From pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord to rolling back a wave of Obama-era environmental regulations, the Trump administration has always been quick to disavow any efforts to combat climate change. But it turns out they're just getting started. The New York Times reports that President Donald Trump and his administration are “launching a new assault” against climate change efforts. The anti-environmental effort is being coordinated across a broad swath of agencies: Officials at the National Security Council are being directed to “strip references” to climate change in speeches, and the U.S. Geological Survey is changing its climate models to project the impacts of climate change only through 2040, rather than the previous modeling through the end of the century.

The greatest impacts, however, are likely to be felt through the National Climate Assessment, a government-funded climate change document published every four years. The assessment's most recent release in November 2018 went against the Trump administration's climate nonchalance by outlining nightmarish projections of climate change's devastating impact—so naturally, the administration is now trying to ensure future assessments will match the administration's own viewpoint instead, scientific evidence be damned. Per the Times, the Trump administration will change the climate assessment in future reports by omitting any worst-case scenario projections. “The previous use of inaccurate modeling that focuses on worst-case emissions scenarios, that does not reflect real-world conditions, needs to be thoroughly re-examined and tested if such information is going to serve as the scientific foundation of nationwide decision-making now and in the future,” Environmental Protection Agency spokesman James Hewitt told the Times. The scientific community sees things differently. “Nobody in the world does climate science like that,” Princeton University professor Michael Oppenheimer told the Times about the elimination of worst-case scenarios. “It would be like designing cars without seatbelts or airbags.”

Beyond changing the methodology of the National Climate Assessment, the Trump administration is planning to go even further by creating a climate change review panel that, the Times reports, would “question [the assessment's] conclusions.” Heading that panel, which was first reported on in February, would be National Security Council member and former Princeton University physicist William Happer, a vehement climate change denier who once said the “demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.” “Happer would be a fringe figure even for climate skeptics,” U.S. Navy Rear Adm. David Titley, a professor of methodology at Penn State, told the Associated Press in February.

Trump's plan to officially give climate change denial a platform, though, has proved too extreme for even some of his closest allies, who have warned Trump about the political optics of such a move. The Times notes that economic advisor Larry Kudlow has urged Trump not to create the review panel, and even Steve Bannon is “apprehensive” about Happer's panel and any resulting studies—at least before 2020. “The very idea will start a holy war on cable before 2020,” Bannon told the Times. “Better to win now and introduce the study in the second inaugural address.” (Trump, the Times notes, appears “unpersuaded” by these arguments, and Happer is “optimistic” about the panel's future.)

Monday's Times report reflected the latest instance of the Trump administration's newest environmental strategy, which mandates that without scientific evidence to back their anti-environmental actions up, it's better just to change the evidence altogether. Earlier in May, the administration responded to an E.P.A. analysis that found Trump-imposed air pollution rules would cause 1,400 premature deaths each year by simply changing the way that it calculates the health risks of air pollution, which would get the deaths off their disclosure forms without actually preventing any of them from happening. But as Kudlow and Bannon's apprehension suggests, the Trump administration's blatant disregard of scientific evidence and the planet's future may not be politically expedient. Recent polls have suggested that even Republicans are starting to come around on taking action against climate change, and other Republican politicians have been responding by ramping up their own talk against climate change. But the changing tide toward climate change action is unlikely to influence Trump, a president who's long proved averse on climate change discussions and still (falsely) believes that cold weather disproves global warming. “Large parts of the Country are suffering from tremendous amounts of snow and near record setting cold,” the president tweeted in January. “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!”

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