Evidence and warnings in the National Climate Assessment are a high-stakes problem for Trump's fossil fuel-friendly agenda, both in politics and in court.

President Donald Trump's administration and its allies in the climate denial community have mounted a campaign to try to discredit the Fourth National Climate Assessment, an effort that has escalated in intensity since the report's release during the Thanksgiving weekend.

Trump could not halt the peer-reviewed assessment by the U.S. government's climate scientists.  The report—the most comprehensive and authoritative report on climate change and its impacts in the United States—is mandated by a law Congress passed in 1990.

But after an attempt to minimize the attention it received, by slipping it out to the public on the afternoon of the Black Friday shopping holiday, Trump flatly rejected its central finding that global warming is causing ongoing and lasting economic damage.  "I don't believe it," he said.

Since then, cabinet members like Environmental Protection Agency Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke have picked up the extraordinary assault, while some of the most prominent stalwarts of science denial have chimed in with arguments seeking to portray the report as "alarmist" and extreme.

Some of the more than 300 experts inside and outside the government who authored or otherwise took part in the assessment have staunchly defended the report, pointing out that it considered a broad range of scenarios and was based on thousands of climate studies and the work of 13 federal agencies.

"Climate science isn't a religion:  it's real, whether we believe in it or not," Texas Tech University atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe wrote on Twitter in a lengthy thread seeking to set the record straight.  "If our decisions are not based in reality, we are the ones who will suffer the consequences."

But the chorus of doubts could help obscure the significance of a report that poses a significant threat to the Trump administration's fossil fuel-friendly agenda.  It would be an echo of a similar campaign at a pivotal moment, the so-called "Climategate" scandal in 2009, in which unsubstantiated attacks on climate scientists based on their stolen emails undercut the credibility of their work on the eve of the Copenhagen climate talks.

Now, the new assessment on the growing threat global warming poses to human life, property and ecosystems across the country, and the potential for vast economic damage, is sure to be highlighted in the renewed discussion of climate change expected on Capitol Hill when the Democrats take control of the House in January, and in the growing movement in the states for strong action to reduce carbon emissions.

Read more at Unable to Bury Climate Report, Trump & Deniers Launch Assault on the Science