In a now infamous April 1998 memo , the main trade association for the U.S. oil and gas industry the American Petroleum Institute laid out plans for a multi-year, multi-million dollar campaign to sow doubt about the scientific consensus on climate change.

The U.S. and dozens of other nations had recently adopted the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. Fossil fuel giants and allied right-wing think tanks mobilized to stymie the effort to rein in emissions, pledging to identify, recruit and train a team of five independent scientists to participate in media outreach, according to the draft plan, first obtained by The New York Times.

The institutes team would produce a steady stream of opinion pieces for newspapers, develop a media kit with research papers that undercut the conventional wisdom on climate science, and set up a data center to serve as a one-stop resource on climate science for members of Congress, the media, industry and all others concerned.

Victory will be achieved, the group wrote, when average citizens understand (recognize) uncertainties in climate science.

Two decades later, human-caused climate change is a full-blown emergency. In response, President Donald Trump is leading an attack on climate science that mirrors the misinformation campaign industry hatched two decades ago and includes some of the same players.

At the center of the White House plan is an initiative to recruit scientists to challenge the all-but-irrefutable consensus that planetary warming is an immediate threat driven by the worlds fossil fuel addiction. The ad-hoc panel is expected to conduct adversarial scientific peer review of climate science, emphasizing uncertainties in a formidable body of research, The Washington Post and E&E News reported in February, citing a leaked White House document.

The landscape, though, is different than 20 years ago. Now, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has soared past 415 parts per million, the highest levels in human history , and deadly extreme weather events are becoming a new normal. Even fossil fuel companies have come around on the science, abandoning outright climate denial for more calculated approaches. Team Trump isnt even aligned with the industries theyve worked so hard to prop up, but rather with crank bloggers and fringe ideologues.

Kert Davies, director of Climate Investigations Center, a fossil fuel industry watchdog, called Trumps approach a kamikaze hit on climate science.

Thats what the [1998] memo said they would do, recruit scientists who will talk about uncertainty, Davies told HuffPost. It was leaked 20 years ago and now here we are.