EXCLUSIVE: White House Ditches Outdated Climate Nightmares For Real-World Policy

WASHINGTON — The White House is ditching outdated guidelines based on worst-case climate change scenarios, The Daily Wire can first report.

The U.S. Global Change Research Program is set to publish an amendment to the Fifth National Climate Assessment on Tuesday, an amendment clarifying that the U.S. government’s congressionally mandated report on climate change impacts and risks, is now retired. That report was published in 2023 and was based on the worst-case scenarios for climate change — not actual scenarios the world is facing.

It is a significant move given that the report massively affects economic and regulatory rules, federal research and grant funding, and the budgeting of millions of dollars and infrastructure misallocation. Planning for dramatic climate change can impact how local governments build power grids, enforce zoning, build sea walls, and more.

With this new amendment, the White House is instructing agencies that any findings or projections that are specifically based on worst-case scenarios should include disclaimers or warnings that they originated this way. The White House will also prohibit worst-case scenario projections from serving as the baseline prediction for funding decisions or regulation or infrastructure decisions.

Dr. Matthew Wielicki, the director of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, explained that the move is intended to ensure that the federal government’s principal climate assessment “reflects current scientific understanding.” Tuesday’s announcement brings back the national climate assessment into a scientific realm that is plausible, he said, and not scenarios that were totally implausible, as the scientific community now admits. 

Led by Greta Thunberg (C), young activists and their supporters rally for action on climate change on September 20, 2019 in New York City.  (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

“This all changed in April of this year when the climate community admitted that the high emission scenarios were no longer plausible, realistic futures,” Wielicki shared in a phone interview with The Daily Wire on Monday. “This had been bounced around by the scientific community for quite a while, that this kind of high-emission scenarios were stress tests for the climate models, but somehow, over time, they became kind of the business as usual idea.”

“They were the expected futures that a lot of policy was being made upon,” he continued. “And if you look at the last national climate assessment, NCA5, a lot of the impact statements, if not even a majority, in many chapters rely on these now implausible scenarios to kind of inform policymakers about how to respond to climate change. If your informed response is based on a scenario that’s no longer plausible, you don’t make good decisions.”

Federal agencies have been making policy and funding decisions based on these extreme, worst-case climate models, a copy of the “Proposed Amendment to the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5)” states. United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had already reached a similar conclusion, so Tuesday’s move clarifies the national climate assessment will be based on plausible scenarios going forward.

The scientific community won’t be up in arms about the news, but Wielicki does anticipate an activist core that will be upset, referencing activists who are fond of the implausible scenarios because “they get a lot of media attention.”

“I’m sure there’ll be some folks that are in the activist groups that are going to be upset, but you know the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admitted this,” he noted. “The Scenario Model Intercomparison Project that makes the scenarios has admitted this. So the climate community, in terms of the research side, is really admitting all of this already. So you know I’m sure there will be some backlash, but I don’t think it will be directly from the scientific community.” 

The U.S. Global Change Research Program is housed in the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, composed of representatives from 15 federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.