'Analysis riddled with errors, cherry-picked data': Scientists denounce Trump administration's climate report

More than 85 American and international scientists have denounced a Trump administration report that calls the threat of climate change overblown, saying the analysis is riddled with errors, misrepresentations and cherry-picked data to fit the president’s political agenda.

The scientists submitted their critique as part of a public comment period on the report, which was to close Tuesday night.

The five researchers who wrote the July report were handpicked by Chris Wright, the energy secretary, and they all reject the established scientific consensus that the burning of oil, gas and coal is dangerously heating the planet. The report acknowledged that the Earth is warming but said that climate change is “less damaging economically than commonly believed.”

The administration used the report to justify its recent announcement that it would repeal limits on greenhouse gas emissions that stem from burning fossil fuels.

Wright has accused the report’s critics of avoiding a robust discussion of the science.

“People had been much less willing than I had hoped to engage in a thoughtful dialogue on climate change,” he said in a recent interview. “This is fundamentally a story about something that’s a real physical phenomenon that’s scientifically complicated. It’s a scientific, economic issue and people treat it too often as a religious issue.”

The Energy Department declined to comment on the criticisms from scientists about the report. Ben Dietderich, a spokesperson for Wright, said in a statement that the agency sought an “open and transparent dialogue around climate science.” He added, “Following the public comment period, we look forward to reviewing and engaging on substantive comments.”

The Trump administration is pursuing an aggressive agenda to ramp up the production and use of coal, oil and gas, the burning of which is the main driver of climate change.

At the same time, average global temperatures have risen by between 1.25 and 1.41 degrees Celsius (2.25 to 2.53 degrees Fahrenheit), compared with preindustrial times. That may sound small, but the warming has impacted every region of the planet with more frequent and intense heat waves, floods, wildfires, droughts and other disasters.

Ross McKitrick, one of the report’s authors, said that their climate work for the Energy Department had been paused because of pending litigation. He defended the report’s lack of peer review, saying that it underwent an initial review within the Energy Department. Critiques submitted during the public comment period will be part of the public record, he said.

McKitrick said that the report’s authors followed their assignment and focused on themes that do not typically get enough attention.

But the 85 scientists, many of whom produced work that was cited in the Energy Department report, said that the report should be discredited.

In a chapter-by-chapter rebuttal that essentially serves as a peer review, the scientists took apart some of the government’s most eye-popping claims.

“Their goal was to muddy the waters, to put out a plausible-sounding argument that people can use in the public debate to make it sound like we don’t know whether climate change is bad or not,” said Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, who led the rebuttal.

The Energy Department report could have a significant impact on federal policy. Climate denialists have for years acknowledged that they wanted to put the imprimatur of the federal government on research that runs counter to accepted climate science. That could give them more influence with Congress and strengthen their ability to legally challenge climate regulations.

Already the Environmental Protection Agency is using the Energy Department analysis to justify the repeal of the endangerment finding, a 2009 scientific declaration that climate change poses a danger to human health and welfare. That finding is the basis for regulations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions from such sources as automobiles and power plants.

Dessler said he was driven to reply to the Trump administration report because he felt it made a mockery out of a fundamental and heavily scrutinized field of science.

By Tuesday morning, more than 2,300 comments had been submitted regarding the report. Among them was a submission from the American Meteorological Society, a premiere climate science organization, which outlined what it called “foundational flaws” in the report and called on the government to correct the findings.

Dessler’s 439-page report — nearly three times as long as the Energy Department’s — disputes each chapter of the agency’s findings. In many cases, the government’s version deploys a scientific “kernel of truth,” taken out of context, to make its arguments seem credible, he said.

For example, the Energy Department report states that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that helps plants grow, and therefore more gas would improve agricultural yields. The scientific review points out that the Energy Department report sidesteps the negative impacts of global warming on plant life, including extreme heat, drought, wildfires and floods.

In another instance, the Trump administration’s report cited two studies by Antonio Gasparrini, a professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, to support its statement that deaths caused by cold weather exceed those caused by heat.

While that is true, Gasparrini said, the report ignores the fact that climate change is increasing heat-related deaths, and at a greater rate than it would prevent deaths from cold.

“I found the report very poor from a scientific perspective, with contradictory and unsupported statements,” he said.

Cyrus C. Taylor, a physics professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, said a chart showing yearly average atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations omitted key data and made misleading choices on a graph to make it seem as if levels had risen only slightly.

“It’s a graphical sleight of hand,” Taylor said.

The scientists found other errors as they reviewed the federal report, including misquoting an international climate report, using incorrect scientific definitions and oversimplifying and mixing up the results of multiple studies.

Pamela D. McElwee, a professor of human ecology at Rutgers University, reviewed a section of the Energy Department report that claimed technological advances and wealth would protect communities from the impacts of climate change. It noted, for example, that improvements to canals, levees and flood gates in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina helped protect against the storm surge from Hurricane Isaac in 2012.

McElwee, who called the report “absolute sloppiness,” said it failed to consider future scenarios and the cost of climate disasters. The section on risks from climate change cited a 2023 paper that does not exist — and included a link to a different paper that concluded that nations should address climate change because the consequences would be damaging.

The Trump administration’s report also highlighted the work of Kristie Ebi, a global health professor at the University of Washington, as proof that dietary supplements would help combat nutrient loss from plants in a warmer world. But Ebi said her research did not make that claim.

Jim Rossi, a professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, who specializes in energy law, said the report was significantly flimsier than what would typically be used to support federal policies or reverse them.

“There’s nothing wrong with having dissenting viewpoints that differ from the mainstream involved in reports used for policy assessments,” Rossi said. But to reverse course on a policy decision, the evidence “ought to be at least as strong as the factual record and science that supported the decision in the first place,” he said.