For 25 years, the periodic National Climate Assessment (NCA) report has been the flagship of American alarmism. It looks like that is about to change with a realist at the helm.
The assessments are produced by a small federal office called the U.S. Global Change Research Program (GCRP) which ironically does no research. It merely produces an annual report of the climate related research of 13 major federal agencies. Its big job is doing the NCAs. The first came out in 2001 with the fifth in 2023.
The Trump administration had zeroed the GCRP, but now they are reviving it with leading skeptic Matt Wielicki running it. So, a skeptical NCA is in the offing.
Wielicki faces a grand challenge. He has a huge job on his hands and may never have run a crash federal project like this before. The alarmist NCA is a monster document with endless alarmists graphs and scary text produced over a period of several years by hundreds of people. Its entire bogus focus is on how human caused climate change is harming Americans.
Logistically, the alarmists who have experience building a prior NCA are unlikely to want to work on a reality-based version so a whole new team must be built. The ICF support contract that paid a lot of the non-federal workers has been terminated. These are complex obstacles that Wielicki must overcome.
He might do something simple since the alarmist impacts packing these prior reports do not exist. Thus the past reports are useless as a model. Here are some initial thoughts on a skeptical document design that might be easy to do.
First, it could discuss the concept of climate change. Climate oscillates naturally on a wide range of scales, from years to centuries. Given this natural variability it can be hard to determine that climate is actually changing in the long run at a given location. In the short term. climate is always changing. This is the thorny confusion of not distinguishing between variability and trend that prior reports have wallowed in.
Second, the report could explain that climate change is mostly natural not human caused. The Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect an obvious exception. Prior reports seem to assume that all change is human caused or human worsened.
Third, there is the issue of beneficial change, which prior reports have largely ignored. This might include issues such as increases in agricultural productivity or reduced deaths from extreme cold. The greening benefits from increasing atmospheric CO2 (the global food supply) might also be discussed.
Fourth, the new report could also address the common fallacies underlying these prior NCA reports. There is a lot of junk science in these extremely alarmist reports.
Below are some links for those who want to explore the GCRP’s recent alarmism which Wielicki hopes to reverse.
Here is a good overview of the GCRP from the Congressional Research Service.
There is a table of funding by agency showing the rapid rise in wasteful alarmist research spending.
Apparently the GCRP website is gone, but here is the latest National Climate Assessment (which I call the National Scare).
Note that the GCRP does not coordinate the federal climate research program, which is often erroneously reported. It just collects annual expenditure and project data from the 13 or so research agencies and does an annual report called “Our Changing Planet.” Oddly, the last issue seems to be FY 2023 when expenditures topped $4 billion.
See here.
How the grand challenge of creating a reality-based National Climate Assessment plays out remains to be seen. Stay tuned to CFACT as this project progresses.