The New York Times has a draft climate report. It’s not controversial

On Monday night, the New York Times reported that it had a copy of a draft federal climate report that’s not yet public. The findings in the 545-page document will underpin the National Climate Assessment, a synthesis of the state of climate science as it relates to the U.S. and the world.

The first NCA came out in 2000 under then President Clinton and subsequent editions were supposed to follow like clockwork every four years. The Bush administration missed the 2004 deadline, however, and the report — which contained science inconvenient to the administration — wasn’t published until 2009. The third edition came out in 2014 along with a sweet website.

Which brings us to the present. The next iteration is slated to come out in 2018. But federal scientists who have worked on this report told the Times that they’re concerned that the Trump administration, which has not been shall we say receptive to climate science, could scrub this report and the NCA.

With that in mind, it’s important to keep a few things in mind about the leaked report.

This 👏 is 👏 not 👏 new 👏 or 👏 controversial 👏 science 👏. This is a synthesis report of existing science. It’s not breaking new ground but presenting what we already know.

While it relies on recent research, the report takes so long to put together that by the time it’s out, there’s already new science out there waiting to be synthesized in the next draft. That all makes it pretty vanilla by nature (or at least not surprising).

Take the “recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1,500 years” line that’s garnering a lot of attention. That finding is based on two papers from 2012 and 2013, neither of which were apparently published (or noticed) in time to be included in the 2014 edition of the NCA. This report, dubbed the Climate Science Special Report, is just a new platform for it.

The “controversy” is the report doesn’t align with the Trump administration’s false statements or its actions. It’s more than a little inconvenient for the Trump administration to have to publish a climate science report.

The findings are directly at odds with President Trump’s stated views and the views of many of his cabinet members, a number of whom have to sign off on the report by Aug. 18.

It puts people like Department of Energy head Rick Perry, for example, in an awkward position. He falsely claimed in a June interview on MSNBC that “most likely the primary control knob (of the climate) is the ocean waters and this environment that we live in.”

Boy, is he going to be surprised when he reads this line in the first chapter of the report:

“Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are primarily responsible for the observed climate changes in the industrial era. There are no alternative explanations and no natural cycles are found in the observational record that can explain the observed changes in climate.”

This and a host of other findings (all of them really) are direct evidence that rebuts the Trump administration’s near across the board climate science denialism. The administration is also enacting policies that are making the worst case scenarios outlined in the report more likely to come to pass. So yeah, awkward.

There’s precedent for climate science tampering: the Bush administration. The NCA is supposed to come out every four years. That nine-year gap between the first and second assessments is because the Bush administration dragged its feet and missed the legal deadline. The Center for Biological Diversity had to sue to get it published.

Non-climate experts in the Bush White House also edited science reports leading to a major 2005 story in the New York Times after a whistleblower came forward.

It’s unclear whether that will happen this time around. Myron Ebell, who headed the EPA transition team for Trump, told the Times that the process “seems to be on autopilot” because there’s no political leadership. But the Trump administration has subverted norms, shuffled climate experts out of jobs and scuffled a scientist’s meeting with Mark Zuckerberg so scientists’ fears of a redo of the Bush years aren’t necessarily unfounded.

The report was previously available. The version of the report that the Times posted is a draft that was released in December 2016 by the Obama administration (UPDATE: they uploaded the final draft). The Trump administration has since taken it offline after the comment period ended, which was to be expected (though like all things on the internet, it can never die completely).

That draft has since been reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences (favorably I might add) and updated. The Washington Post is reporting there’s a fifth iteration of the draft circulating in the White House, but there are no substantial differences from the publicly available one. That version is what the heads of the 13 agencies involved in creating it are looking at as they consider signing off.

It appears someone wanted to resurface a version of the report publicly to put the pressure on agency heads to make that sign off. We’ll find out if it works (or backfires) in 10 days.