The Trump administration has appointed a man who calls himself a 'professor-in-exile,' makes videos for PragerU, and believes climate scientists are 'selling snake oil' to oversee the United States government's most important climate report. Matthew Wielicki, a former geochemist with zero formal training in climate science, will now run the National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated document that is supposed to tell Americans exactly how much trouble they are in. This is like putting a flat-earther in charge of NASA's navigation division, except somehow more on-brand for 2026.
Who Exactly Is This Guy
Wielicki left his post as a geosciences professor at the University of Alabama three years ago. He did not go quietly. He announced on social media that the profession was 'no longer worthy of my efforts,' citing the earth science community's 'silence on the false climate emergency narrative.' He then started a blog called Irrational Fear, which sounds like a self-help podcast but is actually a platform for disputing federal climate science.
On that blog, according to The Guardian, Wielicki argued that it is not carbon dioxide but increasing solar radiation causing atmospheric warming. This is a claim that the overwhelming consensus of actual climate scientists has rejected so thoroughly that relitigating it in 2026 feels less like scientific debate and more like insisting the moon landing was filmed on a soundstage.
He has also made videos for PragerU, the rightwing YouTube channel best known for producing slickly packaged misinformation that teenagers encounter in their recommendations between gaming clips. Whatever you picture when you hear 'PragerU climate content,' you are probably not picturing the next steward of federal climate science. And yet.
What the National Climate Assessment Actually Is
The National Climate Assessment is not a think-tank white paper or a op-ed dressed up in a binder. It is a congressionally mandated report, required by law passed in 1990, produced every four years, detailing specifically how the climate crisis is affecting Americans right now and what is coming. Five editions have been published since 2000. It is the kind of document that emergency managers, city planners, farmers, and insurance companies actually use to make real decisions.
The Trump administration already took a sledgehammer to it before Wielicki even walked in the door. As The Guardian reports, officials shut down the online portal to access all five previous editions last year, then dismissed every contributor to the sixth assessment. The program's budget and staff have been gutted throughout Trump's second term.
So the move here is not just 'hire a skeptic to run the report.' The move is 'destroy the report, then install someone whose job is to make sure whatever crawls out of the wreckage can't be taken seriously.' That is a two-step operation, and step one is already complete.
The 'Snake Oil' Quote Is Doing a Lot of Work Here
In 2023, Wielicki told his audience that people who believe in climate science are 'being sold snake oil.' This week, days before his appointment was confirmed, he posted on social media questioning whether attributing extreme weather to climate change is real science or 'just confirmation bias dressed up as science.' The post was a response to a scientific assessment finding that Europe's recent catastrophic heatwave would have been physically impossible without the climate crisis.
That is the new head of the National Climate Assessment. A man who responded to a peer-reviewed finding about a lethal heatwave by posting 'sounds like confirmation bias, actually.' The appointment was first reported by Politico.
A White House spokesperson told The Guardian that the administration is 'committed to using the best scientific information to inform public policy,' and that the Global Change Research Program had 'been used as a vehicle for political agendas instead of sound science.' The spokesperson did not clarify which scientific agendas were being advanced by findings that extreme heat kills people.
Scientists Are Not Taking This Well
Carlos Martinez, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, did not mince words. 'Reconstituting the USGCRP only to place the National Climate Assessment under the auspices of an utterly unqualified climate science denier would jeopardize the integrity of one of the nation's most important climate science resources,' he told The Guardian. He also noted that the program cannot afford to become a vehicle for 'politically motivated disinformation echoing fossil fuel industry talking points.'
That last bit about fossil fuel industry talking points is not a rhetorical flourish. The Guardian notes that Trump received record donations from the fossil fuel industry during his campaign. The industry has spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars specifically to manufacture doubt about climate science. Wielicki's greatest hits align almost perfectly with the talking points that money was designed to produce. Draw your own lines.
Last year, after the administration fired all contributors to the sixth assessment, the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union announced they would produce their own peer-reviewed research to fill the gaps. 'It's incumbent on us to ensure our communities, our neighbors, our children are all protected,' AGU president Brandon Jones said at the time. So now you have a situation where the nation's scientific societies are having to build a shadow infrastructure because the official one has been handed to a PragerU content creator.
The Pattern That Should Be Terrifying Everyone
Wielicki's appointment is not a one-off. It fits inside a systematic campaign. The Guardian reports that since Trump returned to office, officials have shuttered data-collection offices, killed climate research programs, and last summer published an energy department report written by five climate skeptics that flatly denied climate science. That report was an official government document. Paid for with your tax dollars.
The strategy is not subtle if you look at the whole board. Eliminate the data collection. Fire the scientists. Delete the historical reports. Install unqualified ideologues to produce replacement 'findings.' Then point to the replacement findings as official government science. It is a slow-motion erasure of the evidentiary record about what is happening to the planet, carried out by an administration that took record money from the industry most responsible for what is happening to the planet.
This is not bureaucratic incompetence. Incompetence is random. This is methodical.
The Dingo Take
Let's be precise about what this appointment means. The United States government is legally required to produce a report telling Americans how the climate crisis is affecting them. That report will now be overseen by a man who thinks the climate crisis is a false narrative, who abandoned academia because scientists wouldn't agree with him, and who makes content for PragerU. The guy who calls climate believers snake oil victims is now in charge of the snake oil warning label. If you wrote this as fiction, an editor would send it back as too on-the-nose.
The White House says it wants to restore 'sound science' to the program. The man they chose to do that believes solar radiation, not carbon dioxide, is driving warming, a position so far outside the scientific consensus that it does not even register as a minority view among climate researchers. It is not a heterodox opinion. It is just wrong. The administration is not restoring sound science. It is installing its own preferred fiction and calling it science, which is a thing authoritarian governments do when the facts become inconvenient.
America is going to get hotter. The floods are going to get worse. The fires are going to keep burning. All of that will keep happening whether or not the National Climate Assessment says so, but the assessment is what emergency managers use to prepare, what planners use to build, what farmers use to adapt. Gutting that information does not make the crisis go away. It just means fewer people can see it coming. Which, for an administration funded by the industry causing it, is probably the whole point.
