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TRUMP TEAM’S CONTENTIOUS CLIMATE REPORT ‘MAKES A MOCKERY OF
SCIENCE’, EXPERTS SAY  
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Oliver Milman and Dharna Noor
September 2, 2025
The Guardian
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_ Over 85 top climate specialists lambasted administration’s
review, calling it a ‘shoddy mess’ that downplays risks _

“The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the
planet, melting the sea ice that polar bears require,” says Krista
Wright, executive director of Polar Bears International. , Photograph:
Cristina Mittermeier

 

A group of the US’s leading climate scientists have compiled a
withering review of a controversial Trump administration
[[link removed]] report
that downplays the risks of the climate crisis
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the document is biased, riddled with errors and fails basic scientific
credibility.

More than 85 climate experts have contributed to a comprehensive
434-page report that excoriates a US Department of Energy (DOE)
document written by five hand-picked fringe researchers that argues
that global heating and its resulting consequences have been
overstated.

The Trump administration report
[[link removed]],
released in July, contains “pervasive problems with
misrepresentation and selective citation of the scientific literature,
cherry-picking of data, and faulty or absent statistics”, states the
new analysis, which is written in the style of the authoritative
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.

“This report makes a mockery of science,” said Andrew Dessler, a
climate scientist at Texas A&M University.

“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.”

Another reviewing academic, Lucas Vargas Zeppetello, an environmental
scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, said he was
“shocked and appalled” by the “total disgrace” of the Donald
Trump [[link removed]] report and
was willing to join with other volunteer researchers from leading
institutions to correct the record.

The review will be submitted as part of a public comment period on
the report
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which closes on Tuesday.

Chris Wright, the US energy secretary, has said the report pushes back
against the _“_cancel culture Orwellian squelching of science”
and that the five authors were not ordered what to write.

However, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists
have condemned
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“farce” of the exercise, pointing out it has been used to justify
the administration’s rollback of climate regulations, rather than
act as legitimate scientific inquiry.

“Setting aside several weeks of time to join dozens of other
scientists in an effort to correct the cherry-picked data in a US
government report wasn’t on my bingo card this summer,” said Andra
Garner, a climate scientist at Rowan University. “But it is clearly
what the situation required.”

Reached for comment, DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich said: “Unlike
previous administrations, the Trump administration
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committed to engaging in a more thoughtful and science-based
conversation about climate change and energy.”

The four main critiques contained in the climate scientists’ review
are:

Authors

The problems with the new DOE assessment began when the agency
hand-picked five climate contrarians to author it, the analysis says.

They include John Christy, an atmospheric scientist who has said
[[link removed]] the
climate crisis could be positive; Judith Curry, a climatologist who
rails against climate “alarmism”
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Steven E Koonin, a physicist who has called
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science “unsettled”; Ross McKitrick, an economist who has said the
climate crisis is not
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“big issue”; and Roy Spencer, a meteorologist and climate
scientist who has said top scientists overblow
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impact society has on the climate.

In the DOE report, Wright says the authors were chosen “for their
rigor, honesty, and willingness to elevate the debate”. But each one
is “well known for manufacturing uncertainty”, the new review
states.

By selecting these authors, the Trump administration appears to be
violating a 1972 law
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balanced perspectives within executive advisory committees, the new
review says.

“his group appears to have been personally recruited by the
Secretary of Energy to advance a particular viewpoint favored by DOE
leadership,” the analysis says.

Peer review and transparency

Federal advisory committee members are subject to transparency laws
aimed at promoting citizen input and accountability, the analysis
notes, but the group’s convenings happened in secret, and their work
was withheld from the public.

Under Office of Management and Budget rules
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such assessments are also meant to be subject to peer review. But no
such review has yet occurred, the authors note.

“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,” said Robert Kopp, a climate scientist
at Rutgers University who has said the DOE report misrepresented his
research.

The working group’s process also violated the stated aims of the
Trump administration, they say. In a May executive order, the
president said only peer-reviewed science
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is conducted in a conflict-free and transparent manner should underpin
policies.

“We should be using scientifically vetted and properly reviewed
assessments to make legal decisions – not unreviewed documents that
present a distorted view of our scientific knowledge,” said Abigail
Swann, a professor of atmospheric sciences and ecology at the
University of Washington.

Asked about these concerns, Dietderich said the DOE report was
“reviewed internally by a group of DOE scientific researchers and
policy experts from the Office of Science and National Labs” and is
now “opened to wider peer review from the scientific community and
general public via the public comment period”.

Cherry-picked evidence

The Trump administration report selectively reviews scientific
literature and plucks small sections to support its arguments, rather
than present a full picture of the evidence, the scientists’ review
states.

For example, the Trump-appointed researchers point to the extreme heat
of the 1930s Dust Bowl, while ignoring what was going on in the rest
of the world and how this compares to global trends today. Other
“cherry-picked” evidence is used to support claims about the role
of the strength of the sun in raising Earth temperatures and the
sensitivity of the climate to carbon emissions, the review finds.

Another section, in which the report looks at climate-driven extreme
events, is badly mischaracterized, according to Dessler. “I mean,
they just don’t understand what they’re talking about,” he said.

Five people were hand-selected by the secretary of energy for their
viewpoint, and they produced a shoddy mess of cherry-picked data and
unsupported assertions

Pamela McElwee, Rutgers University

“Five people were hand-selected by the secretary of energy for their
viewpoints, and they produced a shoddy mess of cherry-picked data and
unsupported assertions,” said Pamela McElwee, associate professor of
human ecology at Rutgers University.

While the DOE report was written in four months, traditional federal
and international climate reports – such as the US national climate
assessments and IPCC reports – are each authored by hundreds of
experts, the new analysis says, “with multiple rounds of internal
and external review”.

Because the DOE report “covers areas in which the authors are not
experts”, their report is riddled with “errors in the report
caused by a lack of familiarity with the science”, the assessment
says.

About 11% of the DOE report’s citations were written by its own five
authors – a share nearly five times higher than the average rate at
which authors’ own work was cited in a 2023 IPCC report
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experts wrote.

Predetermined outcome

The Department of Energy report was released as part of a Trump
administration push to repeal the “endangerment finding” – a
landmark 2009 determination that greenhouse gases harm human health.

The elimination of this finding by the Environmental Protection Agency
would effectively kneecap all US policies designed to cut
planet-heating pollution from cars, trucks and power plants. The DOE
report is intended to provide cover for this political goal rather
than act as a credible work of science, the review found.

Dietderich said the president “values the role of science” and
that the administration “have not pre-judged how this report will
impact EPA’s proposed Endangerment Finding rulemaking or any policy
or program at the Department of Energy”.

Yet by sidelining credible climate scientists and actively promoting
the report’s conclusions in draft form, the Trump administration has
shown that this work is merely a tool in service of a political goal,
the reviewing scientists added.

“Work contrary to the conclusions of the DOE report is dismissed or
simply ignored, making it clear that the report is intended to support
a specific policy decision and is not an unbiased synthesis of climate
science,” said Christopher Callahan, a climate scientist at Indiana
University.

_Oliver Milman is an environment reporter for Guardian US.
Twitter @olliemilman [[link removed]].  Dharna
Noor is a fossil fuels and climate reporter at Guardian US_

* Climate Deniers
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