\n<\/p>\n
A new Trump administration report which attempts to justify a mass rollback of environmental regulations is chock-full of climate misinformation, experts say.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a proposal to undo the 2009 \u201cendangerment finding\u201d, which allows the agency to limit planet-heating pollution from cars and trucks, power plants and other industrial sources. Hours later, the Department of Energy (DOE) published a 150-page report defending the proposal, claiming scientific concern about the climate crisis is overblown.<\/p>\n
\u201cClimate change is a challenge \u2013 not a catastrophe,\u201d wrote the energy secretary, Chris Wright, in the report\u2019s introduction.<\/p>\n
Esteemed climate scientist Michael Mann said the report was akin to the result he would expect \u201cif you took a chat bot and you trained it on the top 10 fossil fuel industry-funded climate denier websites\u201d.<\/p>\n
The DOE published the report hours after the EPA announced a plan to roll back 2009\u2019s \u201cendangerment finding\u201d, a seminal ruling that provided the legal basis for the agency to regulate climate-heating pollution under the Clean Air Act. If finalized, the move would topple virtually all US climate regulation.<\/p>\n
In a Fox News interview, Wright claimed the report pushes back on the \u201ccancel culture Orwellian squelching of science\u201d. But Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University and expert in climate misinformation, said its true purpose is to \u201cjustify what is a scientifically unjustifiable failure to regulate fossil fuels\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cScience is the basis for climate regulation, so now they are trying to replace legitimate science with pseudoscience,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The attack on the research underpinning the endangerment finding \u2013 which says greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare \u2013 comes as part of Trump\u2019s \u201cdrill, baby, drill\u201d agenda to boost fossil fuels, which are the primary cause of global warming.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is an agenda to promote fossil fuels, not to protect public health and welfare or the environment,\u201d said Rachel Cleetus, a director at climate and science non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists who was an author on the sixth US national climate assessment.<\/p>\n
Asked about scientists\u2019 assertions that the new report is rife with misinformation,<\/strong> a DOE spokesperson Ben Dietderich, said: \u201cThis report critically assesses many areas of ongoing scientific inquiry that are frequently assigned high levels of confidence \u2013 not by the scientists themselves but by the political bodies involved, such as the United Nations or previous presidential administrations.\u201d<\/p>\n But the UN\u2019s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces what is widely considered the gold standard compendium of climate science, compiled by a huge multinational team of scientists, peer reviewed and agreed to by every national government.<\/p>\n The latest IPCC synthesis report, released two years ago, was a vast undertaking involving 721 volunteer scientists around the world. It states that it is \u201cunequivocal\u201d that human activity has heated the planet, which has \u201cled to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people\u201d.<\/p>\n By contrast, the Trump administration report was crafted by five handpicked scientists who are seen as having fringe or contrarian views by mainstream climate scientists, with no peer review. The experts behind the report have previously denied being climate deniers. The DOE did not respond to a question about the authors.<\/p>\n \u201cThis report had five authors and was rushed over four months, and would not pass muster in any traditional scientific peer review process,\u201d said Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at the climate non-profit Berkeley Earth, who called the paper a \u201cfarce\u201d.<\/p>\n Wright, the energy secretary, insisted he had not steered the report\u2019s conclusions, while Judith Curry, one of the report authors, said in a blog post she hoped the document will push climate science \u201caway from alarmism and advocacy\u201d.<\/p>\n Mainstream climate scientists, however, condemned the findings as distorted and inaccurate. \u201cThis is a report written by a couple of scientists who are outliers in their arguments for climate change,\u201d said Natalie Mahowald, a climate scientist at Cornell University. \u201cThis document does in no way depreciate the value of previous assessments, but rather just cherrypicks the literature to pretend to create a new review.\u201d<\/p>\n Mahowald said the lack of peer review means it\u2019s \u201cobviously not as robust\u201d as the IPCC report or the US government\u2019s periodic national climate assessment, which the Trump administration recently took offline. The latest national climate assessment, compiled by a dozen government agencies and outside scientists in 2023, concluded that the \u201ceffects of human-caused climate change are already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf almost any other group of scientists had been chosen, the report would have been dramatically different,\u201d Andrew Dessler, a climate researcher at Texas A&M University, said of the new report. \u201cThe only way to get this report was to pick these authors.\u201d<\/p>\n Hausfather agreed that the authors\u2019 work \u201cmight represent their views but is not consistent with the broader scientific literature on climate change\u201d. He was among the scientists whose work the authors cited.<\/p>\n The new paper includes a chart from a 2019 report which he led, claiming it demonstrates how climate models \u201cconsistently overestimated observations\u201d of atmospheric carbon. But Hausfather\u2019s research actually showed that climate models have performed well.<\/p>\n \u201cThey 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,\u201d he said. The DOE did not respond to a request for comment about Hausfather\u2019s concerns.<\/p>\n That approach to research seems to underpin the entire paper, said Hausfather, who is also the climate research lead at tech company Stripe.<\/p>\n \u201cThis 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Dessler said scientists are obliged to engage with the full range of evidence, even if it contradicts their initial assumptions. Ignoring this principle \u201ccan rise to the level of scientific misconduct\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe report they produced should be thought of as a law brief from attorneys defending their client, carbon dioxide,\u201d Dessler said. \u201cTheir goal is not to weigh the evidence fairly but to build the strongest possible case for CO2\u2019s innocence.\u201d<\/p>\n The lack of peer review in the administration\u2019s report led to conclusions that deviated, sometimes wildly, from the scientific literature. Many of its claims are based on long-debunked research long promoted by climate deniers, said Mann.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is shop worn, decades-old, discredited climate denier talking points, dressed up in the clothing of some sensible new set of revelations,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat\u2019s different is that it has the imprimatur of the EPA and the federal government now.\u201d<\/p>\n The report, for instance claims that warming trends have been overstated, despite evidence to the contrary. It was published as extreme heat is affecting millions of Americans.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re literally trying to tell us not to believe what we see with our own two eyes \u2026 and instead buy into their denialist framing that rejects not just the science, but what is plainly evident if you look out your window,\u201d said Mann.<\/p>\n The authors also write that ocean acidification is occurring \u201cwithin the range of natural variability\u201d and beneficial for marine life despite the ocean\u2019s acidic levels currently being the highest since 14m years ago, a time when a major extinction event was occurring.<\/p>\n And the report references the apparent health of Australia\u2019s Great Barrier Reef, which it says \u201chas shown considerable growth in recent years\u201d. The reef was recently hit by its sixth mass bleaching event since 2016, a devastating phenomena for corals where they whiten and sometimes die due to high sea temperatures. No widespread bleaching events were recorded on the reef prior to 1998.<\/p>\n The report is \u201ctedious\u201d and at times \u201ctruly wearisome\u201d, according to Bob Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University. Kopp recently worked on a paper showing how rising temperatures and drought will worsen crop yields, counter to the report\u2019s claims that crops will flourish with extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.<\/p>\n \u201cCarbon dioxide fertilization is largely irrelevant to how increasingly extreme heat and intense drought will impact crop yields,\u201d Kopp said. \u201cAs a former department of energy fellow, I\u2019m embarrassed by this report.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A new Trump administration report which attempts to justify a mass rollback of environmental regulations is chock-full of climate misinformation, experts say. On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a proposal to undo the 2009 \u201cendangerment finding\u201d, which allows the agency to limit planet-heating pollution from cars and trucks, power plants and other industrial<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13495,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[794,186,6316,1052,290,293,384,5133,81],"class_list":{"0":"post-13494","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-administration","9":"tag-climate","10":"tag-farce","11":"tag-full","12":"tag-misinformation","13":"tag-report","14":"tag-scientists","15":"tag-slam","16":"tag-trump"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13494\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\u2018I\u2019m embarrassed by this report\u2019<\/h2>\n