Science is Not Team Sport
The blue team response to DOE CWG shows that climate assessment is broken
Roger Pielke Jr.
Sep 02, 2025
This is not how scientific assessment should be done
The Blue team has responded to the report of the Department of Energy’s Climate Working Group (DOE CWG) — the Red team. Together, the two reports show how not to do scientific assessment.
Led by Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M and Robert Kopp of Rutgers, the report (DK25) includes contributions from 85 contributors (mostly academics from various disciplines) and spans 459 pages. The authors should be commended for working fast to prepare their substantive response. Science is better when discussion and debate take place.1
Dessler, who calls the DOE report “bullshit,” pulls no punches in asserting that there is absolutely nothing that is scientifically accurate in the DOE CWG report:
To be clear, the DOE report raises no “interesting questions” overlooked by the scientific community, highlights no ignored research gaps, and brings no fresh perspective. Instead, it’s a rats’ nest of bad arguments.
To the extent that there are legitimate scientific arguments in there, those have already been rejected by the scientific community. But scientific arguments are rare in the DOE report; rather, it’s mainly selective misquoting of the scientific literature (cherry picking), omission of contrary results from the scientific literature, and simple errors due to a lack of understanding of the science.
This framing has been adopted by the media, as you can see in the headlines below characterizing the critique upon its release this morning.
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/science-is-not-team-sport
