The Trump administration is reportedly forming an ad hoc group of hand-picked scientists to throw a shroud of uncertainty over the government’s own climate change report, which stated the country would need to lower emissions in order to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.
As a working group—as opposed to an official Federal Advisory Committee—the scientists will be able to meet in private and will not have to disclose public records of their meetings, The Washington Post reports.
The group, organized by the National Security Council, is allegedly in response to the U.S. National Climate Assessment, which was released on Black Friday last year. The report was compiled by several federal agencies, but President Donald Trump apparently didn’t like what it had to say.
Shortly after the report was released, Trump directly negated the report by saying he doesn’t believe climate change is man-made.
Now, the administration is allegedly gathering known climate change skeptics to question whether mankind’s carbon dioxide emissions are as bad as the scientific community says. Reported group organizers include NSC senior director William Happer and New York University physics professor Steve Koonin, who wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed downplaying the climate assessment results.
Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University, one of the climate assessment’s leading authors, said on Twitter that the Trump administration’s advisory group is redundant, considering the report “went through two rounds of federal agency review and one public comment period, where any of these committee members could have commented and reviewed it, if they so desired.”