Scores of scientists slammed the Trump administration’s latest climate report as a “farce” full of misinformation, The Guardian reported Tuesday.
In July, the Department of Energy published “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate,” a report claiming that the impacts of global warming had been overblown—without having it peer reviewed at all.
In response a group of 85 climate experts compiled a more than 400-page review, and found that the DOE’s report had been authored by five fringe experts who had cherry-picked cases and misrepresented research and evidence to support their flimsy findings.
Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said that DOE’s climate report “makes a mockery of science.”
The document “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,” Dessler told The Guardian. “This report makes it clear DOE has no interest in engaging with the scientific community.”
Energy Secretary Chris Wright personally selected five climate scientists to author the report who were “well known for manufacturing uncertainty” around climate science, the review found. The report’s authors, John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven E. Koonin, Ross McKitrick, and Roy Spencer, have each downplayed the impacts of climate change. Eleven percent of the report’s citations led to the authors’ own research, a rate that was nearly five times higher than another 2023 climate report.
Wright said the authors were chosen “for their rigor, honesty, and willingness to elevate the debate.” But the review stated that the DOE report “covers areas in which the authors are not experts,” and that the report’s many mistakes were “caused by a lack of familiarity with the science.”
Pamela McElwee, an associate professor of human ecology at Rutgers University, told The Guardian that the five people who were selected by the secretary of energy for their viewpoints “produced a shoddy mess of cherry-picked data and unsupported assertions.”
Dessler was distraught over how badly mischaracterized some research about climate-driven extreme events had been. “I mean, they just don’t understand what they’re talking about,” he said.
The scientists said that the shoddy work was in service of a predetermined outcome: a report that would help support the administration’s repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 Endangerment Finding, stating that the current and projected concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.”
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