The Energy Department has hired at least three scientists who are well-known for their rejection of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, according to records reviewed by The New York Times.
The scientists are listed in the Energy Department’s internal email system as current employees of the agency, the records show. They are Steven E. Koonin, a physicist and author of a best-selling book that calls climate science “unsettled”; John Christy, an atmospheric scientist who doubts that human activity has caused global warming; and Roy Spencer, a meteorologist who believes that clouds have had a greater influence on warming than humans have.
Their hiring comes after the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship report on how climate change is affecting the country. The administration has also systematically removed mentions of climate change from government websites while slashing federal funding for research on global warming.
In addition, Trump officials have been recruiting scientists to help them repeal the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which determined that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare, and which now underpins much of the government’s legal authority to slow global warming, according to two people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.
It was not immediately clear what the three scientists were working on or whether they were being paid. Representatives for Dr. Koonin, Dr. Spencer and the Energy Department did not respond to requests for comment.
In a brief phone interview and follow-up email, Dr. Christy said he was not working on the endangerment finding nor collecting a government salary. He declined to comment further.
A vast majority of scientists around the world agree that human activities — primarily the burning of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal — are dangerously heating the Earth. That has increased the frequency and intensity of heat waves, droughts and colossal bursts of rain like the storm that caused the deadly flooding now devastating central Texas.
A small minority of scientists, however, rejects this consensus. Dr. Koonin, who has said he is a friend of Energy Secretary Chris Wright, has been one of the loudest critics.
During President Trump’s first term, Dr. Koonin proposed that the Environmental Protection Agency conduct a “red-team, blue-team” exercise to challenge mainstream climate science. A “red team” of climate skeptics would critique major scientific reports on global warming, and a “blue team” of climate scientists would then rebut these claims. At the time, mainstream climate scientists said the proposal would make a mockery of scientific research and create a platform for marginal views that had already been disproved in the normal course of scientific debate.
Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator at the time, told coal industry executives that he planned to conduct the exercise. But John F. Kelly, then the White House chief of staff, ultimately blocked the effort.
Now, Dr. Koonin is listed as a “special government employee” in the Energy Department’s internal email system, the records show. Federal law says special government employees are executive branch appointees named to “perform important, but limited, services to the government, with or without compensation, for a period not to exceed 130 days” during a one-year period. Elon Musk had that classification when he began Mr. Trump’s cost cutting initiative, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
Dr. Koonin also serves as a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative-leaning research organization on Stanford University’s campus. He previously worked as a physicist at New York University, a scientist for the oil and gas company BP and an under secretary at the Energy Department during the Obama administration.
In his 2021 book, “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t and Why It Matters,” Dr. Koonin argued that while the planet was warming and human activities had played a role, the scientific consensus was not as certain or as dire as it was frequently portrayed.
In a phone interview in November, Dr. Koonin said that the book had made an impression on Mr. Wright, who ran the oil and gas company Liberty Energy before he was confirmed as energy secretary in February.
“He reached out when I wrote the book and said, ‘This is great,’” Dr. Koonin recalled. “He asked me to come talk to his company at one point — it was a couple years ago — and we got to know each other.”
He added, “Chris and I have talked quite a bit over the last couple years, and I think he is well aligned with what I wrote in the book.”
Dr. Spencer, a research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, also has a connection to Mr. Wright. In a report published last year by Liberty Energy, Mr. Wright cited atmospheric temperature records that Dr. Spencer had collected. (The overall report, titled “Bettering Human Lives,” made the case that fossil fuels were “essential” to solving global poverty, a claim that some experts have called misleading.)
In addition to his role at the University of Alabama, Dr. Spencer is a policy adviser at the Heartland Institute, a conservative group that rejects mainstream climate science. He previously served as a scientist at NASA and as a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing group responsible for creating Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for the new administration.
Dr. Spencer has argued that while human activity has caused some warming, its influence has been smaller than that of natural variations in global cloud cover. While some of Dr. Spencer’s past work has been funded by the government, he has accused federal climate researchers of being biased because they receive taxpayer money.
“The popular opinion that government-funded research is unbiased must be considered quite naïve,” he wrote in his 2010 book “The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists.”
Dr. Christy has worked closely with Dr. Spencer to maintain atmospheric temperature records at the University of Alabama. He has also served as Alabama’s state climatologist since 2000. A vocal critic of climate models, he championed the “red-team, blue-team” exercise and served on an E.P.A. scientific advisory board during the first Trump administration.
When asked about his Energy Department role in a brief phone interview, Dr. Christy said he was an “unpaid person who’s available to them if they need it.”
Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, expressed alarm that the Energy Department had hired the three scientists.
“What this says is that the administration has no respect for the actual science, which overwhelmingly points in the direction of a growing crisis as we continue to warm the planet through fossil-fuel burning, the consequences of which we’ve seen play out in recent weeks in the form of deadly heat domes and floods here in the U.S.,” Dr. Mann wrote in an email.
Dr. Mann added that the Trump administration appeared to have fired hundreds of “actual government science experts” and replaced them with “a small number of reliable foot soldiers.”
Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said it would be troubling if these three scientists were involved in repealing the 2009 endangerment finding, which cleared the way for the government to regulate the planet-warming gases emitted by cars, power plants and other industrial sources.
On his first day back in the White House, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that charged the E.P.A. with reviewing the “legality and continuing applicability of” the endangerment finding. And last week, the agency sent a proposal to reconsider the finding to the White House budget office, a first step in repealing it.
An E.P.A. spokesman, Mike Bastasch, declined to comment on the proposal before its public release.
Brad Plumer contributed reporting from Washington.
Maxine Joselow reports on climate policy for The Times.
The post Trump Hires Scientists Who Doubt the Consensus on Climate Change appeared first on New York Times.
