... The Trump team is preparing to appoint a climate denier to head development of the National Climate Assessment for the next two months, a key step that involves contracting scientists to write it, according to advisers close to the White House. Those contracts could be structured to keep researchers who reject climate science in place after President-elect Joe Biden takes office in January.
On Friday, the administration quietly removed Michael Kuperberg from his job as executive director of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (GCRP), according to two sources with knowledge of the move. The program comprises the 13 federal agencies that conduct or use climate research.
Kuperberg has served in the role for years and was recently advancing the latest version of the National Climate Assessment even after it faced delays from the White House.
Kuperberg was transferred back to the Department of Energy (DOE), said Don Wuebbles, a climate scientist at the University of Illinois who co-led the first volume of the fourth climate assessment. ...Yesterday, Kuperberg’s biography was removed from the GCRP webpage.
Meanwhile, planning has been underway for weeks to appoint the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s David Legates, a climate change denier recently named as deputy assistant Commerce secretary for observation and prediction, to replace Kuperberg, said Myron Ebell, the head of President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team and director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Legates is a geologist from the University of Delaware and an affiliate of the Heartland Institute, which exists to muddy the public’s understanding of climate change. He has said burning more fossil fuels would benefit humanity and that policy to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions is a regulatory scheme that runs counter to market principles. ...
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