‘Mockery of science’: US experts blast Trump climate report
By AFP
September 2, 2025
A boy shoots hoops at sunset on August 19, 2025 in San Pedro, California amid a brutal heat wave - Copyright AFP/File Frederic J. BROWN
Issam AHMED
A report commissioned by the Trump administration that disputes the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change mimics tactics once used by the tobacco industry to manufacture doubt, leading US experts said Tuesday.
In a sweeping 440-page rebuttal, 85 scientists accused the government of relying on a small group of handpicked contrarians who drew on discredited research, misrepresented evidence, and bypassed the peer review process to reach pre-determined conclusions.
The Trump administration’s 150-page report was published on the Department of Energy’s website in late July to support the administration’s proposal to overturn the 2009 “Endangerment Finding” — a bedrock determination that underpins much of the federal government’s authority to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
“This report makes a mockery of science,” Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University and one of the co-authors, wrote in a statement.
“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. This report makes it clear DOE has no interest in engaging with the scientific community.”
Entitled “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the US Climate,” the DOE document made sweeping claims: that extreme weather events linked to human-caused emissions were not increasing, US temperatures were not rising, and that higher carbon dioxide levels would benefit agricultural productivity.
The rebuttal marshals experts from multiple disciplines to challenge each assertion.
“Contrary to the authors’ claims, the human-induced global warming signal is clearly discernible in all-time high and low temperature records over the continental United States and throughout the world,” scientists wrote in one example.
On agriculture, the rebuttal notes that while elevated carbon dioxide can sometimes spur greater yields in isolation, rising heat and shifting rainfall patterns are expected to cause overall declines.
The DOE report also downplays the threat of ocean acidification, stating that “life in the oceans evolved when the oceans were mildly acidic” billions of years ago.
But according to the rebuttal, this is “irrelevant for evaluating whether current or near-future conditions are suitable for modern ecosystems to continue,” since complex multi-cellular life had not evolved at the time.
Since returning to office in January, President Donald Trump has gone far beyond the pro-fossil fuel agenda of his first term.
Republicans recently passed legislation titled the “Big Beautiful Bill” which gutted clean energy tax credits established under former president Joe Biden, while opening ecologically sensitive areas to expanded fossil fuel development.
Trump has also withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate and is pressing America’s fossil fuel agenda abroad — requiring the EU in its trade deal to buy more US liquefied natural gas and pressuring the World Bank to stop prioritizing climate change.
'Pervasive problems': New Trump admin report likened to 'Soviet show trial' by experts
Stephen Prager, Common Dreams
September 2, 2025
The US Department of Energy's July climate report is "biased, full of errors, and not fit to inform policymaking," according to a comprehensive review released Tuesday by a group of 85 scientists who reviewed the document independently.
The department's "Climate Working Group" drew up the report as part of the effort by President Donald Trump to fatally undermine the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) determination, commonly known as the "endangerment finding," that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane endanger human lives by warming the planet.
"If successful," Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M, says, "this move could unravel virtually every US climate regulation on the books, from car emissions standards to power plant rules."
The Energy Department's nearly 150-page paper, titled "A Critical Review of the Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the US Climate." Dessler describes its five authors as "climate contrarians who dispute mainstream science." The team behind the report, he argues, was "hand-picked" by Energy Secretary Chris Wright to lend legitimacy to the Trump administration's predetermined conclusions about climate science.
The DOE report's five authors seek to contradict the much more rigorous analyses conducted by groups like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose reports have been written by over a thousand researchers and which cite tens of thousands of academic studies.
The multinational panel has concluded that human fossil fuel usage has considerably warmed the planet, causing increased amounts of extreme weather, threatening food and water security, destroying ecosystems, and risking dangerous amounts of sea-level rise.
The Energy Department's report advances the main idea that climate scientists like those at the IPCC broadly "overstate" the extent of the human-caused climate crisis as well as its risks. Unlike other research of its kind, the department crafted its report in secret, which prompted the expert response.
"Normally, a report like this would undergo a rigorous, unbiased, and transparent peer review," said Dr. Robert Kopp, a climate and sea-level researcher at Rutgers. "When it became clear that DOE wasn't going to organize such a review, the scientific community came together on its own, in less than a month, to provide it."
Their review found that the Energy Department's report "exhibits pervasive problems with misrepresentation and selective citation of the scientific literature, cherry-picking of data, and faulty or absent statistics."
For instance, the report claims that there is "no obvious acceleration in sea-level rise" even though the number of days of high-tide coastal flooding per year has increased more than 10-fold since the 1970s.
It also attempts to portray CO2 emissions as a net benefit to the environment, particularly agriculture, by pointing to its benefits for crop growth, but ignores that the impact of increased droughts and wildfires far outweighs those benefits.
And it attempts to pick out isolated historical weather events like the Dust Bowl during the 1930s as evidence that dramatic climatic changes happen very frequently within short amounts of time and that the unprecedented increase in global temperatures over the past century and a half is not worthy of alarm.
"My reading of the report uncovered numerous errors of commission and omission, all of which slant toward a conclusion that human-caused climate change poses no serious risks," said Kerry Emmanuel, a meteorologist and climate scientist who specializes in hurricane physics. "It seems to work backward from a desired outcome."
Dessler notes that over 99% of the literature included in the IPCC's report was simply ignored by the Department of Energy. He described the report as a "mockery of science" akin to a "Soviet show trial."
"The outcome of this exercise by the Department of Energy is already known: climate science will be judged too uncertain to justify the endangerment finding," he said. "Once you understand that, everything about the DOE report makes total sense."
In 2025, the US National Weather Service issued a record number of flash flood warnings, while 255 million Americans were subject to life-threatening triple-digit temperatures in June. The previous year, 48 of 50 US states faced drought conditions, the most ever recorded in US history, while nearly 9 million acres burned due to wildfires.
"We live in a world where the impacts of climate change are increasingly being felt by citizens all around the globe—including communities throughout the US," said Andra Gardner, a professor of environmental science at Rowan University.
"This is perhaps what makes the DOE Climate Working Group report most astounding," she continued. "In a country where we have the tools to not only understand the impacts of climate change but also to begin meaningfully combating the crisis, the current DOE has instead decided to promote fossil fuel interests that will further worsen the symptoms of climate change with a report that turns a blind eye to the established science."
According to an analysis from Climate Power published in January, oil and gas industry donors gave $96 million in direct donations to the campaign of Donald Trump and affiliated super PACs during the 2024 election, while spending $243 million to lobby Republicans in Congress.
The result has been an administration that has purged climate science information from federal websites, laid off thousands of EPA employees, and gutted government funding for wind and solar energy.
Becca Neumann, an associate professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Washington, says that "the goal" of the report "is clear: to justify inaction and avoid meaningful emissions reductions."
