DOE Climate Assessment Report: Feedback
Posted on September 2, 2025 by curryja
by Judith Curry
A month has passed since the DOE climate assessment report was published. It’s time to reflect on what we might learn from the responses to this Report. Of particular relevance is the report that was issued earlier today, led by Andrew Dessler.
Public comments
The public comment portal for the DOE Report was open for 30 days, and closes on Sept 2 (today). So far there are >2300 comments submitted, with several hundred currently visible on the Federal Register site. The comments are being scrubbed for obscenities, etc. I tried reading through the comments, the portal is awkward (each comment has to be clicked on separately, unlike this blog post). Most of the comments that I’ve looked at are non-substantive cheerleading, attacks or general posturing. It will take time to go through all of these to separate an expected small amount of wheat from the large amount of chaff.
Carbon Brief
One of the early criticisms was that the DOE Report “mis-cited” a paper by Zeke Hausfather by reproducing a diagram from one of his papers, while failing to mention some of the broader points made in his paper (sorry Zeke, that’s not how it works).
This led to Carbon Brief emailing all of the authors cited in the report (plus ~100 other scientists) asking whether the Report uses their work to make misleading or false statements. They received 100 comments from 56 scientists (one scientist contributed about 1/3 of the comments on less than 2 pages of text). The published comments [link] were formatted in a useful way, sorted by chapter/page number and in a single file that is searchable. Several of the comments were useful (including references we hadn’t considered), and worth considering in a revised report. There were many comments on global greening and solar variations. Nearly all the comments were labeled as “misleading”; the factual errors mostly related to misspelling of an author’s name or other mis-citation of a reference.
While I am not in favor of having the media mediate this, and Carbon Brief is arguably far from objective, I appreciate the effort that CB made on compiling this and the effort that individual scientists made to respond.
AMS statement
The American Meteorological Society (AMS) has issued a statement Five foundational flaws in the Department of Energy’s 2025 climate report. This statement has been adopted by the Executive Committee of the AMS Council, I assume this was also written by this Committee. Here is the membership of the Executive Committee [link]. If you cannot recognize any of these names as climate scientists, you would be correct. The statement starts with:
“Here we identify five foundational flaws in the Department of Energy’s (DoE’s) 2025 Climate Synthesis reports. Each of these flaws, alone, places the report at odds with scientific principles and practices. “
Here are the five “flaws”:
Lack of breadth across scientific fields
Lack of depth within scientific fields and specific topics
The DoE Report is based on an unrepresentative group of subject matter experts
TheDoE Report selectively emphasizes a small set of unrepresentative findings, particularly those that might appear beneficial on superficial examination.
The DoE Report extrapolates from a limited subset of findings to reach conclusions that do not follow from comprehensive consideration of the scientific evidence.
These “flaws” and allegations of lack of representativeness are political considerations, not scientific principles or practices. Ironically, the following statements are made in alleged support of their points, when in fact these statements emphasize the need for something like the DOE Report:
https://judithcurry.com/2025/09/02/doe-climate-assessment-report-feedback/
