OBITUARY: The DOE Climate Working Group Report, 2025–2026

it died in a footnote

Last year, the Dept. of Energy put out a climate report from a group known as the Climate Working Group. This Report was designed to cast doubt on climate science in order to advance their efforts to rescind the EPA’s Endangerment Finding. I had seen that the report was having some serious health problems and later I saw an obituary for the Report. I thought readers of The Climate Brink would appreciate reading it. From legacy.com:

It is with heavy hearts that we announce the passing of the DOE Climate Working Group (CWG) Report.

A picture of the decedent that really captures it’s fun and carefree personality.

The CWG Report’s death was announced in footnote 8 of the EPA’s Endangerment Finding rollback:

The EPA pulled the plug

The CWG Report was, in the end, a footnote in a footnote.

The Report was born in July 2025 amid great fanfare. Its authors proclaimed it to be the opening salvo of a new debate over climate science—a bold reassessment that would finally challenge the so-called consensus.

That did not last long.

The report was mortally wounded almost immediately when the scientific community and general public submitted tens of thousands of comments documenting how the report was not a scientific assessment but pseudo-scientific propaganda.

Critics noted that the report violated nearly every conceivable norm of scientific practice—in its cherry-picking of evidence, its misrepresentation of the literature, and its abandonment of the standards of scientific assessment. These wounds proved too much for the CWG Report to overcome.

The Report was preceded in death by the Climate Working Group itself, which the DOE disbanded in September 2025 after losing a lawsuit over the unlawful process used to produce the Report.

NY Times

The report is survived by grieving former members of the Climate Working Group, who remain defiant. They have vowed to respond to the scientific criticisms of their report but have so far done nothing. Instead, they simply continue to repeat the discredited claims of their deceased report as though critiques were never made.

The report was also preceded in death by its close companion, the idea of a “red team-blue team debate” over climate science. This concept had long claimed that climate science had never been truly stress-tested and that, if only the right skeptics were given the opportunity to make their best case, the edifice would crack.

it seemed like a good idea at the time

The DOE gave them that opportunity. The team the DOE assembled was, by any reasonable measure, the cream of the crop of climate skepticism. But the resulting critique of climate science was so thin, so reliant on misrepresentation, and so quickly dismantled that it actually proves how robust climate science is.

After all, if there were a legitimate case against climate science, these authors would make it. That they can’t is deeply revealing.

But even though the CWG Report is gone, it will never truly leave us. It will continue to be cited in venues where a discredited report is welcome: blogs, Twitter, op-eds, and the occasional congressional hearing.

Its only appearance in the peer-reviewed literature will be in papers documenting its errors:

the CWG Report’s only appearance in the peer-reviewed literature is as a punching bag

And it will never see the inside of a courtroom—which is precisely why the EPA pulled the plug in footnote eight rather than stake a legal defense on it.

In lieu of flowers, the scientific community requests that you forget the Report ever existed.

Wow, that was beautiful.

climategate 2

As part of the litigation over the actions of the Climate Working Group, the emails between the CWG group members have been released (get them here). I will refer to them as “climategate 2”. If you do too, we can make climategate 2 a thing.

There’s a lot of important things in the climategate 2 email dump. For example, here’s a graphic that I put together for a “spot the difference” contest:

If you answered “they’re using a different font but are otherwise the same”, you are correct!

As I read the climategate 2 emails, one thing really stood out to me. Science works because scientists talk to each other all the time. They attend conferences, email each other, serve on committees, and have informal conversations with colleagues down the hall.

Reading through the CWG emails, it is clear that the CWG members don’t talk enough (or at all) to the scientific community. In fact, I haven’t seen any of them at a scientific meeting in at least 15 years. If they did, they could have headed off a large number of errors in the Report.

Consider what happens at a typical scientific meeting. At the coffee break, you tell a colleague your latest idea. If it’s good, they’ll tell you so and may suggest ways to strengthen it. But equally valuable is when they tell you your idea is dumb (happens to me more often that you’d think). You might not believe the first person who says so. But when a second person says the same thing, and then a third, you start to listen.

This informal feedback process is a key one in science. It tells you what the rest of the field thinks and what you’d need to do to convince them. It also stops a lot of bad ideas from wasting the community’s time.

But the CWG authors are not getting this key feedback. As a result, they seem genuinely unaware of what the scientific community thinks. It sometimes feels like the report was written in 2013 and then frozen, only to be unthawed in 2025.

In particular, they appear to believe that public concern about climate change is manufactured by a small number of extremists—and that the broader scientific community is quietly sympathetic to their views.

You can see this in their email discussion of whether to get their report peer reviewed¹. At one point, they list people they think would be open to their arguments:

if you’re a reporter/substacker interested in a story, you should contact these people and ask what they think of the CWG Report

I know most of these people and talked to several of them about the CWG report. None thought the Report had any merit. Some even went on the record against the Report—e.g., Kerry Emanuel was an author on our rebuttal of the CWG Report and also wrote a realclimate post dissecting their arguments over climate’s effects on hurricanes. Graeme Stephens was an author of the NASEM report that disputed the central claims of the Report.

People were legitimately shocked that the CWG thought this list would support their sloppy and half-baked science².

this is the correct take

The former CWG members need to start talking to the rest of the scientific community. They should go to a scientific conference and present their work there. Then they should publish their work in the peer-reviewed literature. After all, that’s what the scientists debunking the CWG’s work are doing. And it’s what you’d do if you legitimately wanted to debate the science.

The fact that they will never never never do those things shows that, in their heart, they have zero interest in climate science.

other things to read

A very nice post from the Earthview substack about why libertarians should love solar energy. That they don’t suggests they’re actually more motivated by getting $$$ from fossil fuel interests.

One of our frequent commenters, Just Dean, has a new substack that looks good. I particularly like this post about what paleoclimate variations tell us about future warming.

You should subscribe to both of these!

1. They ultimately decided not to get it peer reviewed.

2. Obviously, Pielke Jr. is an exception. He may have had some minor quibbles with the Report but the CWG authors were likely correct that he would have been broadly supportive, which is why they would have to “sneak him in”.