- Dr. Matthew Wielicki replaces the climate assessment’s former leadership, signaling a shift toward skepticism.
- The next climate report will focus on natural climate variability and positive effects like longer growing seasons.
- Hundreds of scientists and contractors were dismissed, leaving the assessment team to start from scratch.
- Energy Secretary Wright says the report will prioritize honest data over scaring children or raising energy prices.
The U.S. government's National Climate Assessment has long served as the crown jewel of climate alarmism, a sprawling, fear-laden document produced at taxpayer expense to justify sweeping regulations and global policy demands. But that era is coming to an end.
The U.S. Global Change Research Program, which compiles these assessments, now has a new director: Dr. Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist who left academia after growing tired of its ideological capture. His appointment signals a shift toward science grounded in reproducible data rather than narrative-driven panic.
A skeptical scientist takes charge
Wielicki, who describes himself as a "professor in exile," has long argued that the mainstream scientific view on climate change overlooks positive effects and exaggerates dangers. The Trump administration reconstituted the USGCRP after previously eliminating its funding, and Wielicki now leads an office that, despite its name, does not actually conduct or coordinate climate research. Instead, it compiles an annual report summarizing work already being done by 13 federal agencies.
A White House spokesperson stated: "For too long, the USGCRP has been used as a vehicle for political agendas instead of sound science. We look forward to restoring the USGCRP and ensuring it fulfills its legal mandate."
Rethinking what counts in a climate report
Sources close to the effort suggest the next assessment will look nothing like its predecessors. One argument driving the rewrite: climate has always varied on its own, over years and over centuries, and separating that ordinary variability from any genuine long-term trend is harder than past reports acknowledged.
A second argument holds that most observed change has natural origins rather than human ones, with urban heat — warming driven by pavement and buildings rather than the atmosphere — cited as a rare exception. Backers of the new approach also want the assessment to weigh benefits they say past editions ignored, such as longer growing seasons, fewer cold-weather deaths, and the crop-boosting effect of higher atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Rebuilding after the purge
Several hundred scientists and outside experts who had been contributing to the sixth assessment were dismissed last year, and funding for many outside contractors dried up after officials canceled the ICF support contract that had paid them. Researchers who built the prior reports are unlikely to want a role in producing a skeptical version, meaning much of the writing team will effectively need to start from scratch.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright expressed confidence in the new direction, saying Wielicki "is an honest scientist who follows the data wherever it leads." Wright added that "growing the government, increasing energy prices, and scaring children will no longer be the goal. Science will be the goal."
Reaction splits along familiar lines
Meade Krosby, a scientist with the University of Washington's Climate Impacts Group who was among those dismissed from the project, said she worries the next report will amount to a "collection of climate denial talking points" rather than the credible guidance communities need as they deal with heat, wildfires and floods.
However, Myron Ebell, a longtime critic of mainstream climate science who chairs the American Lands Council, took a more optimistic view, saying the coming assessment will be "based more on data and scientific research and less on junk models."
Whether Wielicki can pull off the rebuild is still an open question. There is no functioning office yet, no established writing team, and no fixed timeline for the sixth assessment. But for a program that has spent a quarter-century producing warnings with little room for debate, simply inviting the debate back in would mark a meaningful change.
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