The report should have been vetted before release.
A former Obama administration official with ties to a liberal advocacy group funded by Democratic megadonors George Soros and Tom Steyer helped prepare the Fourth National Climate Assessment, whose dire predictions have since been attacked as overblown.
Andrew Light, who worked on the 2015 Paris accord negotiations as a senior adviser to the U.S. Special Envoy on Climate Change under Secretary of State John F. Kerry, served as a review editor for the assessment, overseeing the pivotal final chapter that concluded under a worst-case scenario that global warming could wipe out as much as 10 percent of the U.S. economy by 2100.
Now a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, Mr. Light also spent five years as senior fellow and director of international climate policy at the Center for American Progress, which was founded and now led by longtime Democratic insider John Podesta. The center is also financed by liberal billionaires such as Mr. Soros and Mr. Steyer.
The involvement of Mr. Light and other figures known for their climate change advocacy has raised questions about the credibility of the report, which has been widely depicted as a politically neutral, scientific document prepared by disinterested specialists from 13 federal agencies.
Roger A. Pielke Jr., University of Colorado Boulder environmental studies professor, criticized the decision to bring in Mr. Light, as well as the report’s reliance for the 10 percent figure on a 2017 study funded in part by Mr. Steyer’s Next Generation and Bloomberg Philanthropies.
“The question remains, whose idea was it to have John Podesta’s climate adviser and Obama political appointee be in charge of the review of the most important chapter, which leans heavily on Tom Steyer research?” Mr. Pielke said in an email.
Mr. Light directed questions about his role to the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which is required by Congress to prepare a new assessment no less than every four years. The program did not immediately return messages requesting comment.
“I was appointed in my capacity as a professor at George Mason University, where I have worked since 2008,” Mr. Light said in an email. “Any questions about decisions on who was or was not appointed to one of the chapter author teams should be directed to the U.S. Office of Global Change Research, because that is the office that put together those teams.”
Mr. Light has no formal academic scientific credentials — he earned his Ph.D. in philosophy — but noted that he completed a three-year postdoctoral research fellowship in environmental risk assessment.[…]
Mr. Trump dismissed the assessment, saying, “I don’t believe it,” prompting CNN to scold him for “dismissing his own experts.”
Skeptics, meanwhile, have blasted the report as “tripe” (Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore), a “400-page pile of crap” (Heartland Institute’s John Dunn), “irrelevant” (JunkScience’s Steven J. Milloy), and “baseless scaremongering” (Watts Up With That’s Eric Worrall).
“The National Climate Assessment report reads like a press release from environmental pressure groups — because it is,” said Marc Morano, author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change.”
He described two of the authors — Texas Tech professor Katharine Hayhoe and Donald J. Wuebbles of the University of Illinois — as “longtime Union of Concerned Scientist activists.”
“These are not ‘Trump’s own scientists’ as the media likes to claim,” Mr. Morano said. “The key authors are in fact left-wing environmental activists with the Union of Concerned Scientists, Center for American Progress, and the Obama Administration. And they cited outlier studies funded by Steyer and [Michael] Bloomberg.”
HT: Huck Funn