Scientists slam Trump administration climate report as a ‘farce' full of misinformation

The Guardian

2 days ago

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.'