(CNN) — More than 85 veteran climate scientists have pushed back against a Trump administration report downplaying the severity of climate change, submitting more than 400 pages in public comments to the Energy Department on Tuesday.
The department’s Climate Working Group report, released July 29 alongside proposals to deregulate some polluting sectors, was authored by five well-known climate change contrarians and even portrayed climate change as potentially beneficial.
In Tuesday’s comments, the climate researchers describe that report as “science-y” in appearance, but grossly misleading, lacking in substance and peer review. For example, the comments criticize the sections on sea level rise, noting the report failed to capture the acceleration of such trends, among other inaccuracies.
“It makes a mockery of science,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate researcher at Texas A&M University who helped organize the public comments to push back against the report, citing mistakes in the document and other flaws.
The researchers’ comments are a lengthy, point-by-point rebuttal to the report in the form of a peer review to the Climate Working Group report. It includes a “Summary for Policy Makers” and zeroes in on everything from the report’s portrayal of carbon dioxide as a net benefit for agriculture, to its depiction of the accuracy of climate modeling.
The climate scientists came together quickly in an ad hoc manner, first organized on the social networking site Bluesky, to address what they interpret as the Trump administration’s attempt to erase credible climate science from the record.
Their effort involved dozens of experts and some review, but the 30-day public comments deadline forced the researchers to respond quickly. There is, however, a lack of clarity about what process the Energy Department will follow in reviewing the public comments and if it will potentially incorporate them into a final report.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former fracking company executive who has minimized the ongoing and future harms of climate change, handpicked the working group report’s authors: John Christy and Roy Spencer, both research scientists at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, Steven E. Koonin of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Georgia Tech professor emeritus Judith Curry and Canadian economist Ross McKitrick.
Dessler compared their report to a “badly written blog post,” but said it demanded a response. “This is something coming out from the federal government that the federal government could conceivably use to make policy” he told CNN.
In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency has already cited the document as part of the scientific justification for repealing the “endangerment finding” on greenhouse gas emissions — a 2009 scientific determination that human-caused climate change endangers human health and safety. Repealing the finding could help end many of the government’s most significant regulations protecting Americans’ health and the environment, including emissions regulations for vehicles, power plants and the oil and gas industry.
Dessler and fellow coauthors of the new comments criticize the Energy Department report for trying to manufacture scientific uncertainty where it does not exist, whether the topic is climate change’s influence on extreme weather events or its potential agricultural impacts.
“This is really a rerun of the tobacco battles. The goal here is not to win the debate. They’re never going to win the debate. The science of climate change is incredibly solid,” Dessler said. “All they’re trying to do is muddy the waters here, create this idea that there’s a debate, and then the government will use that to roll back regulations.”
Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University also involved in the response, said the department’s report is “not scientifically credible,” and the comments filed overall criticize it for aiming to reach a predetermined conclusion, missciting and mischaracterizing studies, and making numerous errors.
The comments summary states that the working group report “exhibits pervasive problems with misrepresentation and selective citation of the scientific literature, cherry-picking of data, and faulty or absent statistics.” Several climate scientists whose research was cited in the Trump report have said it misused or misrepresented their work, CNN previously reported.
Rebecca Neumann, a researcher at the University of Washington who also took part in the comments, said the administration’s report fits in with the evolving arguments of those who minimize the threats climate change poses. “As outright denial of climate change becomes less tenable, the new approach is to downplay its dangers and exaggerate its upsides,” she said in a statement.
Other mainstream climate scientists and their affiliated groups are also more formally addressing flaws in the Energy Department’s report. Last week, for example, the American Meteorological Society, which represents weather and climate experts, published a statement identifying “foundational flaws” in the report.
“Scientific assessments that emphasize unusual views are unrepresentative of the larger community of subject matter experts,” the society’s response states, though it is not clear from the statement whether the American Meteorological Society is submitting its response as a formal comment to the report.
“The DoE Report selectively emphasizes a small set of unrepresentative findings, particularly those that might appear beneficial on superficial examination. This “cherry picking” also downplays and excludes scientific findings that might be widely understood to be harmful,” the society’s statement says. It also points out, as does Dessler, that the arguments put forward in the Climate Working Group report “are not new,” and have been previously considered by the broader scientific community.
Wright told CNN in August that the department’s working group may revisit previously published National Climate Assessments, and he has also expressed interest in holding public climate science debates.
The national assessments — which are congressionally mandated and take years to research and peer review — have been removed from government websites, and the Trump administration dismissed the authors of the next iteration, raising the possibility that the Department of Energy scientists will have a role in writing it.
Dessler said the arguments put forward in the working group document would never survive a peer review in a scientific journal. “What they are trying to do now is rewrite the rules of science, because they know they cannot win in the actual scientific community. So they are busy trying to figure out a venue where they can win,” Dessler said.