Charles Rotter and Anthony Watts
Politico ran a piece on July 9 with a headline built to worry you: the administration has revived a formerly gutted climate change office, and it is now headed by a climate skeptic. The office was/is the U.S. Global Change Research Program. On June 30, 2025, the Trump administration closed down the globalchange.gov website and it went dark online. Now, the new boss is a former University of Alabama geochemist, a self-described professor in exile, who spends a fair amount of time questioning mainstream climate science online: Dr. Matthew Wielicki. He will now oversee the program’s flagship product, the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment. Here’s how Politico frames it.
Congress created the U.S. Global Change Research Program through the Global Change Research Act of 1990. Thirteen at inception, and later, fifteen federal agencies coordinate their climate research through it, and every four years it produces the National Climate Assessment, a sprawling report on how a changing climate is expected to affect American infrastructure, agriculture, water, and the economy. This is not a fringe document. Agencies lean on it when they write rules. Litigants lean on it when they sue. It carries statutory weight, which is exactly why control of it has been contested across three administrations now.
It is worth remembering how we got here. The administration gutted the program in 2025, cancelled the contract that supported its technical staff, and disbanded the authors already at work on the sixth assessment. What Politico is now describing is the office being stood back up under new management. So the appointment of someone skeptical of the prevailing narrative gets treated, in the coverage, as a scandal in itself.
None of this is improvised. White House budget director Russ Vought spent years describing the program as a source of what he called climate alarmism that the executive branch should bring under tighter control, a view he set out plainly in the Project 2025 policy handbook. So the reconstitution under a skeptic is not a surprise. It is the plan working as designed. Whether you cheer that or dread it depends almost entirely on what you already believe the program had become.
Note the move. The objection is not that Wielicki lacks scientific training. He holds a doctorate and has a publication record. The objection is that he holds the wrong conclusions. That is a different complaint than it first appears to be, and it is worth naming plainly before we go further.
Here is the detail I think matters most, and it comes straight from Politico’s own reporting. The group of researchers assembled under Energy Secretary Chris Wright, the same group that last year produced the Department of Energy’s A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate, proposed a rewritten assessment. In a document pulled from court filings, they cautioned that the existing report holds enormous influence precisely because it is a citation routinely invoked in climate litigation.
The concern about the assessment, stated by the very people who want to rewrite it, is not primarily that it misdescribes the weather. It is that it functions as evidence.
The National Climate Assessment has become a load-bearing citation in lawsuits against energy companies and in the legal defense of federal regulation. That is a claim about how the document is used, not about what the temperature did. And once you see it, the fight over who runs the program looks less like a fight over science and more like a fight over a legal instrument. It is no accident that the DOE report landed alongside the EPA’s move to reconsider the 2009 Endangerment Finding, the regulatory keystone that the assessment helps hold in place.
This clarifies the stakes. When a report is written to be cited in court, the pressure to make it say something specific is not a bug that a skeptical editor sneaks in. It is a feature that a skeptical editor threatens.
Judith Curry, one of the scientists Wright selected and a former chair of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, gave Politico the sharpest version of the substantive critique. Her objection was specific: the last assessment leaned far too heavily on extreme emissions scenarios. She called it “all but useless” for that reason.
Regular readers will know why that lands. For months now we have documented, at length, the quiet retirement of exactly those scenarios from mainstream climate modeling. On April 7, 2026, the ScenarioMIP team formally dropped SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0 from CMIP7. The design paper, Van Vuuren et al. 2026 in Geoscientific Model Development, stated that the old high-emission pathway had become “implausible.” That word is doing an enormous amount of work.
We covered the paper when it landed, traced how the discredited scenario still saturates the impact literature, watched it undercut a fresh catastrophe study, and sat with Roger Pielke Jr., who has argued for years that the scenario was never plausible in the first place. Pielke’s apples-to-apples comparison using the FaIR emulator finds the new CMIP7 high scenario producing roughly 0.9 degrees C less warming by the end of the century than the retired SSP5-8.5.
So when Curry says the assessment relied too heavily on these pathways, she is not voicing a fringe grievance. She is describing something the modeling community itself has now conceded, in print, in the flagship journal of its own field. The extreme scenario that anchored a great deal of the alarming language in the National Climate Assessment is the same scenario its own architects walked away from this spring.
That matters downstream. The assessment’s most quotable figures, the projected hits to GDP, the coastal inundation maps, the agricultural collapse estimates, were in many cases computed on top of that high-emission pathway. Pull the foundation out and the numbers move, sometimes by a great deal. An editor who insists the next report use scenarios the modelers still endorse is not censoring the science. He is asking it to keep current.
Here’s the point of view of other side.
Wielicki is not a household name, and the professor in exile branding is the kind of thing that invites easy mockery. His appointment was confirmed through his own social posts and a single anonymous source, so a measure of caution about the finer details is warranted until the office says something official.
More substantively, the DOE report that this new direction appears to build on made the “consensus” apoplectic. At least eighty-five alarmist scientists produced a rebuttal running past four hundred pages, which its authors judged biased and unreliable.
Also a federal judge ruled in early 2026 that Wright’s working group had been assembled in violation of federal transparency law, though the same judge declined to strike the report from the record.
Michael Kuperberg, who ran the program under two prior administrations, put his standard consensus worry bluntly to Politico: an assessment written by a small hand-picked group will not represent the wider field, and the real casualty will be public trust in federal science.
But that cuts in both directions. If public trust in a government report depends on excluding every researcher who disagrees with it, then the trust was never resting on the science. It was resting on the consensus of the topic.
But notice what the rebuttal and the ruling do not touch. The judges transparency ruling was about process, about how the group was convened, not about whether the group was right. And the scenario critique that Curry raised, the one we have documented here for months, survives all of it intact, because it does not come from the DOE at all. It comes from Van Vuuren and the ScenarioMIP team. You cannot rebut the modelers by citing the modelers.
So here is the crux of it. A skeptical scientist has been placed in charge of a taxpayer-funded report that helps drive federal regulation and climate litigation, and the coverage treats his skepticism as the disqualification. I would put it the other way around. A document carrying that much legal and financial weight should be able to withstand a skeptical editor. If it cannot, that tells you something important about the document.
Scrutiny of a government assessment by someone inclined to question it is not a threat to the science. It is a stress test.
Here’s the fun part, Dr. Michael Mann predictably reacted on Twitter.
He also dug up this Tweet:
The delicious irony of this is that Mann was never asked to chair USGRP or any other national climate organization even though he’s the one with all the awards and is a self-named “Nobel Prize Winner.”
That’s really got to stick in his craw once he realizes it, or somebody points it out to him because he’s too blind to see it himself.
WINNING.
P.S., Hilariously, Mann already presents himself with “hair on fire.”
