E&E News reports:

President Donald Trump has long rejected climate science.

Now, his administration is grappling with how to assemble a body of federal climate research to show a warming world is benefiting humanity.

The claims would be highly misleading and ignore decades of scientific research that shows climate change will have increasingly dire effects.

But a federal report downplaying or denying the threat of climate change would become a cornerstone of Trump’s efforts to end or weaken climate regulations while expanding executive authority. It also would mark an escalation of Trump’s own climate disinformation from rhetoric to federal action.

The Trump assault on climate science has begun in earnest. In its first weeks, the Trump administration fired climate scientists and removed climate-related government web pages while Cabinet officials made false climate claims.

When EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin recommended in February that the White House attempt to reverse the endangerment finding — which requires EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions — he may have kick-started a process to produce a government report intended to tear down climate rules.

White House officials did not respond to a request for comment.

Any attempt to reject or replace the endangerment finding would be a challenging legal battle for the administration to wage, according to legal experts and scientists. But a key first step is to go after established climate science.

Officials from Trump’s current and previous presidency have laid out pathways to produce such a report, which would rely on incomplete or selective research and flawed claims.

Proposals include putting together a new endangerment finding to supplant the current one, conducting a hostile review of U.S. and international climate reports, and recruiting a White House-approved list of researchers to produce a National Climate Assessment based on partisan research and industry studies.

“What the Trump administration is trying to do amounts to nothing more than trying to pollute the process with ideologically-motivated antiscience,” Michael Mann, a climate scientist and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in an email. “It means that the U.S. federal government is now at war with humanity.” [Continue reading…]