President Donald Trump attends a ceremony to sign an executive order establishing the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council on Dec. 12, 2018.

(Jacquelyn Martin/AP)

At a Glance

NOAA's current chief Administrator announced that he has never briefed President Donald Trump on climate change.A former NOAA chief said she met with President Barack Obama every few months to discuss the topic.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's current chief Administrator Timothy Gallaudet announced in a press conference this week that in almost two years he has never briefed President Donald Trump on climate change.

Gallaudet said he was unsure if others at the government agency that monitors climate change had briefed the president, but he did claim that he was present when President Trump signed a bill in efforts to keep plastic trash out of the ocean.

However, former NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco said she met with President Barack Obama every few months to discuss climate change. A marine ecologist from Oregon State University, Lubchenco served as the head of NOAA during the first term of the Obama administration.

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“I have been told by my various predecessors that most never met with the President, of if they did, it was only once or twice,” Lubchenco said in an email Tuesday. “I think this says more about President Obama than it does about other NOAA Administrators.”

Obama, she said, “consistently highlighted science as a key underpinning of his administration.”

Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren, estimates that over eight years he briefed the president about climate change more than 50 times.

Trump has dismissed his administration’s warnings about the impact of climate change, including a recent government forecast that it could lead to economic losses of hundreds of billions of dollars a year by the end of the century.

“There is no sign that President Trump is interested in input from anybody on the scientific facts around climate change,” said Holdren, now a professor of environmental policy at Harvard. “And his uninformed rejection of those facts — reflected in his administration’s misguided policies on coal, offshore drilling, automotive fuel economy, clean-energy R&D, the Paris Agreement, and assistance to developing countries on climate-change mitigation and adaptation — is doing immense damage to the prospects for averting a wholly unmanageable degree of global climate change.”

The White House Office of Science and Technology and Policy hasn’t been briefing the president because it is waiting for its director to be confirmed by the Senate, according to a source familiar with the office who asked not to be identified so as not to conflict with White House messaging. Trump nominated University of Oklahoma meteorology professor Kelvin Droegemeier in July, 18 months after taking office.

Commerce Department spokeswoman Rebecca Glover, asked about whether Trump had been briefed, said in a statement that NOAA representatives meet “with the White House on a regular basis on a wide variety of topics that impact the U.S. and U.S. policy.” She did not say whom at the White House was briefed.

The White House said the president gets energy and climate briefings from its own policy people, not specifically addressing briefings from scientists and on climate science.

Gallaudet acknowledged the lack of presidential briefings during a meeting this week of the American Geophysical Union.

“Climate change is real, and we are already suffering the serious consequences. Humans are the dominant cause and if we don’t take urgent action it will only get worse. That’s a conclusion based on real scientific data,” said Chris McEntee, chief executive officer of the 100-year-old scientific society. “The president of the United States has access to some of the best scientific data and the brightest scientific minds in the world — in his own agencies and through reports like the recent National Climate Assessment. It is critical that he access that expertise and data to avoid further risk to the health and safety of the American public.”

Pennsylvania State University ice scientist Richard Alley, a Republican most of his life, said: “Many scientists — dedicated, nonpartisan, knowledgeable — would happily provide administration officials with briefings or background information. The science is solid, and the full scholarship shows that making efficient use of our scientific knowledge will help the economy as well as the environment.”