06/12/2018

The Energy 202: Trump Officials Mount Full-Court Press Against Their Own Climate Report

Washington Post - Dino Grandoni

President Trump speaks during an interview with Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Josh Dawsey in the Oval Office on Tuesday. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
The White House press secretary said it was "not based on facts."
The secretary of the interior said it focused only on the "worst scenarios."
And President Trump said that when it comes to the devastating effects of climate change described in it, "a lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence but we're not necessarily such believers."
The publication Friday of a major climate report written by 13 federal agencies has prompted a series of high-level Trump administration officials, including the president himself, to mount a full-court press questioning its findings.
The fourth National Climate Assessment says the effects of rising temperatures, including more heat waves, coastal floods and forest fires, could collectively strip the United States of one-tenth of its gross domestic product by the end of the century.  Already, the authors argue global warming “is transforming where and how we live and presents growing challenges to human health and quality of life, the economy, and the natural systems that support us.”
The conclusions of the congressionally mandated report run counter to much of the rhetoric that has come from Trump's political appointees, who have tried to ramp up extraction of fossil fuels nationwide while often downplaying, or sometimes outright dismissing, their contributions to global warming.
Trump officials chose to publish the climate assessment on the Friday after Thanksgiving, when many Americans are busy shopping or spending time with family instead of reading the news.
But instead of being buried on Black Friday, the report has stayed in the headlines into the middle of this week. That's partially because its findings were particularly dire. But it's also because Trump officials chose to play them down.
Trump officials claimed the climate report focused on only worst-case scenarios, even as scientists who wrote the document said that is not true.
Appearing on an NBC affiliate in Sacramento while touring fire damage in California, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke did acknowledge "the temperatures have risen" and the fire season "has gotten longer."
But he added: “It appears they took the worst scenarios and they built predictions on that. It should be more probability, but we’re looking at it.”
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the chief spokeswoman for the White House, expanded on that point during a press conference Tuesday.
"You have to look at the fact that this report is based on the most extreme model scenario, which contradicts long-established trends," she said. "Modeling the climate is extremely complicated science that is never exact."
Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Texas Tech University Climate Science Center and one of the more than 300 co-authors of the climate assessment, responded to Sanders on Twitter by saying "we considered many scenarios." The report indeed considered several scenarios, including the worst-case ones.


White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders attacked the Trump administration's own climate report, calling it "extreme" and "not based on facts." (Reuters)

And the most robust dismissal of his own government's report came from the president himself.
During an interview Tuesday with The Post's Philip Rucker and Josh Dawsey, Trump said he does not count himself among the “believers” who see the problem of climate change as dire and caused by humans.
“As to whether or not it’s man-made and whether or not the effects that you’re talking about are there, I don’t see it,” he said.
Instead of addressing the root cause of recent rising temperatures — the buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to human activity — Trump riffed on a number of other environmental problems, including the accumulation of trash in the oceans and smog-forming pollution in the air around the world.
“You look at our air and our water and it’s right now at a record clean. But when you look at China and you look at parts of Asia and you look at South America, and when you look at many other places in this world, including Russia , including many other places, the air is incredibly dirty, and when you’re talking about an atmosphere, oceans are very small,” Trump said. “And it blows over and it sails over. I mean we take thousands of tons of garbage off our beaches all the time that comes over from Asia. It just flows right down the Pacific. It flows and we say, ‘Where does this come from?’ And it takes many people, to start off with.”
Trump's response left some climate scientists baffled. “How can one possibly respond to this?" Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, told The Post.
The response to the report from Republicans outside of the executive branch was not universally dismissive. On Twitter, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina called the climate report "a glaring reminder of the long-term risks of climate change" while Sen. Susan Collins of Maine urged the Trump administration "to take a harder look at the consequences of inaction." Both senators are up for reelection in swing states in 2020.

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