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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial
ARTICLE VIEW:
Trump administration dissolves group that authored controversial report
sowing doubt in the severity of climate change
By Ella Nilsen, CNN
Updated:
5:13 PM EDT, Wed September 10, 2025
Source: CNN
Climate scientists are declaring victory after the Trump administration
dissolved a working group of that authored a questioning the severity
of climate change and even portraying it as potentially beneficial.
A letter dated September 3 from Energy Sec. Chris Wright confirming the
dissolution of the group was sent to the five researchers — John
Christy and Roy Spencer, both at the University of Alabama at
Huntsville, Steven E. Koonin of Stanford University’s Hoover
Institution, Georgia Tech professor emeritus Judith Curry and Canadian
economist Ross McKitrick.
The group’s end can be traced to a filed by the Environmental Defense
Fund and Union of Concerned Scientists alleging the group’s formation
violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act in several ways, mainly by
failing to disclose the group’s formation “until months after it
began working,” and by choosing members of a federal government
working group to deliberately represent a one-sided argument.
Though the group has been disbanded, DOE will not withdraw the report
it authored, which sparked resistance across the climate science
community and stirred a coordinated response during the required
public-comment period.
“DOE determined that the draft report and the public comments it
solicited achieved the purpose of the CWG, namely to catalyze broader
discussion about the certainties and uncertainties of current climate
science,” a DOE spokesperson said. “We will continue to engage in
the debate in favor of a more science-based and less ideological
conversation around climate science.”
Curry wrote in a on September 2 that the group’s activities were
“currently on hold” due to the lawsuit. Wright notified the
researchers of the dissolution a day later.
“Having collided with so many orthodoxies, I’m confident that
we’ve excited the much-needed debate in this area and can dissolve
the Climate Working Group,” Wright wrote his letter. “It is
unsurprising that we are now facing yet another effort to declare the
science ‘settled’ and to shut down this debate.”
Wright handpicked the researchers earlier this year to write
questioning the scientific consensus on the severity and impacts of
climate change. A draft of the report was released in July as evidence
for the administration’s proposal to repeal a 2009 scientific finding
that human-caused climate change endangers human health and safety.
“The agency considered a variety of sources and information in
assessing whether the predictions made, and assumptions used, in the
2009 Endangerment Finding are accurate,” an EPA spokesperson said in
a statement to CNN. “EPA’s proposal is legal in nature.”
The report generated concerted pushback from the scientific community.
More than 100 climate scientists – many of whom – submitted over
400 pages in public comments to the Energy Department last week.
Andrew Dessler, a climate researcher at Texas A&M University who helped
organize the public comments to push back against the report, told CNN
he believes the Energy Department and the former working group were
ill-equipped to respond to the deluge of comments they received.
“My interpretation is they’re waving the white flag,” Dessler
said. “How do five people respond to thousands of comments? They
don’t have the arguments or the knowledge in a lot of areas. Any
attempt to respond would have revealed how unscientific the report
actually was.”
The Trump administration promoted the Energy Department report at the
same time it deleted all previous congressionally mandated National
Climate Assessment reports from government websites and fired the
scientists working on the next iteration of the report. In an , Wright
said the Trump administration was also updating previously published
National Climate Assessments, which drew alarm from climate scientists.
In his letter, Wright said the report and the “resulting debate it
invited exceeded my expectations.”
“The discourse around this issue will benefit from your work and the
public comment process; both create long overdue space for a variety of
scientific viewpoints,” Wright wrote.
Curry told CNN in an email that while the group has been disbanded, it
is “still working independently,” and plans to “issue a revised
report and respond to any serious comments.”
Dessler said the dissolution is a significant blow to the years-long
desire of climate contrarians to have a sham “red-team, blue team”
debate on the merits of climate science, something former group member
Koonin with E&E News would happen in the future.
Dessler said he believed the working group’s dissolution means there
will be no such debate, nor an official point by point rebuttal from
the Trump administration.
“My sense is this is a disaster for them; they honestly believed they
had good arguments,” Dessler added.
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