OH COME ON

White House to Probe Intelligence Community’s Finding That Climate Change Poses National Security Threat

The head of the panel—who is not a climate scientist—has said that carbon dioxide is actually good for the planet.

The White House is preparing to launch a committee that will scrutinize the intelligence community’s repeated insistence that climate change poses a threat to national security, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. The Presidential Committee on Climate Security would be led by William Happer, a senior director at the National Security Council, and would reportedly “advise the President on scientific understanding of today’s climate, how the climate might change in the future under natural and human influences, and how a changing climate could affect the security of the United States.”

Happer, a professor emeritus of physics at Princeton University, is not a trained climate scientist—but he has insisted repeatedly that carbon dioxide is actually good for the planet. “We’re doing our best to try and counter this myth that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant,” he said in 2016. “It’s not a pollutant at all... We should be telling the scientific truth, that more CO2 is actually a benefit to the earth.” That comment flies in the face of established climate science, which says that carbon dioxide is a major contributor to rising temperatures. The documents proposing the committee come just weeks after Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats labeled climate change a serious security concern, a characterization Trump has repeatedly rejected.