Sea level rise is not accelerating. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be good for plant growth. The computer models used to predict global warming tend to exaggerate future temperature increases.
These arguments, routinely made by people who reject the scientific consensus on climate change, were included in an unusual report released by the Energy Department on Tuesday. The report, which is meant to support the Trump administration’s sweeping efforts to roll back climate regulations, contends that the mainstream scientific view on climate change is too dire and overlooks the positive effects of a warming planet.
Climate scientists said the 151-page report misrepresented or cherry-picked a large body of research on global warming. Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth and the payments company Stripe, called the document a “scattershot collection of oft-debunked skeptic claims” that “are not representative of broader climate science research findings.”
The report demonstrates the extent to which President Trump is using his second term to wage a battle against climate change research, a long-held goal of some conservative groups and fossil fuel companies. While the first Trump administration often undermined federal scientists and rolled back more than 100 environmental policies, officials mostly refrained from trying to debate climate science in the open.
This time, Trump officials have gone much further.
The Environmental Protection Agency this week cited the Energy Department report in its proposal to repeal a landmark 2009 finding that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, pose a threat to public health. That determination, known as the endangerment finding, underpinned the agency’s legal authority to limit greenhouse gas emissions from cars, power plants and other industrial sources of pollution.
The new report also comes months after the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship analysis of how climate change is affecting the country. That analysis, known as the National Climate Assessment, was set to explore how rising temperatures will influence public health, agriculture, fisheries, water supplies, transportation, energy production and other aspects of the economy.
“It is a coordinated, full-scale attack on the science,” said Dave White, who directs the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation at Arizona State University. “This was present in the first Trump administration, but it’s being exacerbated in the second.”
The vast majority of climate scientists agree that carbon dioxide, which is released by the burning of fossil fuels, is accumulating in the atmosphere and raising global temperatures. This warming is increasing the risk of destructive storms, droughts, wildfires and heat waves around the globe.
The Energy Department commissioned its own report from five prominent skeptics of the consensus view. They include Steven E. Koonin, a physicist and author of a best-selling book that calls climate science “unsettled”; John Christy, an atmospheric scientist who doubts the extent to which human activity has caused global warming; and Judith Curry, a climatologist who has said there is too much “alarmism” about warming.
An Energy Department spokesman, Ben Dietderich, wrote in an email that the report “critically assesses many areas of ongoing scientific inquiry that are frequently assigned high levels of confidence — not by the scientists themselves but by the political bodies involved, such as the United Nations or previous presidential administrations. Unlike previous administrations, the Trump administration is committed to engaging in a more thoughtful and science-based conversation about climate change and energy.”
In response to emailed questions, four of the report’s authors wrote that they would address any criticism during their report’s 30-day public-comment period.
“Is the final draft perfect? No,” Dr. Christy wrote. “We will be sifting through numerous public comments to fix the mistakes that we may have made or to include evidence we overlooked.”
During Mr. Trump’s first term, Dr. Koonin proposed that the E.P.A. 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 rebut the claims.
But that plan was ultimately blocked by John F. Kelly, then the White House chief of staff. He and other White House aides worried that the exercise could harm Mr. Trump’s re-election chances and distract from the administration’s efforts to repeal Obama-era environmental regulations.
Now, however, the views of Dr. Koonin and other skeptics are prominently featured in the Energy Department report. Its title is “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate.”
The report does not directly dispute that carbon dioxide is heating the planet. And it does not attempt to deny many effects of global warming, such as the melting of vast ice sheets that sit on top of Greenland and Antarctica that are contributing to rising sea levels around the world.
But in many cases, the authors question established research on the significance and the risks of this warming.
For instance, the report suggests that solar activity may be an “underestimated” contributor to warming, citing a recent paper that has been sharply criticized. In contrast, a 2021 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was compiled by hundreds of scientists, determined that human activity is responsible for essentially all of the global warming seen to date, while natural factors like sunspots have played little role.
The Energy Department report also repeatedly highlights the positive effects of carbon dioxide, saying that “rising CO2 levels benefit plants, including agricultural crops.” The report does not mention recent research that found that rising global temperatures can have an adverse effect on yields of staple crops like rice, soybeans and wheat.
The report’s authors “are right that crops breathe CO2, just like we breathe oxygen,” said Andrew Hultgren, an assistant professor of agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. But exposure to extreme heat reduces the ability of plants like corn, wheat and other staples to produce food, he said, “and that’s where they get things wrong.”
The authors also wrote that U.S. tide gauges “show no obvious acceleration in sea-level rise beyond the historical average rate.” But satellite measurements for the past 30 years have found that sea level rise is accelerating globally. The authors seem to have selectively chosen data from certain tide gauges that supported their point, said Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University.
Experts said they were struck by how quickly the Energy Department’s report was put together. When the federal government has previously compiled National Climate Assessments, it has convened hundreds of scientists who spend years gathering research and go through several rounds of peer review.
In contrast, the five scientists assembled by the Energy Department began work in early April and finished by a May 28 deadline, according to the report. “The short timeline and the technical nature of the material meant that we could not comprehensively review all topics,” the authors wrote.
Some experts said that a push for more debate on certain aspects of climate science could be productive.
Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist, has previously criticized other climate researchers for misrepresenting evidence on how global warming has affected extreme weather to date. He said that parts of the report appeared reasonable, such as its point that some of the very worst-case scenarios used in climate research are now widely seen as unrealistically dire. He added that it was a problem for climate science when dissenting views get marginalized.
“These scientists have said they want to motivate discussion and debate,” said Dr. Pielke, who is now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “So let’s see if they live up to that expectation.”
But others were skeptical that the Trump administration was merely trying to start a discussion, particularly since the E.P.A., in its proposal to repeal regulations on greenhouse gas emissions, was leaning on the Energy Department’s scientific review to make its case.
Raymond Zhong contributed reporting from London.
Maxine Joselow reports on climate policy for The Times.
Brad Plumer is a Times reporter who covers technology and policy efforts to address global warming.
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