Initial Response to "A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate"

NCA5 Analysis of Historical and Future CONUS Warming
(I'd like to show you the Climate Working Group version but there isn't one)

In his 1974 commencement address delivered at Caltech, Richard Feynman warned against scientists "fooling themselves" by doing what superficially looks scientific, but lacks rigorous and critical analysis.

In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

Feynman's point was that any and all scientists are susceptible to this because they, like the rest of us, are people, and people are susceptible to confirmation bias. So scientific integrity necessarily involves skepticism directed inwardly towards ourselves. We have to rule out the "null hypothesis" that we have fooled ourselves before publishing our scientific findings for the evaluation and review of other scientists. This is what leads to Feynman's famous quote:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

Without this inward-directed skepticism, we run the risk of misleading ourselves, other scientists, and also the public. In fact, scientists can become like advertisers selling an agenda at the expense of scientific integrity. To illustrate, he shared an example of an advertisement he'd seen. Wesson Oil advertised that their product doesn't soak through food (implying other oils do). But Wesson didn't mention that no oils soak through food at certain temperatures or that all oils soak through food at other temperatures. Scientific integrity requires not just making truthful statements but making sure we don't imply what isn't true while saying what is true. I believe Feynman is describing what is at the heart of my issues with the Dept. of Energy climate report published by the "Climate Working Group." To me it's an example of failed scientific integrity. It resembles "cargo cult science," even when it says what is factually true, but it's also carefully worded to mislead.

The DOE report, "A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate,"  was published just in time to be heard as "evidence" regarding the EPA's endangerment finding, and it essentially replaces what would have been the next National Climate Assessment. NCA6 was likely to be published this year, authored by about 400 scientists writing in their field of expertise. It was undergoing a thorough review before publication, but NCA6 was canceled by the Trump administration. In its place, Chris Wright hired five people, only three of which have credentials in climate science, to assemble what they call a "critical review" of the impact of GHG emissions on US Climate. The report covers a wide range of topics, and these 5 authors do not have any significant expertise in many of them to do anything qualifying as a "critical review." That's not a slight on them; it's just a fact that no 5 people have the combined expertise to write a meta-analysis on so many individual topics (NCA6 was being authored by 400 volunteer scientists). I've read through the document, giving more attention to some parts than others, and I plan on writing responses to various sections of it in the near future. But there are some things that are overwhelmingly clear about the DOE report at this point, and some have been pointed out by others, so I also link to their words when I can.

1. Missing Essential Content. Robert Rohde has noted that this report lacks what should be required analysis for a report of this type. Even though this report is titled such that we should expect an analysis of the "impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on the U.S. climate, nowhere in the paper evaluates "historical or projected future changes in US mean temperature." This is the type of analysis that was featured in NCA5,[3] but it's a not-so-curious omission from the DOE report.
2. Misrepresentations of the Scientific Literature. Several published climate scientists cited in the report have already noticed that their work has been misrepresented in this document. There are several examples of this:
   A. One of Andrew Dessler's papers was cited in this report's claim that warming will produce a net benefit for humanity, "with a net saving of lives since they reduce mortality from cold events." Dessler's actual position is summarized here.
   B. Richard Tol, an economist and prominent critic of AGW, writes, "The DoE published a scientific report in support of the EPA’s legal argument. I am cited 3 times, incorrectly all three times." The DOE report is drawing criticism even from its allies.
   C. Zeke Hausfather documents how both the DOE and EPA misrepresented and misused his research here. This is just a small subsample. CarbonBrief has apparently sent communications to the authors cited in the DOE report, so we may get a fuller accounting of the misuse of scientific literature in the future.
   
3. Botched Scientific References. Leon Simons notes that the DOE misrepresented the scientific literature where relevant to points they were making. He documents that they cited Hansen & Kharecha 2025[2] (and misspelled the second author as "Karecha"), but apparently confused the content of the paper with a blogpost by Zeke Hausfather. The paper by Hansen, Kharecha et al attributed the decrease in albedo to estimate shipping aerosol forcings at +0.5 W/m^2, but the DOE report represented it as "changes in low cloud cover associated with warming sea surface temperatures" on pp. 91-92.
4. Dishonest, Selective Quotations. On pp. 96-97, regarding the Pacific NW heat dome, the DOE report claims that the 2023 Oregon Climate Assessment[4] stated "the heat dome would have formed even without climate change" and quoted the assessment saying, “There is no evidence that the highly unusual combination of weather features that drove the heat dome were made more likely by climate change." This is technically true but also extremely misleading. The assessment actually said, "An event of this magnitude is likely to occur once in 1000 to 100,000 years... A heat dome would have occurred without climate change, but maximum temperatures would not have been as high." They added, "Thompson et al. (2022) estimated that a heat wave of similar magnitude will recur about once in six years by the end of the twenty-first century if concentrations of greenhouse gases do not decrease." So while the unusual combination of weather features was not made more likely by AGW, AGW did make the event hotter, and they argued that events of this magnitude would increase in frequency from once in 1000 years (or longer) to once in 6 years by 2100. I call that dishonesty. Since the DOE report quoted from the same paragraph I just quoted, they presumably read the paragraph, but they chose to quote only the select portion that supported DOE narrative. And perhaps this is a trivial point, but the authors also misspelled Erica Fleishman as "Fleischman" twice. There is more to this, which I detail in another post here.
   
5. Uncritical Acceptance of Papers Critical of Well-Established Conclusions. The vast majority of the scientific literature supports an ECS value near 3 C, including the most comprehensive study written to date, a paper published by Sherwood et al 2020. The DOE report uncritically adopted one paper published by Lewis in 2022 that was critical of Sherwood et al, even though it has significant issues, which I discuss in more detail here. Any "critical review" should critically evaluate these studies, rather than just accepting the papers that reject overwhelming evidence.
6. Cherry Picking and Spotlighting Long-Discredited Ideas. The report selectively emphasizes long-discredited ideas published in no-impact or predatory journals at the expense of an acknowledgement of the full range of scientific literature. For instance, on p. 13 it repeats Connolly & Soon's claims that solar variability is much larger than is represented in the current scientific literature and may explain a large fraction of current warming, a point I discuss here and here. A peer-reviewed rebuttal to Connolly & Soon's paper is published here, documenting numerous flaws and calculation errors in the paper. There appears to be a heavy dose of "ceres-science" funded papers published in low-to-no impact journals in this report.
7. Bungled Citations. A couple examples here, one found by me and another by O'Dell:
   A. On p. 9 it cites Judd et al 2024[1] as being authored by Judd, E. J., Scotese, C. R., Young, S. A. But Scotese and Young were not among the authors. The actual contributing authors were Jessica Tierney, Daniel Lunt, Isabel Montañez, Brian Huber, Scott Wing, and Paul Valdes, with no mention of Scotese or Young. How hard is it to copy a citation?
   B. Chris O'Dell also found that a quote that the DOE report attributed to "Lee et al. (2024)" that concluded “the trajectory of the observed trend reflects the response to increasing GHG loading in the atmosphere” (p. 28). The citation on the next page was, Lee, S., Byrne, M. P., Loikith, P. C., & O’Dell, C. W. (2024). Zonal contrasts of the tropical Pacific climate predicted by a global constraint. Climate Dynamics, 62(1–2), 229–246. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-023-06741-7.
   That link actually points to the following paper: Zhao, M., Yang, XQ. & Tao, L. Quantifying the processes of accelerated wintertime Tibetan Plateau warming: outside forcing versus local feedbacks. Clim Dyn 61, 3289–3307 (2023).
   The correct citation for that quote is is from a different journal with different co-authors: Lee, S., Bannon, P.R., Park, M. et al. Zonal Contrasts of the Tropical Pacific Climate Predicted by a Global Constraint. Asia-Pac J Atmos Sci 60, 669–678 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13143-024-00373-5.
8. Using Data Known to be of Poor Quality: The paper positively makes use of data that the authors know to be poor. For instance, on pp. 70-71, in Figure 6.8.3 they use a graph labeled "U.S. wildfires 1926 to 2023" with data taken from the NIFC. Except the NIFC removed the data prior to 1983 because of poor data quality, and the authors even admit "The NIFC has removed the pre-1960 data from its current website on the grounds that measurement methods changed after 1960 making the comparison unreliable." The situation was actually much worse than that. The pre-1960 data isn't limited to wildfire data at all. The issue wasn't "measurement methods." It had more to do with data reporting methods that caused double and triple counting of acres burned and differing definitions of what was counted as a wildfire. I discuss this in much more detail here and here.
9. Partisan Emphasis: Roger Pielke, Jr. helpfully describes the report as a "red team climate report," which in my view is accurate. I think he intended this to mean this is a document the "red team" has sorely needed, but in fact, it's an admission that this report is designed to sell a political narrative, not provide a critical review of all the available evidence and scientific literature. This is essentially an opinion piece designed to keep debate alive over matters that scientists have put to bed a long time ago. The only way this "red team" report gets written is if the authors were carefully selected for their fringe views and ideological commitments.
10. Politically-Orchestrated to Replace NCA Reports: Zeke Hausfather has observed that this report was released "at the same time that the government has hidden the actual congressionally mandated national climate assessments that accurately reflect the science only further shows how much of a farce this is." This is especially noteworthy because the document "reads like a blog post — a somewhat scattershot collection of oft-debunked skeptic claims, studies taken out of context, or cherry-picked examples that are not representative of broader climate science research findings." Hausfather's assessment agrees closely with my take on the report as well.

Overall, I think Dessler's initial take on the report gets at the heart of the problem. According to him, the report reads more like the authors have been hired by CO2 as its defense attorney, and the authors presenting the best case they can that GHG emissions are not harmful to the environment or to human flourishing. But scientists are obligated to engage in "the full range of evidence, especially that which might contradict their hypotheses." This is especially true with a report that is intended to be a meta-analysis synthesizing and analyzing the available evidence to arrive at a critical review of the evidence about the impacts of our GHG emissions. That is completely absent in this document.

To me, the DOE report approach resembles Feynman's "cargo cult science," having a superficial similarity to the scientific literature but failing to do the actual work that scientists are supposed to do. The "planes won't land" on the climate working group airstrip because (at best) they have "fooled themselves." The report reads more like the advertisement for Wessen Oil. Even at its best, this report is neither "critical" nor a review." It often says truthful things that mislead, both by omission and biased and selective representation of the evidence. And sometimes it gets the data wrong and misrepresents scientific evidence. We had a similarly bad MAHA report earlier this year with similar flaws. It would appear that we're going to have to deal with another three and a half years of this. Ugh.

References:

[1] Emily J. Judd et al. A 485-million-year history of Earth’s surface temperature. Science385, eadk3705 (2024). DOI:10.1126/science.adk3705

[2] Hansen, J. E., Kharecha, P., Sato, M., Tselioudis, G., Kelly, J., Bauer, S. E., … Pokela, A. (2025). Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed? Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, 67(1), 6–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/00139157.2025.2434494

[3] USGCRP, 2023: Fifth National Climate Assessment: Report-in-Brief. Crimmins, A.R., C.W. Avery, D.R. Easterling, K.E. Kunkel, B.C. Stewart, and T.K. Maycock, Eds. U.S. Global Change Research Program, Washington, DC, USA. https://nca-atlas-nationalclimate.hub.arcgis.com/

[4] Fleishman, Erica, and Oregon Climate Change Research Institute. Sixth Oregon Climate Assessment. : Corvallis, Oregon : Oregon Climate Change Research Institute, Oregon State University, 2023. https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/technical_reports/gt54kw197

[5] McKinnon, K. A., & Simpson, I. R. (2022). How unexpected was the 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave? Geophysical Research Letters, 49, e2022GL100380. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022GL100380

[6] Vikki Thompson et al. ,The 2021 western North America heat wave among the most extreme events ever recorded globally. Sci. Adv.8, eabm6860 (2022). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.abm6860