A new climate report from the Trump Administration is attempting to justify a multitude of mass rollbacks of environmental regulations. Scientists and experts are warning readers that the entire report is full of misinformation, and not an accurate representation of the climate crisis and its major impact.
A new climate report from the Trump Administration is attempting to justify mass rollbacks of environmental regulations, however, scientists and climate experts are stating that it’s full of misinformation to rationalize the damage that will continue to occur from the removal of funding and programs to protect the planet.
This week, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a new proposal to undo their 2009 “endangerment finding” which allows the agency to limit planet-heating pollution from vehicles, power plants, and other industrial powers contributing to climate change. The finding also provides a legal basis for the EPA to regulate pollution under the Clean Air Act, and the undoing of this could turn almost all US climate regulation upside down.
Within 24 hours, the Department of Energy (DOE) released a 150-page report defending the proposal, according to The Guardian.
In the report’s introduction, energy secretary Chris Wright claimed that “climate change is a challenge – not a catastrophe.” He also said that the report was fighting against “cancel culture Orwellian squelching of science.”
In response, well-known climate scientist Michael Mann said that this report was something he would expect “if you took a chatbot and you trained it on the top 10 fossil fuel industry-funded climate denier websites”.
History of science professor at Harvard University and expert in climate misinformation, Naomi Oreskes, said that the report’s actual purpose was to “justify what is a scientifically unjustifiable failure to regulate fossil fuels.”
“Science is the basis for climate regulation, so now they are trying to replace legitimate science with pseudoscience.”
This new report also comes as a part of Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda which is meant to boost fossil fuels. Fossil fuel emissions have long been known as one of the most primary causes of global warming.
“This is an agenda to promote fossil fuels, not to protect public health and welfare or the environment,” said Rachel Cleetus, a director at climate and science non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists.
In response to multiple scientists asserting that this new report was filled with misinformation, energy department spokesperson, Ben Bietderich said:
“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.”
Scientists often refer to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the “gold standard” of information regarding climate science. The IPCC is compiled by a large multinational team of scientists and is peer-reviewed and agreed on by every national government.
The last report from the IPCC was published two years ago and involved 721 volunteer scientists from all over the world. The report stated that it is “unequivocal” that human activity has heated the planet and “led to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people.”
The report from the Trump Administration was compiled by five scientists handpicked by the White House and are seen as having “fringe or contrarian views by mainstream climate scientists with no peer review,” the Guardian reported.
“This report had five authors and was rushed over four months, and would not pass muster in any traditional scientific peer review process, [it’s a] farce,” said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at the climate non-profit Berkeley Earth.
“This is a report written by a couple of scientists who are outliers in their arguments for climate change,” said Natalie Mahowald, a climate scientist at Cornell University.
“This document does in no way depreciate the value of previous assessments, but rather just cherrypicks the literature to pretend to create a new review.”
Mahowald also stated that the lack of peer review showed the report was “obviously not as robust” as the IPCC report or the US government’s periodic national climate assessment. The Trump administration also recently took the national climate assessment offline. The last assessment concluded that “the effects of human-caused climate change are already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States.”
“If almost any other group of scientists had been chosen, the report would have been dramatically different. The only way to get this report was to pick these authors,” Andrew Dessler, a climate researcher at Texas A&M University, said.
Hausfather also echoed this perspective, stating that the authors’ overall work “might represent their views but is not consistent with the broader scientific literature on climate change.”
“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.
“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.
Dessler said that scientists have an obligation to engage with, and thoroughly research, the “full range” of evidence even when it contradicts previous assumptions.
“The report is tedious and at times truly wearisome,” according to Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University.
“As a former department of energy fellow, I’m embarrassed by this report.”
“The report they produced should be thought of as a law brief from attorneys defending their client, carbon dioxide. Their goal is not to weigh the evidence fairly but to build the strongest possible case for CO2’s innocence,” Dessler said.
“Many of [the papers’s] claims are based on long-debunked research long promoted by climate deniers,” said Mann.
“It is shop worn, decades-old, discredited climate denier talking points, dressed up in the clothing of some sensible new set of revelations. What’s different is that it has the imprimatur of the EPA and the federal government now.”
“They’re literally trying to tell us not to believe what we see with our own two eyes … and instead buy into their denialist framing that rejects not just the science, but what is plainly evident if you look out your window,” said Mann.
Eric Mastrota is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. A graduate of SUNY New Paltz, he reports on world news, culture, and lifestyle. You can reach him at eric.mastrota@thenationaldigest.com.
