The Department of Energy Borrows a page from Bobby Kennedy Jr

In late July, the Department of Energy released a report “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the US Climate” to support the position that human induced climate change is not an existential threat. The panel was convened by Travis Fisher of the Libertarian Cato Institute, and was composed of nuclear physicist Steve Koonin, atmospheric scientists Judith Curry, Roy Spencer, and John Christy, and Canadian economist Ross McKitrick. Fisher was picked by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, an oil driller.

Koonin, Christy, Spencer, Curry and McKitrick are all climate change skeptics. I will go into their questionable credentials for the job and the history of three of them with a previous effort to roll back concern about climate change. Suffice to say the Trump administration believes in recycling when it comes to shoddy scientific panels. This selection is very much like the vaccine review panel convened by Health and Human Services Secretary Bobby Kennedy Jr which is led by and comprised of vaccine skeptics. Their report is due this month.

The Union of Concerned Scientists and Environmental Defense Fund filed suit against the Administration on the basis of violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, enacted during the Nixon administration to ensure transparency and public participation in the selection of government advisory committees to mitigate the impact of special interests in the government. The Trump administration ran roughshod over the FACA in selecting this climate change committee.

In a one month time frame, a group of 85 climate scientists produced an independent review of the DOE report (that runs nearly 500 pages!) and found it riddled with errors, saying it “contains “pervasive problems with misrepresentation and selective citation of the scientific literature, cherry-picking of data, and faulty or absent statistics”.” More on this below.

The overall disturbing trend of this administration to choose “experts” that produce the conclusions desired by ideology are not without precedent, and like those past precedents the Trump administration’s biased ‘science’ will cost lives. I am thinking here of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union, or of the reversal of intelligence doctrine by Dick Cheney in the George W Bush administration that led to the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq.

What the DOE Report Got Wrong

I won’t reproduce all the Climate Expert’s response to the DOE report - you can read it here. But a sampling of the concerns shows that the DOE report is just shoddy.

• The DOE report suggests that the extreme high temperatures and drought conditions of the 1930s Dustbowl are evidence that natural variability can drive extreme climate events. There are multiple problems with this. First, the Dustbowl was over a small geographical area and limited time scope, while the rising temperature, increased stored ocean heat, and rising sea level, for example, are global in character. Also, the Dustbowl event could be positively attributed to decadal scale fluctuations which are not in effect today. A personal observation is that the signal of human influenced climate change was relatively flat from the end of the Dustbowl to the end of the 70s, at least partly due to human induced cooling from persistent soot and particulates induced by coal burning. When the US and other countries began to clean up that form of short term pollution (the soot and particulates leave the atmosphere relatively quickly) in the 70s, the warming signal from the increase in persistent greenhouse gases took off.

• The DOE report pays considerable attention to the fact that some plants produce better under conditions of higher carbon dioxide. The report then completely ignores the threat to agriculture from extreme precipitation and drought events. This is a recycled old argument in support of greenhouse gases as I discuss in the Appendix.

• The DOE report attempts to minimize the impact of dissolution of carbon dioxide into sea water making the oceans relatively more acidic. This process is known as ‘ocean acidification’ very broadly, a term which the report attacks as inaccurate. This acidification is a direct threat to marine life that forms shells, such as coral, clams, oysters, as the more acidic environment disrupts the formation of calcium carbonate shells. The claim that acidification is a poor term is really picky and silly since the usage implies a shift to lower pH. The DOE report attempts to make comparisons to times of early life suggesting that the high CO2 concentrations then still allowed live to evolve and exist in what were likely truly acidic ocean environments. As the authors of the response note, there were not complex multicellular organisms in those times, and certainly no coral or mollusks.

Why we need Greenhouse Gases, but not excess ones that come from our activities

It is a beautiful and straightforward problem in first year college physics to estimate the Earth’s average temperature as an energy balance equation. This estimate will get you the temperature of the Earth’s surface to within about 10%, which is amazing. The simple model is this: the energy coming into the atmosphere from the Sun is what provides the predominant surface energy input (heat flux from the Earth’s core is negligible by comparison). The net incoming solar radiation is partly reflected (the Earth’s albedo, about 30%) and only absorbed in cross section - that is, just the part of the light that is perpendicular to the atmosphere gets absorbed. Effectively, the Earth absorbs as a disk. The Earth then reradiates as a sphere, acting like a blackbody. Other notable blackbodies are our bodies, the Sun itself, and the universe. Since the 1800s we have known that blackbodies emit a spectrum of radiation, with a net energy per area that goes as the absolute, or Kelvin, temperature to the fourth. power. By balancing incident energy with reradiated energy, you can determine the average surface temperature of the Earth to be 252 Kelvin or -21 Celsius. The real average temperature of the Earth’s surface, currently, is 15 degrees Celsius, or 288 K.

Amazing! A “spherical cow model” of the Earth’s atmosphere gets the mean surface temperature to within about 10% in absolute scale! But that -21 Degrees Celsius is, notably, COLD! Life would not easily survive on such a cold planet. It turns out that temperature of the top of the atmosphere is reasonably well approximated by this simple model. So what lies beneath the top atmosphere must play a critical role in warming the 36 degrees between the simple model and reality? The bulk of that warming comes from the Greenhouse effect: there are heat trapping gases which absorb the infrared light energy from the Earth, vibrate, and reradiate the energy. Half goes up towards space, and half goes back down towards the surface. When you account for the heat trapping gases, some regions of the spectrum where there are holes for transmission to the surface, the vertical structure of the atmosphere (some reflection comes in the atmosphere, not at the surface, for example), and for the latent heats of evaporation and condensation of atmospheric water, together with the presence of the oceans as a huge heat reservoir, you can do a good job explaining the atmospheric temperature. The biggest single effect is the heat trapping by Greenhouse gases. John Harte has laid this reasoning out in beautiful detail in his wonderful book, Consider a Spherical Cow.

The tricky part is that the greenhouse gases make a very small amount of the atmosphere. Nitrogen and Oxygen make up 98% or so of the atmosphere, but they don’t absorb in the infrared. The biggest greenhouse gas by content is water. That makes about 0-3% of the atmosphere. But water stays up for short periods of time. It evaporates, it precipitates, on time scales of days.

Carbon dioxide is the next biggest, and currently over 430 parts per million of molecules in the atmosphere, about .04 percent, are carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide, of course, is exhaled in respiration, and used by plants to make energy through photosynthesis which evolves oxygen. But it is an immutable law of chemistry that essentially every carbon atom in a hydrocarbon of coal, oil, or natural gas (methane) that is burned will produce one molecule of carbon dioxide. Moreover, carbon dioxide is relatively long lived because the processes that absorb excess carbon dioxide, including plant growth, can take decades. As a result, we can reliably attribute the dramatic growth of carbon dioxide since the dawn of the industrial age to the burning of fossil fuels.

Add long lived heat trapping gases, even at trace levels, and you increase the temperature of the planet. Warmer temperatures increase the fluctuations of the climate (extreme weather events,). You warm the oceans which expands them and provides more energy for big hurricanes, and you can begin to melt the caps of land ice which will lift sea level further. Current climate change modeling accounts for the majority of carbon dioxide sinks (that take it from the atmosphere) and show that you can indeed account for the above rise in temperature and many other features of the climate driven with high confidence as driven by human generated greenhouse gases.

It ain’t good.

So, in sum: natural long lived greenhouse gases are good in keeping the earth warmer that at the top of the atmosphere. Extra long lived greenhouse gases provided by human activity, primarily fossil fuel burning, that drive warming of the atmosphere represent a unique problem for our planet.

Who was the DOE working group?

Here is an overview of the DOE working group.

Steve Koonin is a distinguished theoretical nuclear physicist, who had been a professor and Provost at Cal Tech prior to becoming Chief Scientist at British Petroleum. He served as Deputy Secretary of Energy under Secretary Steve Chu in the Obama administration. Later, he became a faculty member at NYU. He is a highly cited scientist, but mostly in Nuclear Physics (some of his recent papers on the urban landscape as an NYU prof are highly cited, as is his book on climate science discussed below).

After stepping down from the DOE, he chaired, beginning in 2014, a subcommittee of the Panel of Public Affairs (POPA) of the American Physical Society, the leading professional society for American physicists. This subcommittee was, to say the least, controversial. Its main conclusion was that human agency and natural contributions were equally responsible for the Earth’s warming. This is, to say the least, flat out wrong.

The full POPA body stepped into intervene with the subcommittee report after reading a draft, and Koonin both resigned from the Panel and shot out a passive aggresive OpEd in the Wall Street Journal that slammed the APS and POPA before they could even weigh in publicly on the report.

So, in leading the DOE Panel, I guess you can at least say that Koonin believes in recycling garbage.

Some context for this APS sub-panel. In 2007, the APS Council (its leadership body) put forward the following statement on climate change the emphasis on ‘incontrovertible’ is mine:

There is really little from the standpoint of mainstream science to quibble with here. Nevertheless, a group of physicists, led by Will Happer and Bob Austin of Princeton, and the scurrilous Fred Singer (deceased, I have an Appendix for him below), petitioned the APS in a 2008 letter to soften this statement, seizing on the use of the word ‘incontrovertible’ in particular. The list of signatories is difficult to trace, but courtesy of the Wayback Machine, here is a copy of the text of that open letter:

In 2009, APS President Cherry Murray directed the Panel on Public Affairs to re-consider the 2007 statement and determine whether it needed to be changed. The Panel rejected the absurd softening of the statement suggested by the open letter above, and instead the APS Council adopted the following commentary in 2010:

But, this was not the end of the process for the APS. APS reviews its policy statements every five years for accuracy and currency. In view of the 2010 amendment to the 2007 statement, that made 2015 the target year. POPA is the arm of the APS charged with reviewing such statements. POPA appointed the subcommittee led by Koonin to reconsider the Climate policy of the APS. Koonin convened a panel to present the scientific issues to the POPA subcommittee, which included notable mainstream climate scientists and authors on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports: Ben Santer from Lawrence Livermore Labs, Isaac Held from Princeton, and Bill Collins from Lawrence Berkeley Labs and UC Berkeley. All are highly cited, highly respected scientists. All have contributed to the overwhelming consensus that has solidified in the last several decades that has solidified in the last three decades that global warming is happening and doing so because of our impact on the climate through the excess release of long lived heat trapping gases in the atmosphere.

But Koonin did not adopt a rational scientific principle to flesh out the rest of the expert panel. Instead he used the journalistic approach - give me three scientists who fully accept the consensus, and give me three scientists who are deeply skeptical: Richard Lindzen from MIT, Judith Curry, then at Georgia Tech, and John Christy, from NASA and University of Alabama, Huntsville. I will say more about Curry and Christy below, since they were on the DOE Panel (recycling!!!!).

Lindzen deserves a special place in climate denial hell. He is a distinguished scientist, a member of the National Academy of Science. He did have a valid question about the appropriate role of clouds in setting the Earth’s temperature. Water vapor traps heat, but clouds reflect sunlight, so there is a tradeoff from warming by heat trapping and cooling by increased reflectivity if global warming increases cloud cover. Also, increased water vapor per Lindzen’s models would cool the upper atmosphere. Lindzen averred that the cooling effect was in fact dominant, but the ensuing decades of scientific work have weighed against him. In the intervening time, he was a darling of the right appearing in climate denial conference after climate denial conference, making such claims as:

Well, you can see the graph above and judge for yourself. As a retired professor, Lindzen received $25K/year from the Cato Institute (which espouses climate denial), $30K for a lecture on climate change denial from Peabody Coal, and received $2500/day as a professor in the 90s while consulting with fossil fuel companies (how many such gigs he had are unclear). He also had a trip for Senate testimony paid by the Western fuels association.

In response to the POPA subcommittee, the APS did issue a statement in 2016 which stepped back somewhat from the 2007/2010 statement:

But, in 2021, the APS came back with a stronger statement, quoted in part here (citations omitted):

Mainstream climate scientists hit back hard at Koonin’s claims in 2014. Raymond T. Pierrehumbert wrote a particularly strong push-back piece in Slate with the title “Climate Science is Settled Enough.” I loved this smoking metaphor: “If you were to apply Koonin’s reasoning to this situation [of a smoker visiting a doctor with troubling complaints but not terminal cancer], your response would be, “OK, Doc, I’ll wait to give up smoking until you can tell me exactly how it will kill me and when.””

In the meantime, Koonin has become a darling of the right. He turned his Wall Street Journal article into a full length book, reviewed critically here (Unsettled is the title). He has appeared on Fox Business, at the Hoover Institute, and on Prager U.

Roy Spencer and John Christy 

Roy Spencer and John Christy are scientists both at NASA and at University of Alabama Huntsville. Their work using remote satellite sensing to monitor climate has been a source of a lot of unnecessary division in the climate community over the years. They make a lot of claims that seem to go against the warming consensus and then are forced to correct the claims due to faulty methodology: “These contrarians have been shown to be wrong over and over again, like in the movie Groundhog Day.”

Basically, Spencer and Christy used satellites to measure the temperature throughout the lower part of the atmosphere, the troposphere. For a period of 10 years, when they had something of a monopoly on the observational approach, their data showed cooling which was not easily reconciled with warming data from surface measurements. Naturally, their results were embraced by denialists . The trouble is that they made a bunch of errors in their analysis that mainstream climate scientists like Ben Santer worked painstakingly to understand and point out. Once the errors were identified, reanalysis led to - ta da! - warming in the satellite measurements. The errors did not stop with the old data. There was a 2017 study that was also riddled with errors.

Now when fore-bearers like Descartes and Bacon told us what the scientific method was, they told us to rigorously examine our precepts to make sure that we weren’t biasing our observations. All of the methodological errors in the Spencer and Christy went in the direction to minimize climate change. All of the public intellectual work by Spencer has been to produce books calling out “climate alarmism.” Was there bias? I call on Occam’s Razor.

It is a bit of a mystery to me that these guys have careers going back to the 80s when they have produced so many corrections to their work, but here we are. It is also jaw dropping that Koonin would look at the range of climate science being done, not just once, but twice, and say “Oh yea, I want John Christy on my team.”

Spencer is also a believer in Intelligent Design. It seems reasonable to expect that a scientist who sees God’s direct handiwork in life would doubt that such a God could allow something like climate change to happen at the hands of the creatures made in his image.

Christy is a Baptist who believes it is a moral imperative to burn fossil fuels for lengthening and enhancing the quality of human life. He thinks the influence of human produced carbon dioxide on climate has been vastly overestimated.

Judith Curry Judith Curry was a distinguished atmospheric science professor at Georgia Tech, but retired in 2017, earlier than intended, because she was tired of the fights on climate change, so she said.

Her career is mysterious in the following sense: until about 2006, she largely published papers well within the mainstream of climate science discourse, and a highly cited paper in the prestigious journal Science in 2005 examined the role of climate change in driving large hurricanes. But that paper exposed her to ferocious criticism from climate change deniers, and she began to wander on to climate change skeptic/denier sites to see what they were saying. She became convinced that some of them were saying sensible things, while others were identifiably cranks, and she thought that the engagement could loosen group think within the mainstream climate science community, and potentially improve IPCC reports.

Was Curry a potential bridge between the very large mainstream community and the climate deniers/skeptics who could filter out the worthless drivel from the latter for whatever meaningful critiques there might me? Or was she a naif duped by the sophistry of the skeptics? She definitely was looked upon with jaundiced eyes by her mainstream climate colleagues after her efforts to converse with the critics, and she says this led to her retirement at Georgia Tech. Since retiring, Curry has done well on the right wing media circuit.

Regarding actual critiques of mainstream climate science, Curry claims that there is reason to be concerned about human impacts on climate but believes that the role of natural variability and climate feedbacks are underestimated, and that models for predicting future climate are riddled with inaccuracies. In fact, it is clear that natural variability has been swamped by the human signal in recent decades, and that climate models if anything tend to underestimate the degree of climate change.

Ross McKitrick 

McKitrick is an associate professor of economics at University of Guelph in Canada. He has been at Associate Professor level for (checks notes) 24 years. If he were advancing in his work, you would have expected promotion to Full Professor sometime in the middle to late 2000s.

Part of the reason could be because he decided to work as a climate science contrarian in the early 2000s, taking particular aim at Michael Mann and the famous hockey stick graph, which was roundly trashed by contrarians but has been replicated repeatedly in the years since it was introduced.

Two of the top three most cited papers by McCitrick go after the hockey stick graph with retired mining executive and climate contrarian hobbyist Steven McIntyre. Not economics, and neither is a credentialed climate scientist. In fact, in his career his papers have been cited 3700 times, vs nearly 55000 citations for Michael Mann Citations are a measure, imperfect but insightful, and generally speaking the leading mainstream climate scientists like Santer (32000 citations), Collins (48000 citations), Mann, and Held (63000 citations) are very highly cited, while the most vocal contrarians are not, at least not within climate science (Christy has 11000 citations, but many are for his flawed observation papers and some for large review papers written with other authors, Curry has 28000 citations). Science is an intellectual marketplace, and a key currency is the relevance of your papers to driving new work, which is in part, at least, quantified by their impact as measured by citations.

McKitrick is also a member of the conservative think tank the Fraser Institute.

As a footnote, McKitrick and McIntyre played an indirect role in the “Climategate” episode, where emails between a handful of climate scientists associated with the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University in the UK were hacked and dumped publicly, then misinterpreted as a way to shed doubt on the integrity of the scientists. Many of the emails discussed efforts by McIntyre and his online army to get data from the climate scientists. The scientists included Ben Santer, Michael Mann, and Tom Wigley, long time former director of the CRU. Some were leery of doing so for fear it would be misinterpreted. Particularly egregious was the misinterpretation of the “trick” Mann used in analyzing data for the hockey stick graph. This trick did not refer to sleight of hand to deceived the audience, but rather a “trick of the trade” to graft modern instrumental temperature data with proxy temperature data such obtained from, e.g., tree rings. The science principals involved were all exonerated fully.

Fin

So, Steve Koonin is a big believer in recycling trash. He founded a biased panel intended to tilt the APS away from the scientific consensus on climate change towards shoddy science in 2014, and he brought back his buddies Judith Curry and John Christy to go at it again in 2025 at the behest of dig, drill and burn loving DOE Secretary Chris Wright. I hope the UCS lawsuit thoroughly embarrasses these folks in court.

Appendix: Fred Singer and the Climate Contrarian School at University of Virginia

The late S. Fred Singer holds a special place in the pathological scientific subfield of Climate Change Denialism. Singer died at 95 as an emeritus professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia. Singer, who did some interesting work in the early 1950s on the use of satellites for scientific observation, did more to inculcate public doubt in the validity of climate change threats than perhaps any other scientist.

Some of Singer’s greatest hits:

• When it became clear after massive Northern Hemisphere heat waves that climate change was entering the public consciousness in the late 1980s (a famous Senate hearing led by Al Gore and featuring NASA Scientist Robert Hansen gave the science wide exposure), Singer helped create the “Science and Environmental Policy Project” in 1990. Behind the innocuous name was an agenda to sow doubt on climate change with support, later revealed, from fossil fuel companies. If you look at the garbage they put out in the early 90s, you again see the passion for recycling trash among Koonin and crew: “Climate science is not ‘settled;’ it is both uncertain and incomplete. The available observations do not support the mathematical models that predict a substantial global warming and form the basis for a control policy on greenhouse (GH ) gas emissions. We need a more targeted program of climate research to settle major scientific problems.” “Global agriculture will likely benefit from climate warming and increased precipitation; increased CO2 leads to more rapid plant growth; increased nocturnal and winter warming leads to a longer growing season. Farmers can and will adjust to climate changes.”

• Singer fought back against hardening scientific consensus on human induced climate change by getting scientific statements put forward with lots of signatories, sometimes by trickery. One such statement was the “Heidelberg Appeal” on pseudoscience. Singer got a number of prominent scientists, including the late Nobel Laureate Phil Anderson, to sign onto a statement decrying the rise of pseudoscience. Singer then conflated climate science with pseudoscience AFTER he got the signatures, inflaming the wrath of the signatories. Phil Anderson told me years later in private communications that Singer was one of the most scurrilous actors in the modern scientific community.

• A separate set of signatures was acquired on the “Leipzig Declaration” on climate change in 1995 and again in 1997 to rebut the United Nations sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Reports, and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, a UN driven framework for reducing greenhouse gas emissions inspired by the successful 1989 Montreal Protocol for reducing the use of ozone depleting gases. The Declaration was pushed out with great fanfare to say “look, these major scientists disagree with the other scientists on climate change.” The hype fell apart quickly. Many of the signatories were TV weatherpeople with no scientific credentials. Several of the scientists, like Robert Balling and Pat Michaels (a research professor at Virginia in Singer’s department), were long time recipients of fossil fuel funding for their research.

• Singer helped to spearhead the creation of the NON-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). This kind of action was clearly a forerunner of current misinformation campaigns. Create an organization which shares 80% of the initials of the organization you want to discredit then put out contrarian and bullshit science statements. Each IPCC report is based on carefully reviewed consensus from hundreds of scientists. The NIPCC has about 20. Who funded the NIPCC? The “thinktank” Heartland Institute, which funded the SEPP, and which gets a huge amount of money from industry that stands to lose out with greenhouse gas reduction.

• Concomitant with his climate denial projects, Singer set out to cast doubt on the dangers of second hand smoke.

If there were a National Academy of Infamous Scientists, Singer would be high on my list.