The Fifth US National Climate Assessment was published in 2023 during the Biden/Harris administration. The report begins as follows:
The Global Change Research Act of 1990 mandates that the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) deliver a report to Congress and the President not less frequently than every four years that “integrates, evaluates, and interprets the findings of the Program and discusses the scientific uncertainties associated with such findings; analyzes the effects of global change on the natural environment, agriculture, energy production and use, land and water resources, transportation, human health and welfare, human social systems, and biological diversity; and analyzes current trends in global change, both human-induced and natural, and projects major trends for the subsequent 25 to 100 years.”
You may well have noticed that Kamala Harris lost the subsequent election? Hence the Sixth US National Climate Assessment will be prepared during the term of the current Trump/Vance administration.
The first move by Trump et al. was for the US Department of Energy to commission a “Climate Working Group” to produce a report catchily entitled “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate“, which was published in July 2025. The authors of the report were listed alphabetically as John Christy Ph.D., Judith Curry Ph.D., Steven Koonin Ph.D., Ross McKitrick Ph.D. and Roy Spencer Ph.D.
Regular readers will recognise some or all of those names, and it will not surprise you to learn that there was plenty of pushback from a wide range of climate scientists. In particular, the “Climate Experts’ Review of the DOE Climate Working Group Report“, led by Andrew Dessler and Robert Kopp was published at the end of September 2025. This report begins as follows:
In response to the Department of Energy’s recent climate report, more than 85 scientists came together to submit a detailed rebuttal. Our motivation was simple: the DOE report misrepresents the state of climate science by cherry-picking evidence, exaggerating uncertainties, and ignoring decades of peer-reviewed research. Climate science is one of the most scrutinized and well-established fields, and the DOE report falls far short of that standard.
Our review demonstrates that many of the report’s central claims—such as the absence of trends in extreme weather, or the notion that carbon dioxide is broadly beneficial—are misleading or outright wrong. We conclude that the report undermines science in a way that echoes past efforts by the tobacco industry to manufacture doubt. Our comment, submitted to the DOE, EPA, and the National Academy review, underscore the broad scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is real, it is already driving potentially dangerous impacts, and efforts to obscure that reality should not go unchallenged.
Subsequently Axios reported on December 17th 2025 that:
The Trump administration plans to close the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, calling its research “climate alarmism.”
Why it matters: The Boulder lab is one of the world’s leading institutions for Earth systems and climate research, playing a crucial role in weather forecasting and climate modeling, and its absence would significantly impact U.S. scientific capabilities.
Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe wrote in an X post Tuesday that closing NCAR would be “taking a sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding of the planet.”
It is already crystal clear that the climate scientists who produced NCA5 will not be invited by the Trump administration to write NCA6. Which does rather beg the question, “Who or what will be?”.
To be continued…