washington Post writes.
The plan, discussed at a meeting Friday, has not yet been finalized but attendees at the meeting “debated how best to establish a group of researchers that could scrutinize recent federal climate reports.”
The Post adds that the new panel will not, however, look into recent intelligence community assessments of climate change.
According to a senior administration official, President Trump was upset by his administration’s issuance of the National Climate Assessment in November and was looking for “a mixture of opinions,” disputing the report.
“The President wants people to be able to decide for themselves,” the aide said.
A number of scientists have noted that the findings presented in the report were scrutinized by other researchers in the field before being made public. Christopher Field, who served on the National Academy of Sciences review panel, said the committee met several times “to do a careful, page-by-page evaluation by the entire report.”
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