Climate scientists are declaring victory after the Trump administration dissolved a working group of five well-known climate contrarians that authored a recent federal report 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 lawsuit 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 personal blog post 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 the controversial report 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 coordinated their efforts – 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 CNN interview last month, 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 suggested in an interview 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.
CNN’s Andrew Freedman contributed to this report.
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