President Donald Trump has long rejected climate science.

Now, his administration is grappling with how to assemble a body of federal climate research to show a warming world is benefiting humanity.

The claims would be highly misleading and ignore decades of scientific research that shows climate change will have increasingly dire effects.

But a federal report downplaying or denying the threat of climate change would become a cornerstone of Trump’s efforts to end or weaken climate regulations while expanding executive authority. It also would mark an escalation of Trump’s own climate disinformation from rhetoric to federal action.

The Trump assault on climate science has begun in earnest. In its first weeks, the Trump administration fired climate scientists and removed climate-related government web pages while Cabinet officials made false climate claims.

When EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin recommended in February that the White House attempt to reverse the endangerment finding — which requires EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions — he may have kick-started a process to produce a government report intended to tear down climate rules.

White House officials did not respond to a request for comment.

Any attempt to reject or replace the endangerment finding would be a challenging legal battle for the administration to wage, according to legal experts and scientists. But a key first step is to go after established climate science.

Officials from Trump’s current and previous presidency have laid out pathways to produce such a report, which would rely on incomplete or selective research and flawed claims.

Proposals include putting together a new endangerment finding to supplant the current one, conducting a hostile review of U.S. and international climate reports, and recruiting a White House-approved list of researchers to produce a National Climate Assessment based on partisan research and industry studies.

“What the Trump administration is trying to do amounts to nothing more than trying to pollute the process with ideologically-motivated antiscience,” Michael Mann, a climate scientist and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in an email. “It means that the U.S. federal government is now at war with humanity.”

In his first term, Trump wanted to go big with his attacks on climate science. He floated the idea of a nationally televised climate science debate. He empowered a National Security Council official to conduct a red team-blue team review of climate science that would apply a military strategy designed to find weaknesses in plans.

In the end, it was all blocked by White House officials nervous about Trump’s reelection chances.

This time is clearly different.

Now, top White House officials have laid out plans to more aggressively attack climate science, especially if it inhibits their vision of executive authority and restricts the fossil fuel industry. And while it’s not clear how the White House will proceed, Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought proposed in the Project 2025 conservative policy handbook to cut what he called “climate fanaticism” from the federal government.

Vought wants greater control over government climate science and the ability to select the researchers who would produce the National Climate Assessment, a comprehensive report that includes input from hundreds of scientists documenting how global warming is affecting the U.S. The goal, he wrote, has little to do with science and everything to do with ensuring climate research is not used against the administration in court.

One strategy that Trump could resurrect from his first term involves casting doubt on established science by claiming there are flaws in climate research, said Steve Koonin, a physicist at New York University and former top scientist at BP who co-led the effort five years ago. That could topple the endangerment finding, he said.

“What I think has been needed all along is an honest, transparent, unbought presentation of the science — that’s what needs to happen — and then the endangerment finding will fall where it is,” Koonin said. “It’s the job of the scientists to inform the decisionmakers. That includes the courts, of course, as well as the administration.”

Overturning the consensus would be a heavy lift, especially since the Supreme Court has rejected three previous attempts to revisit the endangerment finding, said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.

“There was a ton of scientific evidence supporting the conclusion that greenhouse gasses worsened climate change. There’s now 10 times that evidence,” Gerrard said. “It’s implausible that EPA could now come up with evidence refuting any of that and so it would be the essence of arbitrary and capricious.”

Gerrard did say such a report could let the administration gut public health regulations on the fossil fuel industry if the inevitable legal challenge came before a Trump-appointed judge willing to overlook an overwhelming body of climate science research.

Despite seeming long odds, it’s likely the new Trump White House will try.

Another strategy would involve compiling a second endangerment finding focused on the past 15 years of research since EPA adopted the finding.

The idea was raised last week by David Legates, who served briefly as NOAA’s deputy assistant secretary of commerce for observation and prediction in Trump’s first administration. In a video livestream by the conservative Heartland Institute, which produces climate disinformation, Legates called for a “replacement” endangerment finding that would be based on research published in the last 15 years.

“I’m pretty certain that what we’re going to conclude from what we know now is that carbon dioxide is not an evil gas,” Legates said. “Rather, it’s a gas beneficial to life on Earth. It’ll increase temperatures slightly, and warmer temperatures are certainly better than colder temperatures.”

In reality, thousands of peer-reviewed studies by climate researchers worldwide since 2009 have added evidence that supports the endangerment finding. While a warming world could reduce cold-related deaths, it would kill more people with intensive heat, research shows.

Legates was fired from the first Trump administration for attempting to publish partisan and unsupported climate claims on the White House website. He was trying to establish an official government record that could be used in future attempts to attack climate regulations.

Legates has maintained close ties to top figures in the new administration.

Legates helped Vought, the OMB director, write a chapter in Project 2025 that called for expanding presidential power, breaking up NOAA because of its climate science research and producing a new National Climate Assessment written by researchers who downplay or deny humanity’s role in driving climate change.

Legates and Vought also called for ending the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which coordinates federal research and spending produces the National Climate Assessment. On the livestream, Legates indicated that Elon Musk’s unofficial Department of Government Efficiency had been alerted that the group should be targeted for elimination.

“Let’s just say DOGE knows about it,” Legates said.