DOE’s Bogus, Cherry Picked, Climate Denial Cover Up

Energy Secretary Chris Wright has quickly revealed himself as a hyper-ideological, dishonest and self dealing attack dog for the fossil fuel industry – including the fracking services company that has made him a millionaire.
No further proof needed than the recently published “Critical Assessment” of climate science, in which Wright commissioned 5 of the most widely discredited and out-of-the-mainstream climate denial hacks of the last 30 years.

Above, my video from some years ago describes the mistakes made by Roy Spencer and John Christy, two of the hand-picked authors of this new document.

Carbon Brief has a very detailed breakdown, that I’m still working through.
Washington Post took a crack.

Carbon Brief:

A “critical assessment” report commissioned by the Trump administration to justify a rollback of US climate regulations contains at least 100 false or misleading statements, according to a Carbon Brief factcheck involving dozens of leading climate scientists.

The 140-page report – “A critical review of impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on the US climate” – was published by the US Department of Energy (DoE) on 23 July, just days before the government laid out plans to revoke a scientific finding used as the legal basis for emissions regulation.

The executive summary of the controversial report inaccurately claims that “CO2-induced warming might be less damaging economically than commonly believed”.

It also states misleadingly that “excessively aggressive [emissions] mitigation policies could prove more detrimental than beneficial”.

Compiled in just two months by five “independent” researchers hand-selected by the climate-sceptic US secretary of energy Chris Wright, the document has sparked fierce criticism from climate scientists, who have pointed to factual errors, misrepresentation of research, messy citations and the cherry-picking of data.

Washington Post:

But scientists say the report, drafted by researchers known for questioning mainstream climate science, is riddled with errors and cherry-picked data.

“They cherrypick data points that suit their narratives and exclude the vast majority of the scientific literature that does not,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and the climate research lead at the payment company Stripe, whose work was cited in the new report, said in a text message. “This gives a terribly skewed view of the underlying climate science.”

Page 3, Section 2: Direct impacts of CO2 on the environment

“The growing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has the important positive effect of promoting plant growth by enhancing photosynthesis and improving water use efficiency. That is evident in the “global greening” phenomenon discussed below, as well as in the improving agricultural yields discussed in Chapter 10. … The IPCC has only minimally discussed global greening and CO2 fertilization of agricultural crops.”

The new report highlights a positive effect of carbon dioxide — that it promotes “global greening” — without acknowledging the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on rising droughts, heat and crop stress.

Ben Sanderson, climate scientist at the Center for International Climate Research in Oslo, said the effect of CO2 on plant growth is well-documented and incorporated into all of the climate models and studies that examine food security.

“It’s a case of extracting one particular part of the science — which is in this case incredibly uncontroversial — and then excluding the much wider, more complex discussion about how climate change is going to impact vegetation,” Sanderson said.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there is “high confidence” that warming “is negatively affecting crop and grassland quality and harvest stability.”

Karen McKinnon PhD on LinkedIn:

A few days before the Trump administration suspended my NSF CAREER grant, they cited one of my papers in a DOE report that claims that greenhouse gas emissions have had “little-to-no effect on heatwaves” for the US. Wait, what?

The backstory: after the record-smashing 2021 heatwave in the Pacific Northwest, we aimed to understand its likelihood, given that 115F temperatures in Portland, OR were not on anyone’s bingo card.

These days, any weather event can be viewed as some combination of a changing climate and day-to-day weather variability.

In the case of heat, the influence of greenhouse gas-driven warming is so established that we first removed the climate change signal from the data, and then analyzed the probability of the observed temperatures occurring given the overall warming that has occurred in the region during early summer, which has been nearly 3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1960.

We found that, after accounting for those 3 degrees Fahrenheit, the extreme heat conditions were unlikely but not impossible based on an ensemble of climate model simulations. As scientists, this supported the simplest hypothesis: that the region has warmed due to climate change, and then we had some “bad luck” in the weather that led to the very extreme event.

The authors of the DOE study, however, only included the following quote from our study: “the most likely explanation remains that the weather event itself was ‘bad luck.’” When taken out of context, this quote fails to reflect the reality, which is that the weather event occurred against a warmer baseline, leading to a hotter and longer heatwave.

Unfortunately, the intentionally misleading nature of the DOE report is due to its role as a building block towards the goal of rescinding a 2009 finding from the EPA that greenhouse gases cause a threat to human health and welfare.

Luckily, there is time to take action: comment on the report, and contact your representatives to let them know we need to take action to bring back the tolerable summers of years past.

DOE report and link to comment: https://lnkd.in/e6ntuZn8

Guardian:

The new paper includes a chart from a 2019 report which (Climate expert Zeke Hausfather) 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.

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This “Red Team – Blue Team” approach to climate science was trotted out more than a decade ago by one of Wright’s hand-picked Denialists – Steven Koonin.
Ben Santer participated in that exercise, which was sponsored by the American Physical Society. He related the story in to me in 2017.

Finally, below, if you can stand it – a fawning Wall Street Journal interview with Wright discussing the stinking travesty.