Deep Sixing the National Climate Assessment

NASA Removes the National Climate Assessment

NASA has begun a process of correcting the blatant politicization of climate science by removing all of the existing National Climate Assessments from its website.

The assessments’ conclusions were politically driven, lacking a scientific basis. Their removal is consistent with requests by the CO₂ Coalition and others to restore integrity to the work of government agencies and with President Trump’s executive order, “Restoring Gold Standard Science.”

Issued in May, the Trump order states that the government had promoted scientific information in a “highly misleading manner.”

As recently as June 11, the CO ₂ Coalition and Protect the Public's Trust (PPT) formally asked the Trump administration to fix the many flaws they say are in existing National Climate Assessments.

The organizations’ letter was sent to Michael Kratsios, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which advises the White House on scientific, engineering and technological aspects of national policy. PPT and the CO₂ Coalition argued that the National Climate Assessments are “riddled with violations of the principles” expressed in Trump’s order.

In a July 15 statement, NASA Press Secretary Bethany Stevens said:

“The USGCRP (the government agency that created the assessments) met its statutory requirements by presenting its reports to Congress. NASA has no legal obligations to host globalchange.gov’s data.”

That means no data from the assessment or the government science office that coordinated the work will be on the NASA website.

CO₂ Coalition executive director Gregory Wrightstone issued the following statement:

"We applaud the brave leaders at NASA who are taking the bold steps needed to begin the process of bringing the scientific method back into government scientific agencies. For far too long, real science has been replaced by political science, consensus science and blatant misinformation."

National Climate Assessment Misinformation on Wildfire

The 4th National Climate Assessment (NCA) was a hodgepodge of cherry-picked data, outright lies and scaremongering at its worst. The poster child of their apocalyptic vision for the Earth was man-made, warming-driven wildfire.

Forests in flame were prominently featured on the cover and back page of the NCA Overview and prominently featured throughout the first chapter as the prime example of a planet teetering on the brink of apocalypse. The study reported as fact that “wildfires are increasing.”

In an attempt to document their claim of increasing fires, the “science” provided in the report was a chart (inset of orange graph) that showed an increase in area burned for the United States from the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC). Inspection of the chart, however, revealed that the data used was limited to information starting in 1983.

Yet, the data available from the NIFC and the U.S. Census Bureau go back to 1926, and the full dataset shows that area burned in the U.S. is now 25% of what it was 70 years ago.

This represents a willful abuse of the scientific process to stoke public fear and justify economically crippling “green” policies of those attempting to solve a nonexistent climate crisis.