“The Climate Working Group and the Department of Energy look forward to participating in substantive commentary after the end of the 30-day comment period,” Woods wrote. “This report critically evaluates many ongoing scientific inquiries areas that are often assigned a high level of confidence – not the scientists themselves, but by the political institutions involved (such as the United Nations or the previous presidential administration). Unlike previous administrations, the Trump administration is committed to a more thoughtful, scientific-based dialogue on climate change and energy.”
Ben Santer is a climate researcher and professor emeritus at the University of East Anglia, with a long history among some of the authors of the new report. (Santer’s research is also cited in the DOE report; like other scientists who spoke with Wired, his work “basically misrepresents his work.”)
In 2014, Santer became part of the American Physical Society (APS), one of the largest scientific member organizations in the country. It is known as the Red Team with the Blue Team Practice, and it has enabled supporters of mainstream climate science to support counter-trends (including two authors of the current DOE report) to pass on whether their claims are valuable.
The exercise was convened by Steve Koonin, one of the new DOE employees, and the author of the report. As Inside Climate News reported in 2021, Koonin resigned from his leadership position after APS refused to adopt a statement about the modifications he made about climate science after the drill. Koonin later performed similar exercises with the first Trump White House.
“These guys have a wrong history on important scientific issues,” Sant said. “The scientific community’s brief view of their views is completely wrong.”
The report quotes Hausfather’s work twice in the report, which challenges emissions schemes: predicting how many cooperatives2 Will be discharged into the atmosphere in various ways. Hausfather said the citations were “inspiring” to see how the author of the DOE report “cherrypick’s data points fit their narrative.”
The report includes the DOE authors who said a graph from his 2019 paper shows how climate models “always overestimate observations of atmospheric CO.”2. However, Hoth’s father told Wired that the main finding of his 2019 study is that historic climate models are actually very accurate in predicting warming.
“They seem to have given up on the entire paper because they don’t fit their narrative, but instead chose a single number in the supplementary material to create doubts about the model, when the entire paper actually confirms how they perform in the years after publication,” he told Wired. (Hausfather’s research has also been cited for the EPA reasoning, as he said in an article on X that it was a “completely backward” conclusion in his work.)
Not only do I feel that my work is inappropriate. Much of the report discusses how beneficial carbon dioxide is to grow, a statement that has been repeated by the Secretary-General as a “plus” to global warming. The author cites a 2010 study by evolutionary biologist Joy Ward, now the provost and executive vice president of Case Western Reserve University in support of the assertion that plant life will flourish with more companies2 In the atmosphere.
