Veteran climate scientists are organizing a coordinated public comment to a US Department of Energy (DOE) report that cast doubt on the scientific consensus on the climate crisis.
The report, published late last month, claimed concerns about planet-warming fossil fuels are overblown, sparking widespread concern from scientists who said it was full of climate misinformation; it was an attempt to support a proposal from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to undo the “endangerment finding”, which forms the legal basis of virtually all US climate regulations.
“A public comment from experts can be useful because it injects expert analysis into a decision-making process that might otherwise be dominated by political, economic, or ideological considerations,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate researcher at Texas A&M University who is organizing the response to the report. “Experts can identify technical errors, highlight overlooked data, and clarify uncertainties in ways that improve the accuracy and robustness of the final policy or report.”
The response comes as part of a broader wave of experts’ attempts to uphold established climate science as the Trump administration promotes contrarian and unproven viewpoints.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (Nasem), the country’s top group of scientific advisers, has launched a “fast-track” review of the latest evidence on how greenhouse gases threaten human health and wellbeing – a move announced following the proposed endangerment-finding rollback.
Nasem, which advises the EPA and other federal agencies, plans to release their findings in September, in time to inform the EPA’s decision on the endangerment finding. The initiative will be self-funded by the organization – a highly unusual practice from the congressionally chartered group, which usually responds to federal bodies’ calls for advice.
“It is critical that federal policymaking is informed by the best available scientific evidence,” said Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, in a statement.
Trump administration efforts to block access to data have also inspired pushback. This month, the president ousted the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after baselessly saying the data it publishes is “rigged”.
In earlier weeks, federal officials have also deleted key climate data and reports such as the national climate assessments and the US Global Change Research Program from government websites. The administration has changed 70% more of the information on official environmental websites during its first 100 days than the first Trump administration did, according to a report the research group Environmental Data and Governance Initiative published last week.
In light of these actions, research organizations such as the Public Environmental Data Project and Cornerstone Sustainability Data Initiative have worked to safeguard and publicize data that the federal government is hiding from the public.
“Attacks on science are dangerous because they erode one of society’s most effective tools for understanding the world and making decisions in the public interest,” said Dessler. “When political or ideological forces undermine scientific institutions or discredit experts, they weaken our ability to harness this powerful tool.”
Asked for comment about the Nasem review, an EPA spokesperson repeated a comment offered earlier this month: “Congress never explicitly gave EPA authority to impose greenhouse gas regulations for cars and trucks.”
The Clean Air Act authorizes the EPA to set emission standards for cars if the EPA administrator determines that their emissions endanger public health or welfare. That includes greenhouse gas emissions, due to the endangerment finding.
Asked for comment on the DOE report supporting the EPA’s position, Department of Energy spokesperson Ben Dietderich also repeated an earlier comment. “This report critically assesses many areas of ongoing scientific inquiry that are frequently assigned high levels of confidence – not by the scientists themselves but by the political bodies involved, such as the United Nations or previous presidential administrations,” he said.
The UN and the US have regularly convened top scientists to produce scientific climate reports, which warn that urgent action to curb emissions is needed.
Dietderich also said officials “look forward to engaging with substantive comments” on the report.
However, “the real question is whether they’ll listen to us”, said Dessler.
