From Watts Up With That?

By Charles Rotter

The long-overdue showdown with America’s most bloated, self-important arm of climate alarmism finally arrived this week — and what a spectacle it was. In a move that should have happened years ago, the Trump administration decisively dismissed the hundreds of so-called “experts” who were preparing the next National Climate Assessment (NCA) — a document often weaponized to justify costly and draconian climate policies that the American people neither asked for nor benefit from.

According to The New York Times’ own agonized reporting, “The Trump administration has dismissed the hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship report on how global warming is affecting the country”​. Translation: the gravy train of climate catastrophe peddling has hit a brick wall.

The National Climate Assessment has long been a centerpiece in the grand theater of climate fear, projecting dire futures with a laughable level of pseudo-certainty. Despite its authors’ best efforts to scare Americans into submission with apocalyptic visions, most of their “projections” have failed the simple test of reality. As Brad Plumer and Rebecca Dzombak gloomily noted, “The move puts the future of the report, which is required by Congress, into serious jeopardy”​. That’s not a bug — it’s a feature.

The absurdity of the situation becomes even clearer when reading how the dismissed researchers reacted. Jesse Keenan, a climate adaptation professor, practically cried into his recycled coffee mug, declaring, “This is as close as it gets to a termination of the assessment. If you get rid of all the people involved, nothing’s moving forward”​. Exactly, Professor Keenan. That was precisely the point. Perhaps it’s time to move forward with serious, grounded research rather than ideologically driven climate sermons.

Let’s also take a moment to savor the bureaucratic collapse. NASA, which had been doling out contracts like candy to firms like ICF International for “technical support” — read: glorified office busywork — saw those contracts axed​. No more multi-million dollar taxpayer-funded boondoggles to prop up a narrative that grows thinner by the year.

Naturally, the usual suspects are already sobbing that without their preferred team of doomsayers, any future report will “downplay” the supposed dangers of warming​. Yet one has to ask: if your “science” can’t survive the loss of a hand-picked team of activists, maybe it wasn’t science in the first place. Perhaps it was always closer to a political manifesto, dressed up in lab coats.

The Times frets that “state and local policymakers, as well as private businesses, rely on the assessment”​. What they don’t admit is that these assessments often serve more to inflate public hysteria and lawsuits against the federal government than to offer sound advice. Russell Vought, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget Director, hit the nail on the head when he described the reports as a “source of climate alarmism”​. It’s refreshing to finally see leadership willing to call out the climate-industrial complex for what it really is.

Predictably, the fearmongers are already plotting new strategies to sneak their ideology back in through the cracks. Meade Krosby of the University of Washington lamented, “The question is whether it [the next assessment] is going to reflect credible science”​. Given their track record, “credible” in this context apparently means “produced by a select group of like-minded alarmists with a history of failed predictions.”

The American public deserves better than yet another self-referential, doom-and-gloom fantasy presented as objective fact. This purge of the climate clerisy from the National Climate Assessment is a long-awaited act of intellectual housecleaning. The public should celebrate that, for once, we have an administration willing to stand up to the sprawling technocracy of climate fearmongering and demand real accountability.

The scientists and bureaucrats who treated the NCA like their personal manifesto-writing project are shocked today. They should be. They mistook the American people’s tolerance for blind consent. Now, they are being shown the door, their shrill warnings reduced to background noise in a nation tired of being lectured about its alleged sins against the Earth.

Good riddance. May this be the first of many steps toward reining in the arrogance of central planners who believe they have the right — and the competence — to redesign society based on speculative, unprovable theories.

The climate fear machine has been unplugged. And the lights, ironically, have never looked brighter.

H/T Steve Milloy