Dozens of the world’s leading climate researchers on Tuesday publicly rebuked a hastily assembled report from the Trump administration that questions the severity of global warming — marking one of the strongest repudiations yet of the president’s efforts to downplay climate change.
In a withering 459-page document, more than 85 scientists denounced the Department of Energy‘s July report as biased, error-ridden and unfit for guiding policy.
The report “fails to adequately represent the current scientific understanding of climate change,” they wrote. The authors include veterans in atmospheric science, physics, ecology, forecast modeling and several other fields at universities, think tanks and research institutions in the United States and abroad.
Titled “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate,” the report was written by five researchers selected by U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright. It was published after the White House dismissed more than 400 scientists working on the sixth National Climate Assessment and shut down the website that housed the previous assessments.
The Environmental Protection Agency leaned on the Energy Department report in its hotly contested proposal to repeal the endangerment finding, a landmark 2009 determination affirming that planet-warming greenhouse gases pose a threat to human health and the environment. The finding is the basis of many federal climate efforts.
Among its controversial conclusions, the Energy Department report determines that carbon dioxide-induced warming “might be less damaging economically than commonly believed,” and that “aggressive mitigation policies” — such as those designed to curb the use of fossil fuels — “could prove more detrimental than beneficial.”
“The purpose of this report is to restore an open and transparent dialogue around climate science,” department spokesman Ben Dietderich said in a statement to The Times on Tuesday.
But the authors of the rebuttal say the report misrepresents evidence, relies on discredited research and fails to follow the peer review process typically expected of rigorous scientific assessments, among other concerns.
“The more than 85 volunteer expert reviewers found that DOE’s committee of five produced a report that is not scientifically credible,” said Robert Kopp, a distinguished professor in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University and one of the authors of the critical review.
The 500-page review was submitted as a public comment in the Federal Register. More than 2,400 public comments have been submitted about the Energy Department report to date.
The Trump administration has been outspoken in its skepticism of climate change. In March, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the agency’s plans to roll back more than 30 environmental regulations that he said were stifling American energy production and driving up costs for consumers, including the endangerment finding. “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion,” Zeldin said.
President Trump this year also withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement and subsequently championed the production of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal, which have long been understood to contribute to climate change by releasing carbon dioxide that traps heat in the atmosphere. The administration has been halting clean-energy projects that are fully permitted, under contract and under construction.
In response, the scientists said the basic science of the Earth’s climate has been well established through decades of research, including that of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“The evidence shows that human influence is warming the atmosphere, ocean, and land in a way that is unprecedented for many centuries to millennia,” they wrote. “The evidence that human-caused climate change is changing heat waves, heavy rainfall events, droughts, hurricanes, and wildfires has grown.”
They pointed to several examples of errors and “cherry-picked” information in the federal report, such as a section that argues that climate models have overestimated warming because the U.S. Corn Belt — which makes up less than 1% of the area of the planet — did not warm as projected.
Another section of the report states that U.S. tidal gauge readings reveal “no obvious acceleration” of sea-level rise, but the researchers noted that it selected only five tidal gauges to support that claim, while ignoring a wide body of findings to the contrary.
In his foreword to the report, Wright acknowledged that climate change is real but downplayed its effects, stating that “misguided” policies on the issue have been based on fear, distorted facts and exaggerated and incomplete information. (Wright later said the administration may revise the previously published National Climate Assessments.)
But Kopp, of Rutgers, said that most climate models and projections contain a variety of potential outcomes, including some scenarios where society acts quickly to reduce fossil fuel emissions and limit warming, and others where warming continues to accelerate.
“This report is about emphasizing the uncertainty — things might not be as bad as we think — while ignoring the potential that things could be much worse than we think,” Kopp said.
In fact, climate change has been outpacing many scientific projections, which tend to be conservative, given their reliance on consensus.
The researchers came together after Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, posted about the federal report on the social media site BlueSky, asking whether anyone was considering a coordinated response. What followed was a robust, grassroots effort to review and reply to each section of the report.
“This report makes a mockery of science,” Dessler said in a statement. “It relies on ideas that were rejected long ago, supported by misrepresentations of the body of scientific knowledge, omissions of important facts, arm waving, anecdotes and confirmation bias. This report makes it clear DOE has no interest in engaging with the scientific community.”
The 85 researchers who rebuked the report are far from the only ones concerned about the Energy Department’s findings.
A separate public comment submitted Tuesday by the Union of Concerned Scientists — a nonprofit representing more than 21,000 scientists — decried the department’s report as “deeply flawed” and rife with “anti-science content.”
“It is a staggering affront to the public,” the group wrote in its testimony, “to see such a flawed product put forward as an official U.S. Government document.”
The authors of the federal report began working in early April with a late May deadline, according to their preface. Dietderich, the department spokesman, said agency officials “look forward to reviewing and engaging on substantive comments” after the public comment period ends Tuesday.
This story originally appeared on LA Times
