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Trump’s science report on climate change is all cover and no content [1]

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Date: 2025-09-09

The conclusion of the Energy Department’s supposedly serious study of global warming: “Eh, maybe it won’t be so bad”

The most important thing to know about the report on global warming by Trump’s energy secretary is that it has a cover, followed by 150 more pages.

That doesn’t mean it’s not important. It means that the message of A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate is that someone in the Administration decided there needed to be a bit more meat on Trump’s three-word energy policy of “drill baby drill.”

But not real meat. Just something that climate change deniers can point to and say, “See? Science!” They don’t even have to read it.

I did. What Energy Secretary Christopher Wright and his Climate Working Group conclude is that global warming might not be so bad.

Or in their own words, “Climate change is real, and it deserves attention. But it is not the greatest threat facing humanity. That distinction belongs to global energy poverty.”

Which raises a couple questions: where would they rank nuclear war, and does that statement mean climate change ranks as threat #2?

Bias, errors, and distortions

Cosmic questions like those aside, the study just puts a cap and gown on a document filled with shoddy logic and cherry-picked factoids. In an Associated Press story on the study, it contacted 64 scientists for their reaction. The AP reports they said the study was “filled with errors, bias, and distortions.”

The report’s chapters list the basic global warming issues: climate trends; effects on agriculture; sea levels; economic effects. In each, it makes the basic argument that while there may be bad-seeming trends, the scientific models that project those into the future might not turn out to be 100% accurate.

The report doesn’t address the consequences if the forecasts turn out to be true. But its bigger crime is that it ignores the realities of the past and present.

It’s a document whose purpose is misdirection and diversion.

For example, you won’t read in the report that the average global temperature has been steadily rising for the last 100 years, that the increase has speeded up dramatically in the past 10 years, and that all 10 of the warmest years on record have happened in the last 10 years.

Scientific-sounding mumbo jumbo

Instead, each chapter begins with an observation about global warming, then proceeds with an avalanche of scientific-sounding mumbo jumbo that concludes that global warming not only isn’t bad, but might even be good.

Like the chapter about whether people are dying because of climate change, oddly titled, “Managing Risks of Extreme Weather.” In a flurry of graphs and phrases like “Epidemiological methods that consider correlational evidence,” it concludes that while global warming might kill more people with extreme heat spells, “it stands to reason” that fewer would die from extreme cold snaps.

While “it stands to reason” doesn’t sound especially scientifically rigorous, there’s another eye-popper in that chapter. Under the subhead, “Mortality from temperature extremes,” the report introduces the idea that deaths from heat and cold will balance out, saying, “There is strong evidence that people adapt to weather risks.”

Adapting to weather risks by trading more deaths in summer for not as many in winter seems, well, pretty cold.

In any event, “there is evidence” is used as the basic organizing phrase of the report. Some form of it gets used 13 times. There is evidence global warming claims are overstated. There is evidence that higher levels of greenhouse gases promote crop growth. There is evidence that forests might increase cloud cover. There is evidence that urbanization might affect temperature measurements.

Declaring there is evidence of something is the report’s glib way of dismissing all other evidence. The report’s writers seem very proud of themselves for coming up with such an all-purpose phrase.

False footnotes

It’s all scientific-sounding sleight of hand that gives an impression of serious analysis, when it’s really just a series of rhetorical devices that raise issues, then dismisses them as things that might not happen. After all, who can really know what the future holds?

But it’s the report’s footnotes that offer the strongest evidence that it’s meant to be gazed upon rather than read. The references at the end of each chapter look scholarly, but they don’t say what the report claims they say.

Two examples.

To show how an ecosystem can bounce back from global warming damage, it cites the reversal of the deterioration of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Clicking through the footnote for that claim to the original study finds this: “The increasing frequency and extent of mass bleaching events in recent years poses a significant risk to the state of the reefs in the (Great Barrier Reef.) Any future disturbances can rapidly reverse the observed recovery.” Not quite the rosy outlook claimed by the Energy Department report.

Another assertion declares that a study found a 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest was not caused by global warming. Following the footnote finds a study of the complexities of relating a weather event to climate change, concluding that those complexities should be taken into account when making public policy. That’s not even remotely a declaration that global warming did not cause the heat wave.

One of the more stunning sections of the report comes at the end of the chapter that considers whether sea levels are actually rising as polar ice sheets melt from global warming. It cites a National Oceanic and Atmospheric study predicting a one-foot sea level rise at New York City from 2020 to 2050. The report labels this as simply “remarkable” and “improbable,” concluding cavalierly, “We should know in a decade or so whether that prediction has legs.”

By then, of course, it will be too late.

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Written by Paul Wesslund. Originally posted on Forward Kentucky, the progressive voice for the Bluegrass state.

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