The Trump administration has appointed a critic of mainstream climate science to oversee the federal government’s flagship report on how climate change affects the United States.
Matthew M. Wielicki is a former geochemist at the University of Alabama with no formal training in climate science. On social media and podcasts, he frequently argues that the mainstream scientific view on climate change is too dire and overlooks the positive effects of a warming planet.
Now Dr. Wielicki is leading the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which compiles the National Climate Assessment, a sweeping report required by Congress that details the effects of rising temperatures in every region of the country. Policymakers, communities and industries use it to plan for the future.
The report is typically published every few years. But last spring, the administration dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who had been working on the next update.
The last climate assessment, published in 2023, found that human-caused global warming was supercharging wildfires in the West, droughts in the Great Plains and heat waves from coast to coast.
President Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” and his administration has dismantled climate initiatives across the federal government. Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, has called for overhauling the Global Change Research Program, saying its findings have been used to justify environmental lawsuits that constrained government actions.
Politico first reported on Dr. Wielicki’s appointment. Reached by phone on Friday, Dr. Wielicki said he could not speak to reporters without permission from the White House, which declined to make him available.
In an unsigned statement that referred to the program by its abbreviation, the White House said, “For too long, the U.S.G.C.R.P. has been used as a vehicle for political agendas instead of sound science. We look forward to restoring the U.S.G.C.R.P. and ensuring it fulfills its legal mandate.”
Early in his career, Dr. Wielicki helped write several papers about craters that formed when the Earth collided with meteorites or other bodies, as well as the geological history of the Himalayas. He has not published peer-reviewed studies on climate science, a separate field.
In 2023, Dr. Wielicki resigned from his untenured position as an assistant professor of geosciences at the University of Alabama. He wrote on social media at the time that earth scientists had embraced a “false ‘climate emergency’ narrative” and that academia had been overrun with diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Since then, Dr. Wielicki has frequently described himself as a “professor-in-exile.” He often criticized climate scientists on his former podcast, “Weekly With Wielicki,” and in videos produced by the conservative educational platform PragerU.
“Climate is a very convenient way for governments and institutions to get involved in nearly aspect of a citizen’s life,” he declared in a PragerU video in 2023.
On a 2024 podcast episode, Dr. Wielicki argued that climate scientists had exaggerated the negative effects of warming, including the impact of sea level rise on coastal areas.
“As we start to weigh the first 1.1 degrees of warming over the last 170 or so years, I argue that if you take an objective look at this, the negative side has really fallen apart,” he said. “The negative effects are very minor. The sea level change we deal with relatively easily. We haven’t had to move coastal cities. We don’t see mass migrations. We don’t see island nations underwater.”
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The planet has already warmed roughly 1.4 degrees Celsius (2.5 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, on average. Global sea levels have risen about 8 to 9 inches since the 19th century, with some parts of the U.S. coast seeing even higher rates, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Some regions of the Southeast and Gulf Coast have seen a five to tenfold increase in coastal flooding at high tide as a result, the agency has said. Globally, rising seas could inundate large swaths of low-lying island nations this century under even moderate warming, according to the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international assessment compiled by hundreds of scientists around the world. Some smaller coastal villages have already relocated to higher ground.
“The reality is that accelerating sea level rise is already having impacts all around the world, including along the U.S. East Coast,” said Rachel Cleetus, the senior policy director with the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group.
“We need good science to help us get ready for these impacts that are coming our way instead of putting our heads in the sand and denying it’s happening, and as a result, putting more people’s lives and safety at risk,” said Dr. Cleetus, who was among the scientists the Trump administration dismissed from working on the next climate assessment.
At times, Dr. Wielicki has sparred on social media with climate scientists and meteorologists who have discussed global warming in their forecasts. Last year, for instance, he criticized Chris Gloninger, a television weatherman who had resigned from a station in Iowa after receiving a death threat from a viewer who was angry about his climate coverage.
“This guy has literally made his entire social media presence about getting a couple of angry emails from a 60-year-old,” Dr. Wielicki wrote of Mr. Gloninger, adding, “How embarrassing.”
In an interview, Mr. Gloninger said that Dr. Wielicki “has a track record of mocking, harassing and belittling scientists in the field, and I’m just one of his victims.”
The White House did not respond to questions about criticism of Dr. Wielicki or plans for the next National Climate Assessment. In a post on X on Thursday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright wrote that Dr. Wielicki “is an honest scientist who follows the data wherever it leads.”
Meade Krosby, a principal scientist at the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group and a former contributor to the assessment who was also dismissed by the Trump administration, said she worried that the next version of the report would include false or misleading information.
“Communities are experiencing unprecedented heat and wildfires and floods and other climate risks that are being driven by the burning of fossil fuels, and they really need credible tools and resources right now to help them respond, not a collection of climate denial talking points,” Dr. Krosby said.
But Myron Ebell, a prominent critic of mainstream climate science, said he was optimistic that the next assessment would take a contrarian viewpoint.
“It’s going be based more on data and scientific research and less on junk models,” said Mr. Ebell, who is now chairman of the American Lands Council, a group that pushes for securing local control of federal land in the West.
The U.S. Global Change Research Program was established by Congress in 1990 and coordinates environmental research among 15 federal agencies
During Mr. Trump’s first term, his administration published the fourth climate assessment on the day after Thanksgiving in 2018, in an apparent attempt to minimize attention. But The Times and other media outlets still highlighted its conclusion that global warming posed an imminent threat to the economy, environment and public health. The Biden administration released the fifth climate assessment in 2023.
After the Trump administration dismissed the scientists who had been working on what would be the sixth assessment, two major scientific groupssaid they would carry on a large portion of that work independently. The groups, the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society, said they planned to publish a collection of climate research in their peer-reviewed journals to help inform future assessments.
“We aren’t doing a national climate assessment ourselves,” said Walter Robinson, an atmospheric scientist at North Carolina State University who serves as the American Meteorological Society’s publications commissioner. “This is a place to have rigorous peer review of the science that can underpin the next assessment whenever it moves forward.”
Dr. Robinson added that the Trump administration would be welcome to use that research.
“The people who use these climate assessments, including citizens and businesses and local governments all over the country, they’re going to need this information and they will need it to be done well,” he said. “It’s a huge undertaking, and it’s not like one person can lock themselves in a room and bang this thing out.”