The National Climate Assessment: Science or Sales Pitch?

Written by Dr. Matthew Wielicki on May 3, 2025. Posted in Current News

Donald Trump has made it clear that if he were to be reelected, he intends to dismantle large swaths of the climate bureaucracy, including the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the umbrella agency responsible for the National Climate Assessment.

While predictably derided by legacy media as “anti-science,” the more one digs into the Fifth National Climate Assessment, the more one is tempted to say: good riddance.

Every four to five years, the United States government releases the National Climate Assessment (NCA), a sweeping report intended to summarize the impacts of climate change on the U.S. economy, health, infrastructure, and environment. The latest version, the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5), dropped in late 2023 with a flood of media fanfare and dire predictions, many of which you’ve already seen amplified across major outlets.

But few people ever ask: Who actually writes these reports? Who funds them? And who stands to gain if their dire projections come true, or are at least believed to be true?

The NCA is funded by the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), a conglomeration of 14 federal agencies including NASA, NOAA, the EPA, and the Departments of Defense, Energy, and State. The USGCRP was established in 1990 to coordinate climate change research, but in recent years it’s become increasingly entangled with activist-driven agendas and ideologically motivated forecasting. The authors of the NCA are overwhelmingly drawn from universities, NGOs, and federally funded labs… institutions that, unsurprisingly, rely heavily on climate-related grant money and policy alignment.

That’s where the conflict begins.

A Tale of Two Figures: What NCA5 Says… and What It Shows

When I reviewed NCA5 shortly after its release, I focused on a single contradiction in the report… one that I believe exemplifies its fundamental flaws. In Figure 2.7, the report shows a clear, documented decline in the number of days above 95°F across most of the United States between 2009 and 2021.

That’s actual observational data. Then, just a few pages later, in Figure 2.11, it projects a substantial increase in days over 95°F in the decades to come.

That’s not nuance. That’s narrative. And the models behind those projections, many of which have already been shown to overstate warming, are treated with more authority than actual observations.

The authors try to explain this away by citing regional variability and land use changes, but if those same factors drove down the number of hot days over the past decade, why are they dismissed or ignored in forward projections? Either they matter or they don’t. You can’t have it both ways.

Roger Pielke Jr. Nails It

Roger Pielke Jr., whose work on the politicization of climate science is essential reading, exposed this contradiction in his excellent piece, “Original Sin”. As he notes, NCA5 commits the same methodological error as its predecessors: using worst-case emissions scenarios to create maximum-impact headlines, while quietly admitting elsewhere that those scenarios are increasingly implausible.

Together, our critiques converge on the same point: NCA5’s core conclusions are more the result of modeling assumptions than measured reality. And those assumptions happen to align perfectly with the political goals of the institutions funding and writing the report.

If this sounds bad, it’s because it is. But the real eye-opener is who these authors are, where their funding comes from, and how deeply embedded they are in the machinery built to profit from climate fear.

In the subscriber section below, we’ll:

• Name names—specific authors and their institutional ties
• Follow the money trail to activist funders and green energy interests
• Examine failed predictions from previous assessments that never made headlines

If you’re serious about understanding the politics behind the climate science, this is where the curtain gets pulled back.

See more here Substack

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