Scientists decry U.S. climate report

85 researchers repudiate review questioning global warming's severity

- BY HAYLEY SMITH

JASON WHITMAN NurPhoto A TRUMP administration report questioned policies to curb fossil fuel use. Above, a power plant in Ohio.

Dozens of the world's leading climate researchers on Tuesday publicly rebuked a hastily assembled report from the Trump administration that questions the severity of global warming — marking one of the strongest repudiations yet of the president's efforts to downplay climate change.

In a withering 459-page document, more than 85 scientists denounced the Department of Energy's July report as biased, error-ridden and unfit for guiding policy.

The report “fails to adequately represent the current scientific understanding of climate change,” they wrote. The authors include veterans in atmospheric science, physics, ecology, forecast modeling and several other fields at universities, think tanks and research institutions in the United States and abroad.

Titled “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate,” the report was written by five researchers selected by U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright. It was published after the White House dismissed more than 400 scientists working on the sixth National Climate Assessment and shut down the website that housed the previous assessments.

The Environmental Protection Agency leaned on the Energy Department report in its hotly contested proposal to repeal the endangerment finding, a landmark 2009 determination affirming that planet-warming greenhouse gases pose a threat to human health and the environment. The finding is the basis of many federal climate efforts.

Among its controversial conclusions, the Energy Department report determines that carbon dioxide-induced warming “might be less damaging economically than commonly believed,” and that “aggressive mitigation policies” — such as those designed to curb the use of fossil fuels — “could prove more detrimental than beneficial.”