Scientists discover Earth has two new seasons
The new seasons are now recurring every year, driven entirely by human activity and posing serious threats to public health, marine life, and global ecosystems.
Haze season occurs annually across parts of Southeast Asia, when thick smoke blankets the region, causing hazardous air quality and widespread health concerns.
Most of the haze comes from intentionally set fires, massive burn-offs used to clear land for agriculture in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia.
A similar pattern has been found in the US as California 's wildfire season, once limited to the hottest months, now begins in spring and extends well into December.
Meanwhile, in Bali, a different kind of season unfolds each year from December to March. As monsoon winds shift, ocean currents carry staggering volumes of plastic waste ashore, burying beaches under piles of garbage.
This 'trash season' has become so consistent that locals can now predict it down to the month.
Similar events have been seen in the Philippines, Thailand, and even along the US East Coast, where the Gulf Stream and other currents push floating debris toward Florida and the Carolinas, especially during summer.
To better understand and describe the shifting climate rhythms, the research team analyzed decades of satellite imagery, weather data, and local reports.
They've even introduced a new vocabulary to define the evolving seasonal patterns: extinct seasons, arrhythmic seasons, and syncopated seasons.
The haze season in Southeast Asia typically starts in June and runs through September.
The smoke often drifts across borders, enveloping cities in Singapore, Thailand, and beyond in a toxic cloud that can last for weeks.
The researchers led by the London School of Economics and Political Science said that this 'is caused by the widespread burning of tropical peatlands in regions of Malaysia and Indonesia and is now considered an annual event in equatorial Southeast Asia, impacting the health and livelihoods of millions.'
This season has also been appearing in northern India every winter, as the monsoon season ends and crop burning begins, often intensified locally by Diwali festive burning.
The US has also become accustom to hazy skies each summer as parts of the norther east were blanketed with smoke over the weekend, sparking air quality alerts in New York and New Jersey.
In 2023, smoke from record-breaking Canadian wildfires engulfed the Midwest and East Coast, turning skies orange over New York City.
Events like this are becoming more frequent as wildfire seasons across North America grow longer, hotter, and more intense, researchers warned.
'Looking beyond emergent atmospheric seasons of the Anthropocene, marine pollution seasons are also surfacing, quite literally, as observed on the beaches of Bali, Indonesia,' the study reads.
'Here, floating plastic waste, either washed off the land by heavy rainfall or dumped into the oceans, is blown by strong monsoonal winds onto the southern beaches of the island province from December to March.'
The new season has forced governments to employ hundreds of seasonal workers and volunteers to assist with clean-up each year.
In March, Bali revealed that over 3,000 tons of ocean debris and trash landed on its shores during the most recent monsoon season.
Such pollution on the East Coast of the US, specifically in areas like New England estuaries, tends to peak during the summer months.
This is likely influenced by factors like increased precipitation during this season, leading to greater runoff and transport of land-based plastics into coastal waters.
According to the study, some traditional seasons have also vanished. In alpine regions like the Andes and the Rocky Mountains, the once-predictable winter sports season is collapsing due to a severe lack of snow.
In the northeast of England, seabirds like kittiwakes have stopped returning to breed at their usual time, breaking a natural cycle communities have depended on for generations.
Other seasons like spring and summers have shifted out of sync. These are 'arrhythmic' changes, when spring comes too early, or summer overstays its welcome, describing the natural cycle is falling out of sync.
For example, breeding and hibernation cycles across Europe are now starting weeks earlier than they used to.
Similarly, wildfire and hurricane seasons are lengthening in North America and the Pacific, disrupting planning and preparedness.
Then there are 'syncopated' seasons, which have not vanished or moved, but have intensified. A clear case is Europe's summer.
Ever since the 2003 French heatwave killed thousands, scientists have noted that summers across the continent are not just hotter but more dangerous. These seasons follow the usual rhythm, but with a harder, more unpredictable beat.
In this case, the season did not disappear, it became dangerously amplified. That makes it syncopated, which is the pattern still exists, but the beat is harder and more unpredictable.
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Telegraph
9 hours ago
- Telegraph
Enough doom-mongering about climate change
As a student, Johannes Ackva wore a hair shirt so itchy and uncomfortable that even Greta Thunberg might have approved. The young, idealistic German limited his use of water, stuck to a strict vegetarian diet, refused to drive and flew as little as possible. But, two decades on, Ackva, who works as a climate researcher, has changed his views considerably. He remains concerned about the environment and he still doesn't drive or eat meat. But there is cause, he believes, for optimism. Two things have changed since his hair-shirt days, he says. One is that the data looks a little less bleak than it used to. Instead of predicting that global temperatures are likely to increase by between 1.5°C (the best case) and 4.5°C (the worst), as it did for many years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) now says the increase will be between 2.5°C and 4°C. That 0.5°C reduction in the worst-case scenario makes a substantial difference – and itself represents a significant reduction from the 8°C rise that had, in the Noughties, been predicted by scientists such as James Lovelock for the world's temperate region. 'You have to be more optimistic than you would have been 10 years ago,' Ackva says, 'and even five years ago.' And the second thing that has changed, according to Ackva, is the rate of technological progress: 'We can see from what we've been doing with solar, or with electric cars, that we know how to fundamentally solve this problem.' The most rapid energy transition in history The price of solar energy has fallen almost at the speed of light; solar panel costs have fallen 90 per cent in the past decade alone. Renewables are helping to push coal and natural gas out of power grids. In 2009, 74 per cent of British electricity came from fossil fuels; in 2023, it was only a third. Over the same period, the share of British electricity coming from renewable sources (solar, wind etc.) has gone from two per cent to 40 per cent. In short, we are living through the most rapid energy transition in history. It is incomplete because renewables are dependent on the sun shining and the wind blowing, and because we do not have adequate battery technology to store vast amounts of electrical energy for months at a time. And, of course, it is expensive because of all the infrastructure that needs building, be it car-charging facilities, wind farms, or the apparatus that connects both of these things and more to our power grids. However, the recent progress in the energy transition is demonstrative of a truth that many environmental activists – groups like Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion and the new Youth Demand – would prefer to ignore. Because, while they advocate for 'degrowth', whereby we shrink our economy and consume less in order to constrain our emissions, the innovation of recent years suggests the opposite is true: that it is investment and economic growth that will improve lives worldwide and solve the crisis. I spoke to Ackva during my research for a book about people who have dedicated their careers to saving the world from catastrophe, The Anti-Catastrophe League. He works at a non-profit organisation called Founders Pledge, where his research guides the philanthropy of entrepreneurs who want to use their wealth to address the climate crisis. And degrowth organisations are not the kind that he recommends his philanthropists support. Instead, he recommends that they fund innovation: inventions, and government action, that take the battle beyond wind farms and electric cars. 'We need to make sure that we also do it for cement, that we do it for [the manufacture of] steel, that we do it for long-range transport,' he says. 'But this is not rocket science. This is, in principle, doable.' It has been doable for longer than we might care to admit. After the Second World War, governments on either side of the Iron Curtain built nuclear power stations by the dozen. But nuclear power stations are gargantuan structures, complete with puffing chimneys atop blue-glowing reactors, and they are expensive to build. They also produce radioactive waste. This effluent is relatively unproblematic in itself, but conceptually unattractive to the public. Even more unattractive is the concept of nuclear meltdown. Chernobyl's death toll, including deaths from the explosion and acute radiation sickness within the first few months, is estimated to have been 30 to 60 people. These figures are lower than one might imagine but the victims of the Chernobyl disaster stick much more indelibly in the mind than do the abstract millions who die of fossil fuel-related air pollution each year. Despite the Chernobyl disaster, and despite smaller events at Fukushima and Three Mile Island, nuclear power is much safer than fossil fuels. The use of nuclear energy results in 99.8 per cent fewer deaths than does the use of coal; 99.7 per cent fewer than oil and 97.6 per cent fewer than gas. We can predict with some confidence that fossil fuels will be thoroughly outmoded over the course of the 21st century. It is important that governments continue to underwrite what Ackva calls 'big bets'. Fusion technology, for instance, stands a much better chance of working if, through being given public funding, it is given the gift of time. Once a technology outperforms fossil fuels, though, it will need no subsidy. We will need no carbon taxes, nor carbon credits. Thanks to far-sighted government support, the market has greedily adopted solar power and electric vehicles. Further greedy adoptions are inevitable. Bettering the miracle of fossil fuels is a lofty goal, but one that humanity is likely to meet. That still leaves a serious problem unsolved. That problem is the warming (1.17°C / 2.11°F) that has already occurred – and the warming that we are due from the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. Many people are trying to prevent the temperature from rising in the future; very few are trying to reverse the heating that has already occurred. But a small minority is attempting to do just that: the environmental dark wizards. Speaking with Andrew Song, he rejects the pieties of climate change. 'A lot of people were indoctrinated,' he tells me, 'including myself. I was an American boy scout, thinking: 'I just need to recycle and recycle and plant some trees, and I'm good.'' But these soothing instructions, Song came to realise, were 'all a f—ing lie!'. Telling me the story, he bursts into laughter. And he is right: recycling, in some respects, is overrated. It will not solve the climate crisis. Song has helped start several businesses in San Francisco. While enrolled in Y-Combinator, the prestigious accelerator for start-ups, Song met Luke Iseman. This was in 2016; after some false starts, Iseman said: 'Andrew, I've just learnt about stratospheric aerosol injection.' Stratospheric aerosol injection is the method by which we might be able to reduce the heat of the planet. It is achieved by launching sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere. Here sulphur dioxide reacts with other gases to form sulphate aerosols, which are fine particles. These fine particles reflect the Sun's light back into space. And the more light is reflected back into space, the less it warms the Earth. But there are downsides. The term 'uncontrolled termination' describes the scenario in which humanity starts a massive project of stratospheric aerosol injection, then abruptly stops. It is thought that this would result in ' termination shock ', whereby the temperature would swiftly rebound. Such a rebound would result in much more disruption of weather and ecology than would a more gradual rise in temperatures. And termination shock is far from the only reason to be wary of stratospheric aerosol injection. It could deplete the ozone layer. It could cause acid rain. It could have various other unintended effects. And it would not address air pollution, acidification of the oceans, and other nasty effects of the burning of fossil fuels. Instead, stratospheric aerosol injection might encourage us to stick with our bad habits. In April 2022, Iseman launched his first balloons, releasing them from his home in Baja California, Mexico. By the following February, Time magazine was calling him 'an innovator, renegade, or charlatan, depending on who you ask, but certainly the biggest climate tech trouble-maker in recent memory.' He and Song incorporated Make Sunsets, their new company, that October. Having been ticked off by the government of Mexico, they currently operate a patch of hilly Californian scrubland owned by Iseman. Journalists tagging along with Iseman and Song have witnessed a homebrew operation that resembles some of the more chaotic scenes from the TV series Breaking Bad: two rascals taking an RV to the wilderness in order to cook up something that most observers would probably call deeply irresponsible. Song, a talented marketer, tends to liken stratospheric aerosol injection to sunscreen. As he pointed out to me, humanity already puts 60 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the troposphere each year. Song and Iseman propose simply to put a much smaller amount of the chemical compound a little higher up. In Song's view, we have been misapplying our sunscreen. We have been 'just spraying the sunscreen lotion on our face, but with our mouths open. And since some of that is being swallowed, we're getting sick off it.' As for the ozone layer, Iseman and Song refer to evidence that its depletion will be comparatively small. Song does accept there is a risk of acid rain, but he argues that the risks of inaction are even greater. His view is that we should be less precious about geoengineering. 'We've injected two trillion tons of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere since the 1870s,' he says. 'So are we suddenly drawing a line of where we can deploy these aerosols? Literally, as we speak, we're emitting CO2, geoengineering the Earth, even just by breathing.' Global buy-in required Another difficulty, though, is that stratospheric geoengineering will require global buy-in. Or will it? Perhaps it is naive to imagine that solar geoengineering will occur after diplomatic efforts rather than before. As the climate expert Ben James writes: 'I find it impossible to imagine a UN mechanism approving something so universally contentious. Rather, someone will probably just do it.' Stratospheric aerosol injection, like nuclear fission, is a technology to which we already have access. And there are several more under development and notable for their promise. An American startup, Terraform Industries, demonstrated last year that it could produce synthetic natural gas from sunlight, water, and airborne carbon dioxide. In other words, the prototype can conjure some of the world's best-performing fuel from almost nothing. It is also possible that we will be able to take not only energy from the air, but pollution. Via carbon capture, we can remove fossil fuel-generated pollutants from the atmosphere, though we have not yet worked out how to do this in an energy-efficient manner. However, the technology I consider the most underrated involves not the air above us, but the ground below us. Today, geothermal power, which harnesses the heat of the Earth's core, constitutes a sliver of global energy production: an estimated 0.35 per cent. The figure seems even more meagre when one considers that an infinitesimal fraction of the Earth's geothermal heat, a tenth of one percent of that heat, goes the calculation, would power humanity's current outgoings for 20 million years. As it stands, we use geothermal power only where that heat happens to be closer to the surface than usual. Volcanic areas are useful in this regard. The hot springs of Bath are a less dramatic example. Elsewhere, geothermal power is harder to exploit. The idea is that you pump water down one well, bring it up via an adjacent well, and use that hot water to power turbines or heat buildings. We can drill deep enough, several kilometres down, to reach rock the temperature of a boiling kettle, or even a heated oven, but it's expensive, and can cause mild tremors. Moreover, to pay back that up-front cost, geothermal systems need to produce heat for years – which, given how hard it is to know what's going on several kilometres down, presents yet further difficulty. For that reason, this promising technology has been far less attractive an investment than drilling for fossil fuels, and has therefore remained underdeveloped. Necessity is forcing us into action. So is new technology. Commissioned by a think tank, I spent much of last year examining the performance of FORGE, the US government's geothermal field laboratory, in Utah. The lab shares its results and allows companies to visit and test their gear. Its drilling speed had increased fivefold between 2017 and 2022 and costs had fallen by as much as 50 per cent from 2022 onward. As all of FORGE's research was public, the entire geothermal industry could benefit from it. FORGE is working on 'enhanced geothermal', which employs techniques imported from the fracking industry. Likewise, the oil and gas industry has pioneered 'directional drilling', which is now allowing geothermal projects to drill not just vertically, but laterally, thus making it possible to create underground structures resembling radiators. Even more thrillingly for fanboys of geothermal power, Quaise, another company, is trying to go even deeper, which would enable it to access heat that can give water the energy density of natural gas. Quaise's method is to vapourise rock using a millimetre wave, which is something akin to a transparent laser. The company was founded by Carlos Araque, a disenchanted oil and gas engineer, advised by Paul Woskov, a fusion scientist. They must solve a litany of technical problems. But if they are successful, they could unlock a power source that would leave fossil fuels outmoded and make fusion an irrelevance. Due to advanced geothermal being in the category of those 'big bets', that would be a vindication of Ackva's approach. We failed to make the most of nuclear power; we might shy away from stratospheric aerosol injections; but to start to turn the situation around, we might need only one of those big bets to pay off.
The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
Scientists slam Trump administration climate report as a ‘farce' full of misinformation
A new Trump administration report which attempts to justify a mass rollback of environmental regulations is chock-full of climate misinformation, experts say. On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a proposal to undo the 2009 'endangerment finding', which allows the agency to limit planet-heating pollution from cars and trucks, power plants and other industrial sources. Hours later, the Department of Energy (DOE) published a 150-page report defending the proposal, claiming scientific concern about the climate crisis is overblown. 'Climate change is a challenge – not a catastrophe,' wrote the energy secretary, Chris Wright, in the report's introduction. The esteemed climate scientist Michael Mann said the report was akin to the result he would expect 'if you took a chatbot and you trained it on the top 10 fossil fuel industry-funded climate denier websites'. The energy department published the report hours after the EPA announced a plan to roll back 2009's 'endangerment finding', a seminal ruling that provided the legal basis for the agency to regulate climate-heating pollution under the Clean Air Act. If finalized, the move would topple virtually all US climate regulation. In a Fox News interview, Wright claimed the report pushed back on the 'cancel culture Orwellian squelching of science'. But Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University and expert in climate misinformation, said its true purpose was to 'justify what is a scientifically unjustifiable failure to regulate fossil fuels'. 'Science is the basis for climate regulation, so now they are trying to replace legitimate science with pseudoscience,' she said. The attack on the research underpinning the endangerment finding – which says greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare – comes as part of Trump's 'drill, baby, drill' agenda to boost fossil fuels, which are the primary cause of global warming. 'This is an agenda to promote fossil fuels, not to protect public health and welfare or the environment,' said Rachel Cleetus, a director at climate and science non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists who was an author on the sixth US national climate assessment. Asked about scientists' assertions that the new report is rife with misinformation, an energy department spokesperson, Ben Dietderich, said: 'This 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.' But the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces what is widely considered the gold standard compendium of climate science, compiled by a huge multinational team of scientists, peer-reviewed and agreed to by every national government. The latest IPCC synthesis report, released two years ago, was a vast undertaking involving 721 volunteer scientists around the world. It states that it is 'unequivocal' that human activity has heated the planet, which has 'led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people'. By contrast, the Trump administration report was crafted by five handpicked scientists who are seen as having fringe or contrarian views by mainstream climate scientists, with no peer review. The experts behind the report have previously denied being climate deniers. The energy department did not respond to a question about the authors. 'This report had five authors and was rushed over four months, and would not pass muster in any traditional scientific peer review process,' said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at the climate non-profit Berkeley Earth, who called the paper a 'farce'. Wright, the energy secretary, insisted he had not steered the report's conclusions, while Judith Curry, one of the report authors, said in a blogpost she hoped the document would push climate science 'away from alarmism and advocacy'. Mainstream climate scientists, however, condemned the findings as distorted and inaccurate. 'This is a report written by a couple of scientists who are outliers in their arguments for climate change,' said Natalie Mahowald, a climate scientist at Cornell University. 'This document does in no way depreciate the value of previous assessments, but rather just cherrypicks the literature to pretend to create a new review.' Mahowald said the lack of peer review meant it was 'obviously not as robust' as the IPCC report or the US government's periodic national climate assessment, which the Trump administration recently took offline. The latest national climate assessment, compiled by a dozen government agencies and outside scientists in 2023, concluded that the 'effects of human-caused climate change are already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States' 'If almost any other group of scientists had been chosen, the report would have been dramatically different,' Andrew Dessler, a climate researcher at Texas A&M University, said of the new report. 'The only way to get this report was to pick these authors.' Hausfather agreed that the authors' work 'might represent their views but is not consistent with the broader scientific literature on climate change'. He was among the scientists whose work the authors cited. The new paper includes a chart from a 2019 report which he led, claiming it demonstrates how climate models 'consistently overestimated observations' of atmospheric carbon. But Hausfather's research actually showed that climate models have performed well. 'They appear to have discarded the whole paper as not fitting their narrative, and instead picked a single figure that was in the supplementary materials to cast doubt on models when the whole paper actually confirmed how well they have performed in the years after they were published,' he said. The energy department did not respond to a request for comment about Hausfather's concerns. That approach to research seems to underpin the entire paper, said Hausfather, who is also the climate research lead at tech company Stripe. 'This is a general theme in the report; they cherrypick data points that suit their narrative and exclude the vast majority of the scientific literature that does not,' he said. Dessler said scientists are obliged to engage with the full range of evidence, even if it contradicts their initial assumptions. Ignoring this principle 'can rise to the level of scientific misconduct', he said. 'The report they produced should be thought of as a law brief from attorneys defending their client, carbon dioxide,' Dessler said. 'Their goal is not to weigh the evidence fairly but to build the strongest possible case for CO2's innocence.' The lack of peer review in the administration's report led to conclusions that deviated, sometimes wildly, from the scientific literature. Many of its claims are based on long-debunked research long promoted by climate deniers, said Mann. 'It is shop worn, decades-old, discredited climate denier talking points, dressed up in the clothing of some sensible new set of revelations,' he said. 'What's different is that it has the imprimatur of the EPA and the federal government now.' The report, for instance claims that warming trends have been overstated, despite evidence to the contrary. It was published as extreme heat is affecting millions of Americans. 'They're literally trying to tell us not to believe what we see with our own two eyes … and instead buy into their denialist framing that rejects not just the science, but what is plainly evident if you look out your window,' said Mann. The authors also write that ocean acidification is occurring 'within the range of natural variability' and is beneficial for marine life despite the ocean's acidic levels currently being the highest since 14m years ago, a time when a major extinction event was occurring. And the report references the apparent health of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, which it says 'has shown considerable growth in recent years'. The reef was recently hit by its sixth mass bleaching event since 2016, a devastating phenomenon for corals in which they whiten and sometimes die due to high sea temperatures. No widespread bleaching events were recorded on the reef before 1998. The report is 'tedious' and at times 'truly wearisome', according to Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University. Kopp recently worked on a paper showing how rising temperatures and drought will worsen crop yields, counter to the report's claims that crops will flourish with extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 'Carbon dioxide fertilization is largely irrelevant to how increasingly extreme heat and intense drought will impact crop yields,' Kopp said. 'As a former department of energy fellow, I'm embarrassed by this report.'
The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
Scientists slam Trump administration climate report as a ‘farce' full of misinformation
A new Trump administration report which attempts to justify a mass rollback of environmental regulations is chock-full of climate misinformation, experts say. On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a proposal to undo the 2009 'endangerment finding', which allows the agency to limit planet-heating pollution from cars and trucks, power plants and other industrial sources. Hours later, the Department of Energy (DOE) published a 150-page report defending the proposal, claiming scientific concern about the climate crisis is overblown. 'Climate change is a challenge – not a catastrophe,' wrote the energy secretary, Chris Wright, in the report's introduction. Esteemed climate scientist Michael Mann said the report was akin to the result he would expect 'if you took a chat bot and you trained it on the top 10 fossil fuel industry-funded climate denier websites'. The DOE published the report hours after the EPA announced a plan to roll back 2009's 'endangerment finding', a seminal ruling that provided the legal basis for the agency to regulate climate-heating pollution under the Clean Air Act. If finalized, the move would topple virtually all US climate regulation. In a Fox News interview, Wright claimed the report pushes back on the 'cancel culture Orwellian squelching of science'. But Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University and expert in climate misinformation, said its true purpose is to 'justify what is a scientifically unjustifiable failure to regulate fossil fuels'. 'Science is the basis for climate regulation, so now they are trying to replace legitimate science with pseudoscience,' she said. The attack on the research underpinning the endangerment finding – which says greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare – comes as part of Trump's 'drill, baby, drill' agenda to boost fossil fuels, which are the primary cause of global warming. 'This is an agenda to promote fossil fuels, not to protect public health and welfare or the environment,' said Rachel Cleetus, a director at climate and science non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists who was an author on the sixth US national climate assessment. Asked about scientists' assertions that the new report is rife with misinformation, a DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich, said: 'This 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.' But the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces what is widely considered the gold standard compendium of climate science, compiled by a huge multinational team of scientists, peer reviewed and agreed to by every national government. The latest IPCC synthesis report, released two years ago, was a vast undertaking involving 721 volunteer scientists around the world. It states that it is 'unequivocal' that human activity has heated the planet, which has 'led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people'. By contrast, the Trump administration report was crafted by five handpicked scientists who are seen as having fringe or contrarian views by mainstream climate scientists, with no peer review. The experts behind the report have previously denied being climate deniers. The DOE did not respond to a question about the authors. 'This report had five authors and was rushed over four months, and would not pass muster in any traditional scientific peer review process,' said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at the climate non-profit Berkeley Earth, who called the paper a 'farce'. Wright, the energy secretary, insisted he had not steered the report's conclusions, while Judith Curry, one of the report authors, said in a blog post she hoped the document will push climate science 'away from alarmism and advocacy'. Mainstream climate scientists, however, condemned the findings as distorted and inaccurate. 'This is a report written by a couple of scientists who are outliers in their arguments for climate change,' said Natalie Mahowald, a climate scientist at Cornell University. 'This document does in no way depreciate the value of previous assessments, but rather just cherrypicks the literature to pretend to create a new review.' Mahowald said the lack of peer review means it's 'obviously not as robust' as the IPCC report or the US government's periodic national climate assessment, which the Trump administration recently took offline. The latest national climate assessment, compiled by a dozen government agencies and outside scientists in 2023, concluded that the 'effects of human-caused climate change are already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States' 'If almost any other group of scientists had been chosen, the report would have been dramatically different,' Andrew Dessler, a climate researcher at Texas A&M University, said of the new report. 'The only way to get this report was to pick these authors.' Hausfather agreed that the authors' work 'might represent their views but is not consistent with the broader scientific literature on climate change'. He was among the scientists whose work the authors cited. The new paper includes a chart from a 2019 report which he led, claiming it demonstrates how climate models 'consistently overestimated observations' of atmospheric carbon. But Hausfather's research actually showed that climate models have performed well. 'They appear to have discarded the whole paper as not fitting their narrative, and instead picked a single figure that was in the supplementary materials to cast doubt on models when the whole paper actually confirmed how well they have performed in the years after they were published,' he said. The DOE did not respond to a request for comment about Hausfather's concerns. That approach to research seems to underpin the entire paper, said Hausfather, who is also the climate research lead at tech company Stripe. 'This is a general theme in the report; they cherrypick data points that suit their narrative and exclude the vast majority of the scientific literature that does not,' he said. Dessler said scientists are obliged to engage with the full range of evidence, even if it contradicts their initial assumptions. Ignoring this principle 'can rise to the level of scientific misconduct', he said. 'The report they produced should be thought of as a law brief from attorneys defending their client, carbon dioxide,' Dessler said. 'Their goal is not to weigh the evidence fairly but to build the strongest possible case for CO2's innocence.' The lack of peer review in the administration's report led to conclusions that deviated, sometimes wildly, from the scientific literature. Many of its claims are based on long-debunked research long promoted by climate deniers, said Mann. 'It is shop worn, decades-old, discredited climate denier talking points, dressed up in the clothing of some sensible new set of revelations,' he said. 'What's different is that it has the imprimatur of the EPA and the federal government now.' The report, for instance claims that warming trends have been overstated, despite evidence to the contrary. It was published as extreme heat is affecting millions of Americans. 'They're literally trying to tell us not to believe what we see with our own two eyes … and instead buy into their denialist framing that rejects not just the science, but what is plainly evident if you look out your window,' said Mann. The authors also write that ocean acidification is occurring 'within the range of natural variability' and beneficial for marine life despite the ocean's acidic levels currently being the highest since 14m years ago, a time when a major extinction event was occurring. And the report references the apparent health of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, which it says 'has shown considerable growth in recent years'. The reef was recently hit by its sixth mass bleaching event since 2016, a devastating phenomena for corals where they whiten and sometimes die due to high sea temperatures. No widespread bleaching events were recorded on the reef prior to 1998. The report is 'tedious' and at times 'truly wearisome', according to Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University. Kopp recently worked on a paper showing how rising temperatures and drought will worsen crop yields, counter to the report's claims that crops will flourish with extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 'Carbon dioxide fertilization is largely irrelevant to how increasingly extreme heat and intense drought will impact crop yields,' Kopp said. 'As a former department of energy fellow, I'm embarrassed by this report.'
