Former Secretary of State John Kerry tries to talk sense to congressional climate science deniers at a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing addressing “The Need for Leadership to Combat Climate Change and Protect National Security.”

Officials at the White House, the most prestigious refuge for the nation’s stubborn cohort of climate crisis deniers, are finding that some federal departments and agencies aren’t interested in or haven’t even heard about Donald Trump’s plan to set up a team to challenge scientific findings on climate change. And one of them, the Department of Defense, is especially out of step with this grotesque nonsense. The Pentagon has spent nearly a decade looking into, making plans, and adopting measures to deal with the impacts of climate change, which it considers a serious matter of national security.

The idea for this Presidential Committee on Climate Security came from William Happer, a senior director at the National Security Council who noted in an interview a decade ago: