Acting Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Andrew Wheeler, Sarah Sanders, and other Trump administration officials have criticized their own government’s climate change report for being unnecessarily alarmist about a “worst-case scenario.”The Global Change Research Act of 1990 requires the federal government to conduct and publish an assessment of climate change every four years. The report, the Fourth National Climate Assessment, reads, “Global average temperature has increased by about 1.8 [degrees] from 1901 to 2016, and observational evidence does not support any credible natural explanations for this amount of warming… Instead, the evidence consistently points to human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse or heat-trapping gases, as the dominant cause.”

The report was also conspicuously released on Black Friday, one of the slowest news cycles of the year due to the holidays and holiday shopping. The National Wildlife Federation President Collin O’Mara said in a statement, “It’s an absolute disgrace to bury the truth about climate impacts in a year that saw hundreds of Americans die during devastating climate-fueled megafires, hurricanes, floods, and algal blooms.”

Despite the report being published under the Trump administration, many high-ranking Trump officials undermined the report’s urgent demands.

According to the Hill, Andrew Wheeler, Acting Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator, indicated that since the report started under the Obama administration, the direction it took focused on the “worst-case scenario.”

Wheeler stated, “I don’t think the assessment really took into account the innovation that we’ve seen and the technological advancement that we’ve seen in recent years. It basically freezes technology going forward.”

At a White House briefing, Sarah Sanders said, “It’s not based on facts… It’s not data-driven… We’d like to see something that is more data-driven, that’s based on modeling, which is extremely hard to do when you’re talking about the climate.”

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told KCRA, “It appears they took the worst scenarios and they built predictions on that.”

Many environmental experts are criticizing the administration’s responses to the report and addressed the urgency of drastic changes on global warming and climate change.

Nathaniel Keohane, senior vice president of climate at the Environmental Defense Fund, said, “It’s like the tobacco industry saying they needed more science showing the link to smoking and cancer… This is the most data-driven assessment we’ve ever had in the U.S.”

Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. echoed the same sentiments, “The worst-case scenario is that we have an administration that completely ignores the information coming out from its own scientists, its own analysts, and not only rolls back protections and safeguards, but tries to do things like subsidize coal plants to keep them running.”