More than 80 scientists have panned the Department of Energy’s recently released report on climate change, describing it as riddled with errors, founded on cherry-picked data and “just plain wrong.”
“This report makes a mockery of science,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University who organized the response alongside Rutgers climate scientist Robert Kopp. “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.”
In July, the DOE released a report entitled ”A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate”, which significantly downplayed the effects of climate change. In it, the writers concluded that “claims of increased frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and droughts are not supported by U.S. historical data,” and that “CO2-induced warming appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed,” according to a summary.
Climate scientists from a range of institutions, including MIT, UCLA and the University of Washington, signed a statement to the agency disputing these conclusions and questioning the way that facts were framed in the report. The scientists note that the report’s authors cherry-picked findings and cited “outdated or discredited studies” in order to support their assertions while failing to conduct a peer review of their work.
For instance, the scientists suggest that the DOE report — which was compiled by five experts who have a history of minimizing concerns about the climate crisis — overstates the sun’s influence on global warming and discounts the human impact.
“Just as the tobacco industry funded scientists to question the harms of smoking, the fossil fuel industry engaged in a coordinated campaign throughout the 1990s to fund scientists willing to argue that it was the sun, and not humans, causing the climate change observed up to that point,” said Ted Amdur, a climate scientist at Aon Impact Forecasting.
“This report was reviewed internally by a group of DOE scientific researchers and policy experts from the Office of Science and National Labs,” DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich previously told NPR. “The Trump administration is committed to engaging in a more thoughtful and science-based conversation about climate change and energy.”
The DOE did not immediately respond to a HuffPost request for comment.
The scientists also argue that the report was written to support a “predetermined” outcome, noting that it’s already been cited by the Environmental Protection Agency to try to unravel its Endangerment Finding. The 2009 EPA finding concluded that the accumulation of greenhouse gases posed a threat to public health and welfare, thereby underpinning the regulation of these emissions.
The report comes as the Trump administration has sought to undo this finding to roll back policies aimed at curbing climate pollution.
“We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has said.