The Trump administration wants to revise the latest National Climate Assessmentthree years after publication

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Set us as preferred The Trump administration is seeking to revise a federal climate report published three years ago to recast worst-case climate scenarios as implausible and limit their use in federal decision-making.The White House has proposed an “amendment and clarification” to the findings of the National Climate Assessment 5, published in 2023.

National Climate Assessments are Congressionally mandated reports composed by hundreds of scientists and researchers and have been published every four years since 1990.Now, the White House wants to go back and change how the highest-emission scenarios — those representing the worst possible outcomes of climate change, known technically as RCP8.5 — can be interpreted and used by the federal government.

The proposal comes from the U.S.Global Change Research Program within the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy and was published in the federal register.

RCP.8 or other equivalent pathways “are not policy relevant, and should not be used in authoritative federal work products,” officials wrote in the proposed amendment.Climate & Environment More than 400 experts were starting to prepare the latest national climate assessment report.

They all received an email from the Trump administration dismissing them.National climate assessments are important because their projections can inform federal infrastructure planning, risk assessments, regulations, disaster preparedness and cost-benefit analyses, including from hazards such as wildfires, floods, drought and sea-level rise.The worst-case scenario paints an extremely unlikely but theoretically possible picture of what the climate would look like if the world continued to develop with a heavy reliance on coal, oil and natural gas, and if greenhouse-gas emissions kept rising with little effective clim...