President Trump and Energy Secretary Perry are both vocal skeptics of climate change alarmism, but the US Energy Department is still running one of the top drivers of alarmist science for the United Nations. This engine of alarmism is obscurely named the Climate Model Intercomparison Project or CMIP. Climate change alarmism is based entirely on computer modeling and CMIP is where the core modeling comes from.

What CMIP does is provide the computer climate modeling for the infamous UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading proponent of alarmist science. CMIP itself is a UN activity, part of the UN’s World Climate Research Program. The modeling is done by major climate modeling centers around the world, including a number of US federal agencies. So while the Trump Administrations says it does not support the IPCC, it is actually doing a lot of free work for it. This should stop.

What the Energy Department does first is to coordinate and oversee all of this modeling activity. The CMIP office at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is the nerve center for all of UN CMIP. It is there that the modeling centers get their instructions and where they deliver their results for IPCC use.

This coordination work is paid for by the US, not the UN, as is the extensive modeling work done by the various US CMIP agencies and their laboratories. This US work involves numerous computer models, funded mostly by DOE, NSF, NOAA and NASA. No figures are available for the cost of all this work, but it must be many millions of dollars. Most of the climate models run on expensive supercomputers. So not only is the Trump Administration supporting climate alarmism via UN CMIP, they are paying heavily for the privilege.

That the modeling results support alarmism is guaranteed by the instructions given to the global modeling centers. These instructions specify which causes can be used to model and explain climate change. All of the significant allowable causes are due to human activity, with CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels being by far the largest.

The IPCC then uses these rigged computer results to claim that humans are causing the climate change. This is a classic case of circular reasoning, which is explained in some detail here.

The UN CMIP computer modeling occurs in waves that are timed to feed into the massive UN IPCC assessment reports, which come out roughly every five years. Thus both IPCC Assessment Report 6 and CMIP6 are presently in progress. CMIP6 is globally coordinated by the U.S. Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. LLNL is part of DOE’s National Nuclear Security Agency, which builds and maintains the nuclear weapons stockpile, so has no climate mission.

According to the CMIP6 website, 44 different computer modeling institutions are registered for the project. Of these 13 are US, by far the largest number. 11 or these are federal; the other 2 are federally funded. In addition to NOAA, NASA and NSF, a whopping 8 Energy Department national labs are listed. The next largest national efforts are 7 Chinese institutions and 6 German, each of which we outnumber by about 2 to 1.

In other words, the U.S. government and especially the Energy Department are responsible for a great deal of the IPCC alarmist climate modeling. We may have stopped funding the IPCC but we are still doing a lot of their work.

Even worse, this free work is the mainstay of climate change alarmism. Alarmism is based entirely on rigged computer modeling and the Trump Administration is doing a lot of that modeling, plus coordinating much of the rest.

We need to stop doing the UN’s climate change dirty work. We need to terminate our role in CMIP.