Trump administration officials have for months considered using a small group of climate contrarians to help write the nation’s preeminent report on global warming, new court records reveal.
The documents show that Energy Department officials, as early as last May, were weighing the possibility of having five climate contrarians contribute to the National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated document that outlines the ways that global warming threatens the United States.
The court records confirm what Judith Curry, one of the five climate contrarians and a former climatologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told POLITICO’s E&E News in December. They also raise the possibility that DOE officials were skirting federal records laws — as some of the communication was made through personal email accounts.
Neither the White House nor DOE responded to requests for comment.
Taken together, the newly revealed emails suggest the Trump administration has for months looked at turning the sixth version of the National Climate Assessment into a climate contrarian treatise that cuts against the findings of the previous five versions, which have come out every few years since 2000.
The emails were included in court filings as part of a lawsuit the Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists have brought against DOE for violating public disclosure laws around the formation and work of a small team of climate contrarians known as the Climate Working Group.
Erin Murphy, a senior attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund, said the content of the emails — as well as their timing — is evidence that a key goal of the Climate Working Group is to help roll back climate regulations.
“The Trump Administration’s Climate Working Group was meeting in secret to recklessly attack the National Climate Assessment and seek to undermine the law,” Murphy said.
The five members of the Climate Working Group were handpicked by Energy Secretary Chris Wrightto write a separate report — released in July — that questioned the basic tenets of climate science and downplayed the threat that global warming poses to people and the planet.
An E&E News review of that July report found it obscured key facts and cherry-picked mainstream research.
The new court documents show the Trump administration had thought about using these same climate contrarians for more than just the DOE report.
Travis Fisher, who was hired from the conservative Cato Institute to organize the DOE report, wrote to the scientists in late May and said that they should think about being “involved in the next NCA,” or National Climate Assessment.
The Cato Institute, which has received funding from the fossil fuel industry, has long pushed to eliminate climate regulations. A top White House official has said previously the National Climate Assessment is harmful to the fossil fuel industry in legal disputes.
“If I had to bet on it, I’d say each of you will be asked to help, if not join, the USGCRP (U.S. Global Change Research Program) and contribute to NCA 6,” wrote Fisher in one of the revealed emails.
“I thought that’s what we have been working on,” responded Roy Spencer, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and one of the five members of the Climate Working Group.
Last year, the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists working on the sixth version of the NCA and dismantled the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which administers the report. The USGCRP was created under Republican President George H.W. Bush in 1990 and it has produced five previous reports that were deleted from web pages by the Trump administration.
Fisher encouraged the contrarian researchers to follow government guidelines to make their DOE report the sixth version of the National Climate Assessment.
“If you all want to submit this report through that process, the product that comes out on the other end probably could be NCA 6,” he wrote.
In an interview last week, Fisher declined to comment on the emails, but he denied that the Climate Working Group was preparing the next National Climate Assessment.
“What I was hoping for was to generate a report that was useful both to Secretary Wright and to whoever would come in to run the NCA 6 process,” Travis said. “I don’t recall being convinced that the report that the DOE worker was working on would ever be the NCA 6.”
The emails also reveal that both Fisher and Josh Loucks, a special assistant to the DOE deputy secretary, were communicating using private Gmail accounts rather than their DOE emails, a possible violation of public records law.
That court case is ongoing and additional hearings are scheduled for later this month.
In an effort to dismiss the case, Wright told a judge last year that the Climate Working Group was disbanded.
But E&E News reported last month that members of the group are continuing the work they started at DOE and that the National Climate Assessment is their next target. A former top NOAA official from Trump’s first administration is also working on the report and has stated that he is using Grok, Elon Musk’s chatbot, to help with the effort.
The newly revealed court records also cast doubt on the rigor applied to the DOE report written by the five climate contrarians of the Climate Working Group.
When that report was released in July, the department touted in a press release that it had been subjected to a rigorous “internal peer-review period amongst DOE’s scientific research community.”
DOE has refused to name those internal reviewers, but comments from at least two of them were included in the batch of emails. The reviewer comments came just days before the report was publicly released.
The names of the reviewers were redacted, but they each noted they were not able to fully assess the report.
“There are many topics covered; all of which would take more time to properly review,” one peer reviewer wrote on July 21, just days before the report was publicly released.
On July 20, a different researcher submitted comments and wrote to the group that “I don’t have the technical depth at this point in my career that the Lab scientists do.”
“But my top-level comment is that it would be really helpful to DOE (and the secretary) if it was more explicit about the biggest scientific uncertainties, where further research is most needed.”
Curry, one of the Climate Working Group authors, responded that the suggestion seemed a better fit for their upcoming work on the National Climate Assessment.
“I like the suggestion that we list major uncertainties for future research but that seems to be more of a task for the NCA6 recommendations,” she wrote.
Reporter Lesley Clark contributed to this story.
Reach Scott Waldman on Signal at Waldman.04
