Climate change group scrapped by Trump reassembles to issue warning

Source: The Guardian

Climate change group scrapped by Trump reassembles to issue warning

Panel was disbanded after a Trump official voiced concerns that it did not have enough members ‘from industry’

Oliver Milman in New York
Thu 4 Apr 2019 14.00 BST

A US government climate change advisory group scrapped by Donald Trump has reassembled independently to call for better adaptation to the floods, wildfires and other threats that increasingly loom over American communities.

The Trump administration disbanded the 15-person Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment in August 2017. The group, formed under Barack Obama’s presidency, provided guidance to the government based on the National Climate Assessment, a major compendium of climate science released every four years.

Documents released under freedom of information laws subsequently showed the Trump administration was concerned about the ideological makeup of the panel. “It only has one member from industry, and the process to gain more balance would take a couple of years to accomplish,” wrote George Kelly, then the deputy chief of staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in a June 2017 email.

The advisory group has since been resurrected, however, following an invitation from New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, and has been financially supported by Columbia University and the American Meteorological Society. It now has 20 expert members.

The panel is now known as the Science to Climate Action Network (Scan) and has now completed work it would have finished for the federal government, releasing a report on Thursday warning that Americans are being put at risk from the impacts of a warming planet due to a muddled response to climate science.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/04/climate-change-trump-advisory-group-report-warning-global-warming

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Related: Evaluating Knowledge to Support Climate Action: A Framework for Sustained Assessment