There is a fundamental timing difference between the DOE report and the original endangerment finding report, or, say, the last IPCC report. The DOE report took maybe a month or two. The IPCC report takes two years, with named experts writing part of a chapter, maybe only a paragraph or two, each. Those submissions are then peer reviewed by hundreds of other scientists, none of which contributed to the original papers. Commenters receive responses detailing how their comments were addressed. Then the report is edited for clarity and continuity. Most importantly, the scientists reveal when they are confident, and what data supports the confidence level. They also reveal when they are not confident. That's scientific method. The endangerment finding went through a similar process. The DOE report only details areas where the DOE analysts point to the "low confidence" statements in the science behind the endangerment finding.
The Supreme Court is the "audience" for the DOE report. Trying to overturn the endangerment finding means reversing a legislative action - i.e., a constitutional issue. SCOTUS can only consider the official record. If the Administration has a "study" seemingly equivalent to the original endangerment finding, they have cover to reverse the EPA enforcement mechanism.
They could hand SCOTUS a note on a napkin and that would be sufficient information to make their decision. Alito and co. don't actually need any information, the decision is already made. This is just theater for the ones not paying attention.
Thank you for keeping up the fight and writing this. It's crazy how they are just denying reality but obviously not surprising. It's great that you are documenting the truth.
I skimmed the top page, and saw they have dragged in something about "range anxiety." Jeez Louise, people can come up with all sorts of odd scenarios that they might want to take a cross country trip every few years or so. They end up carrying around hundreds of kilograms more battery than they need. Those extra kilos just add inertial mass to every acceleration or hill climb.
Meanwhile, hurricane evacuees driving combustion vehicles know to tank up before they spend the next 10 hours in stop and go traffic, the engine running the whole time, needed or not.
First off, thank you to you and your colleagues for quickly rallying and developing a science based review of the DoE report. As with all other attempts at undermining time-tested norms and procedures, the best defense is to hew to the norms and procedures and provide a point of comparison for those pushing simple propaganda.
I am curious about your expectations here. Are you expecting the DoE to rally and issue an actual response that addresses some of your review comments? It seems to me they've accomplished their only objective (issuing a report that proves there is nothing to see here) and I'd be surprised if they want to get into the trenches and actually defend any of their positions.
That certainly might be correct. However, I want to keep as much pressure on them to reply as I can. And, if they don’t respond, then I want it to be clear that they have no interest in debating.
Good comment, Mr. Love, and good question. Prof. Dessler has spoken for himself, with professional concision. Now Ima wax verbose again. I, for one, am neither a professional scientist nor any kind of politician, and I'm baffled and dismayed by the urgent need for scientists to defend their intersubjectively alarming conclusions to the uncomprehending public, so it can take appropriate collective action. AFAICT, science's perceived epistemic authority utterly depends on its strict political neutrality, enforced by the competitive mutual skepticism, and absence of hierarchy, among scientists who review each other's work for publication in their venues of record. Prof. Dessler is in a list of 85+ co-authors on a 400+ page review of the DOE report. A single data point: another co-author, tropical cyclone expert and NAS member Kerry Emanuel, voted Republican from 1973 until 2012, but then switched his registration to Independent when he encountered the transparent but dogged denialism of GOP leaders face to face (https://cs3.mit.edu/about-us/personnel/emanuel-kerry/news-media?page=3).
Yet it's also scientists themselves, singly and collectively, who are under flagrantly partisan attack in this shameful episode in my country's history. IMHO it would take not only strong peer discipline, but superhuman self-discipline, to keep the big picture in mind, and not deploy every available rhetorical weapon in a forlorn hope! Only by delegating their individual epistemic authority, and their personal anger and indignation, to a widely respected, self-governing professional body can scientific peers hope to counter the purely political might of the Republican Party and its plutocratic backers.
All that said, I'm not under the same constraint as Prof. Dessler and his illustrious peers! I can't claim to be their peer myself, but as long as I don't make any claims here beyond what scientific metaliteracy tells me, then I can confidently offer summary rebuttal to simple-minded revenant denialism, cite genuine experts when needed, and peevishly call out deception when I spot it. Ain't Freeze Peach (h/t Gavin Schmidt) grand?
I hear you. You're frustrated and angry with the whole process. I get it. From one professional to another, and coming from a more collegial tone, perhaps now you may be interested in joining a climate debate? Maybe get together 5 climate scientists to debate the CGW 5? I was hoping you might be more open to the idea now that their is a chance the endangerment finding may be reversed? I think it would be highly interesting to get both sides together in the same room. Just a thought.
It's as if Scott is cosplaying some ancient tribal champion, a mighty warrior ready to decide a territorial dispute by single combat. *Mano-a-mano*, winner take all! He issued his "debate me" challenge on RealClimate a couple of days ago (https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/09/doe-cwg-report-moot/#comment-839231). Hilarity ensued, mostly at the notion that this camp-follower, armed with no more than a shepherd's sling, might defeat 200 years of climate science by smiting a trained, disciplined expert like Prof. Dessler on the forehead!
And who's the audience for this "debate"? The people who mob town councils and warn about electricity from solar arrays damaging the nearby crops? Taylor Swift fans? Oil company investors? Lord Monckton (who has a cure for AIDS, you know)?
NS, don't you think Andrew would now be more open to debating when it looks like the momentum is going the other way? I mean, by avoiding a debate, the optics may not look good. People may ask that if his evidence is so solid, so certain, so sure, then a debate would be a great way to highlight that certainty. There are very simple ways to frame the debate so nobody can gish gallop. Moderators (or the audience) can stop a gish gallop, and every claim has to be backed up, right then and there, with the corresponding scientific reference for all to see. If we eliminate the gish gallop, then it should be a great way to showcase your scientific certainty.
The scientific case has already been made, and part of the problem we had for decades was news programs bringing on one scientist against one professional lobbyist or doubt-slinger, as if there were two "sides" to a complex reality.
What would be the topic for the debate? The long-known physics of the greenhouse effect? Whether glacier melt is accelerating? Whether the AMOC is slowing down? Whether coral reef bleaching events are more frequent? Whether →the rate of change← makes all the difference? Why it shouldn't matter at all because the surface of the planet was once molten rock?
They do this for everything. "We asked this obviously mentally unwell person on the street what they think about this obviously common sense law, and they said it's bullshit. So clearly the law is controversial".
If you never intend on even trying to find the truth, you can just do that, blast it on every newspaper and evening show (since you own them all), then do whatever you want. We're on the verge of a mass extinction and I'm so tired of people acting like these are two equal sides arguing in good faith.
I don't see how that would help with anything. Engaging in a "debate" over this after already providing an extensive opinion (which was ignored) will only further legitimize their claims that the endangerment finding is debatable.
And fossil fuel’s close industry partner, big pharma, also used tactics such as banning scientists from press conferences and discrediting and destroying dissenters when politicians and press officers announced, with no evidence at all, that the probable cause of ‘AIDS’ was ‘HIV’.
Diagnosis of AIDS is so far removed from the scientific method as to defy belief.
This rickety public policy and it's harmful measures such as AZT, along with the extreme 'covid' measures and suppression of debate over them has been an extremely effective method of discrediting all science and all scientists (unless saying what they want to hear- that there's no need to worry) in the public's mind. And Cook and Oreskes have been highlighted as being guilty of supporting the flimsy evidence on vaccination etc and thus discredit climate science. Doing Project 2025's work for them.
Yes, I most certainly can. You might have been aware of the doubt expressed by South Africa’s President Mbeki- here’s the extremely biased way that Wikipedia frames it-’In south Africa ‘HIV/Aids denialism had a significant impact on public health policy from 1999 to 2008, during the presidency of Thabo Mbeki who criticized the ‘scientific consensus’ that HIV is the cause of AIDS beginning shortly after his election to the presidency. In 2000, he organized a Presidential Advisory Panel regarding HIV/AIDS including several scientists who denied that HIV caused AIDS.
In the following eight years of his presidency, Mbeki continued to express sympathy for HIV/AIDS denialism, and instituted policies 'denying’ drugs to AIDS patients. The Mbeki government even withdrew support from clinics that started using (toxic) AZT to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV. He also restricted the use of a pharmaceutical company's ‘donated’ (not- $billions worth of tax breaks) supply of a drug that (allegedly) helps keep newborns from contracting HIV.’
AI says ‘April. On April 20, 2000, Mbeki sent a five-page letter to Bill Clinton in which he describes AIDS as a "uniquely African catastrophe", and compared the "persecution" of HIV/AIDS denialists to the treatment of black people in South Africa during the apartheid era.’
Always follow the money- to fossil fuels, animal ag or pharma. They are all connected.
Look, I'm not educated enough on the topic to properly examine your arguments, but it "smells" bad. It feels exactly like the DOE's report feels in the face of the IPCC.
I can tell you mean well, and thank you for that. I'm well aware of the dark sides of the healthcare industry. But in my experience, evil is a lot more banal and obvious than this. Thousands of scientists have worked on understanding and treating HIV and there's no way most of them are rich, and that all of them are still hiding the truth to this day. It's probably much simpler than that.
I would also suggest that you've been conditioned by what and who you follow to think that HIV/AIDS denialism is the same as climate denialism. This is the way they've been framed for one side- the 'left', climate scientists and environmentalists. The way it's been framed for the 'right', medical freedom and 'covid' dissenters is that politicians and scientists are wrong on the 'covid' measures therefore they are wrong on climate.
I agree they are both denying something. But there the similarity ends. Follow the money and white western colonialism.
The powers that be have interests in US based fossil fuels, animal ag and pharma, all of which have enormous lobbying power and skill at propaganda. All of which want to maintain white western full spectrum dominance of the globe by keeping people burning fossil fuels, eating animal products, slaving in gold and diamonds in Africa on their behalf and taking $trillions worth of drugs and pharmaceuticals that they don't need and which makes them ill.
Thanks for your engagement though Yasen- it's a step up from most!
If we all keep our minds open, we're all going to fair a lot better.
No, the people working on HIV are not rich. They have just not thought through what they are actually working on. They have been fooled. They work on antibodies without remembering this is supposed to mean immunity. They don’t work on vaccines for HIV because there are so many, millions in fact, genomes for it uploaded to gene bank. They don’t think through that these can’t possibly be from the same entity. They are not hiding the truth. They just get a job and a wage for not engaging their thinking capacity too deeply.
Ah, so they're all just a bit dumb. Implausible. With how many HIV-positive people have you had unprotected sex with no prep? Would you do it to prove the point? I'm sure someone would, wanna guess what happened to them?
Western colonialism never ended, slavery is alive and well, genocide is not only "Never again", but "We'll destroy anyone who gets in our way". This is all very obvious for someone who takes a few months to deprogram from the propaganda and look at some good sources. And despite of me being engaged in radical communities for a while now,
I've never heard of HIV denialism. So either it's the world's best kept secret, or it's simply the truth, and someone lied to you.
I didn’t say that ‘they’ ie researchers were dumb, and I was one of them for many years working in pathology, I said they hadn’t looked into it, just accepted the dogma and what they’d been taught and told.
Interesting you should say that about unprotected sex- there is zero evidence of transmission via intercourse of HIV positiveness (ie those with one or more protein or antibody that’s been found in healthy people, pregnant people and those with other non AIDS symptoms) to HIV negative people either by vaginal or anal sex. The only increase in risk of testing positive (for a protein never shown to be from an entity) is from increased frequency of passive anal sex. So while I would sleep with someone who was “HIV” positive if they were healthy and clean I wouldn’t receive frequent anal sex to prove a point.
There is a fundamental timing difference between the DOE report and the original endangerment finding report, or, say, the last IPCC report. The DOE report took maybe a month or two. The IPCC report takes two years, with named experts writing part of a chapter, maybe only a paragraph or two, each. Those submissions are then peer reviewed by hundreds of other scientists, none of which contributed to the original papers. Commenters receive responses detailing how their comments were addressed. Then the report is edited for clarity and continuity. Most importantly, the scientists reveal when they are confident, and what data supports the confidence level. They also reveal when they are not confident. That's scientific method. The endangerment finding went through a similar process. The DOE report only details areas where the DOE analysts point to the "low confidence" statements in the science behind the endangerment finding.
The Supreme Court is the "audience" for the DOE report. Trying to overturn the endangerment finding means reversing a legislative action - i.e., a constitutional issue. SCOTUS can only consider the official record. If the Administration has a "study" seemingly equivalent to the original endangerment finding, they have cover to reverse the EPA enforcement mechanism.
They could hand SCOTUS a note on a napkin and that would be sufficient information to make their decision. Alito and co. don't actually need any information, the decision is already made. This is just theater for the ones not paying attention.
I'm nearly certain you're right, but I've been surprised by SCOTUS before.
Thank you for keeping up the fight and writing this. It's crazy how they are just denying reality but obviously not surprising. It's great that you are documenting the truth.
Here is the docket for the rule to overturn our climate change rules. Please comment! Closes 9/22.
https://www.regulations.gov/docket/EPA-HQ-OAR-2025-0194
Strong agree. If you feel strongly about climate policy, leave a comment.
I skimmed the top page, and saw they have dragged in something about "range anxiety." Jeez Louise, people can come up with all sorts of odd scenarios that they might want to take a cross country trip every few years or so. They end up carrying around hundreds of kilograms more battery than they need. Those extra kilos just add inertial mass to every acceleration or hill climb.
Meanwhile, hurricane evacuees driving combustion vehicles know to tank up before they spend the next 10 hours in stop and go traffic, the engine running the whole time, needed or not.
/rant
Andrew:
First off, thank you to you and your colleagues for quickly rallying and developing a science based review of the DoE report. As with all other attempts at undermining time-tested norms and procedures, the best defense is to hew to the norms and procedures and provide a point of comparison for those pushing simple propaganda.
I am curious about your expectations here. Are you expecting the DoE to rally and issue an actual response that addresses some of your review comments? It seems to me they've accomplished their only objective (issuing a report that proves there is nothing to see here) and I'd be surprised if they want to get into the trenches and actually defend any of their positions.
That certainly might be correct. However, I want to keep as much pressure on them to reply as I can. And, if they don’t respond, then I want it to be clear that they have no interest in debating.
Good comment, Mr. Love, and good question. Prof. Dessler has spoken for himself, with professional concision. Now Ima wax verbose again. I, for one, am neither a professional scientist nor any kind of politician, and I'm baffled and dismayed by the urgent need for scientists to defend their intersubjectively alarming conclusions to the uncomprehending public, so it can take appropriate collective action. AFAICT, science's perceived epistemic authority utterly depends on its strict political neutrality, enforced by the competitive mutual skepticism, and absence of hierarchy, among scientists who review each other's work for publication in their venues of record. Prof. Dessler is in a list of 85+ co-authors on a 400+ page review of the DOE report. A single data point: another co-author, tropical cyclone expert and NAS member Kerry Emanuel, voted Republican from 1973 until 2012, but then switched his registration to Independent when he encountered the transparent but dogged denialism of GOP leaders face to face (https://cs3.mit.edu/about-us/personnel/emanuel-kerry/news-media?page=3).
Yet it's also scientists themselves, singly and collectively, who are under flagrantly partisan attack in this shameful episode in my country's history. IMHO it would take not only strong peer discipline, but superhuman self-discipline, to keep the big picture in mind, and not deploy every available rhetorical weapon in a forlorn hope! Only by delegating their individual epistemic authority, and their personal anger and indignation, to a widely respected, self-governing professional body can scientific peers hope to counter the purely political might of the Republican Party and its plutocratic backers.
All that said, I'm not under the same constraint as Prof. Dessler and his illustrious peers! I can't claim to be their peer myself, but as long as I don't make any claims here beyond what scientific metaliteracy tells me, then I can confidently offer summary rebuttal to simple-minded revenant denialism, cite genuine experts when needed, and peevishly call out deception when I spot it. Ain't Freeze Peach (h/t Gavin Schmidt) grand?
Hi Andrew,
I hear you. You're frustrated and angry with the whole process. I get it. From one professional to another, and coming from a more collegial tone, perhaps now you may be interested in joining a climate debate? Maybe get together 5 climate scientists to debate the CGW 5? I was hoping you might be more open to the idea now that their is a chance the endangerment finding may be reversed? I think it would be highly interesting to get both sides together in the same room. Just a thought.
ATTENTION READERS: Never, ever, get into an oral debate on a scientific topic. There is no way to cogently respond to a Gish Gallop.
It's as if Scott is cosplaying some ancient tribal champion, a mighty warrior ready to decide a territorial dispute by single combat. *Mano-a-mano*, winner take all! He issued his "debate me" challenge on RealClimate a couple of days ago (https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/09/doe-cwg-report-moot/#comment-839231). Hilarity ensued, mostly at the notion that this camp-follower, armed with no more than a shepherd's sling, might defeat 200 years of climate science by smiting a trained, disciplined expert like Prof. Dessler on the forehead!
*Eppur si riscalda* [h/t Trevor Ridgway].
And who's the audience for this "debate"? The people who mob town councils and warn about electricity from solar arrays damaging the nearby crops? Taylor Swift fans? Oil company investors? Lord Monckton (who has a cure for AIDS, you know)?
NS, don't you think Andrew would now be more open to debating when it looks like the momentum is going the other way? I mean, by avoiding a debate, the optics may not look good. People may ask that if his evidence is so solid, so certain, so sure, then a debate would be a great way to highlight that certainty. There are very simple ways to frame the debate so nobody can gish gallop. Moderators (or the audience) can stop a gish gallop, and every claim has to be backed up, right then and there, with the corresponding scientific reference for all to see. If we eliminate the gish gallop, then it should be a great way to showcase your scientific certainty.
The scientific case has already been made, and part of the problem we had for decades was news programs bringing on one scientist against one professional lobbyist or doubt-slinger, as if there were two "sides" to a complex reality.
What would be the topic for the debate? The long-known physics of the greenhouse effect? Whether glacier melt is accelerating? Whether the AMOC is slowing down? Whether coral reef bleaching events are more frequent? Whether →the rate of change← makes all the difference? Why it shouldn't matter at all because the surface of the planet was once molten rock?
They do this for everything. "We asked this obviously mentally unwell person on the street what they think about this obviously common sense law, and they said it's bullshit. So clearly the law is controversial".
If you never intend on even trying to find the truth, you can just do that, blast it on every newspaper and evening show (since you own them all), then do whatever you want. We're on the verge of a mass extinction and I'm so tired of people acting like these are two equal sides arguing in good faith.
I don't see how that would help with anything. Engaging in a "debate" over this after already providing an extensive opinion (which was ignored) will only further legitimize their claims that the endangerment finding is debatable.
Denying allow them to accumulate profits. For what?
And fossil fuel’s close industry partner, big pharma, also used tactics such as banning scientists from press conferences and discrediting and destroying dissenters when politicians and press officers announced, with no evidence at all, that the probable cause of ‘AIDS’ was ‘HIV’.
Diagnosis of AIDS is so far removed from the scientific method as to defy belief.
https://jowaller.substack.com/p/the-importance-of-intellectual-freedom
This rickety public policy and it's harmful measures such as AZT, along with the extreme 'covid' measures and suppression of debate over them has been an extremely effective method of discrediting all science and all scientists (unless saying what they want to hear- that there's no need to worry) in the public's mind. And Cook and Oreskes have been highlighted as being guilty of supporting the flimsy evidence on vaccination etc and thus discredit climate science. Doing Project 2025's work for them.
Can you elaborate on the AIDS stuff? I've never heard of any doubt on this topic.
Yes, I most certainly can. You might have been aware of the doubt expressed by South Africa’s President Mbeki- here’s the extremely biased way that Wikipedia frames it-’In south Africa ‘HIV/Aids denialism had a significant impact on public health policy from 1999 to 2008, during the presidency of Thabo Mbeki who criticized the ‘scientific consensus’ that HIV is the cause of AIDS beginning shortly after his election to the presidency. In 2000, he organized a Presidential Advisory Panel regarding HIV/AIDS including several scientists who denied that HIV caused AIDS.
In the following eight years of his presidency, Mbeki continued to express sympathy for HIV/AIDS denialism, and instituted policies 'denying’ drugs to AIDS patients. The Mbeki government even withdrew support from clinics that started using (toxic) AZT to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV. He also restricted the use of a pharmaceutical company's ‘donated’ (not- $billions worth of tax breaks) supply of a drug that (allegedly) helps keep newborns from contracting HIV.’
AI says ‘April. On April 20, 2000, Mbeki sent a five-page letter to Bill Clinton in which he describes AIDS as a "uniquely African catastrophe", and compared the "persecution" of HIV/AIDS denialists to the treatment of black people in South Africa during the apartheid era.’
Always follow the money- to fossil fuels, animal ag or pharma. They are all connected.
As regards the scientific evidence I present its feebleness here- I look forward to engaging with you on it. https://jowaller.substack.com/p/the-importance-of-intellectual-freedom
Look, I'm not educated enough on the topic to properly examine your arguments, but it "smells" bad. It feels exactly like the DOE's report feels in the face of the IPCC.
I can tell you mean well, and thank you for that. I'm well aware of the dark sides of the healthcare industry. But in my experience, evil is a lot more banal and obvious than this. Thousands of scientists have worked on understanding and treating HIV and there's no way most of them are rich, and that all of them are still hiding the truth to this day. It's probably much simpler than that.
I would also suggest that you've been conditioned by what and who you follow to think that HIV/AIDS denialism is the same as climate denialism. This is the way they've been framed for one side- the 'left', climate scientists and environmentalists. The way it's been framed for the 'right', medical freedom and 'covid' dissenters is that politicians and scientists are wrong on the 'covid' measures therefore they are wrong on climate.
I agree they are both denying something. But there the similarity ends. Follow the money and white western colonialism.
The powers that be have interests in US based fossil fuels, animal ag and pharma, all of which have enormous lobbying power and skill at propaganda. All of which want to maintain white western full spectrum dominance of the globe by keeping people burning fossil fuels, eating animal products, slaving in gold and diamonds in Africa on their behalf and taking $trillions worth of drugs and pharmaceuticals that they don't need and which makes them ill.
Thanks for your engagement though Yasen- it's a step up from most!
If we all keep our minds open, we're all going to fair a lot better.
No, the people working on HIV are not rich. They have just not thought through what they are actually working on. They have been fooled. They work on antibodies without remembering this is supposed to mean immunity. They don’t work on vaccines for HIV because there are so many, millions in fact, genomes for it uploaded to gene bank. They don’t think through that these can’t possibly be from the same entity. They are not hiding the truth. They just get a job and a wage for not engaging their thinking capacity too deeply.
Ah, so they're all just a bit dumb. Implausible. With how many HIV-positive people have you had unprotected sex with no prep? Would you do it to prove the point? I'm sure someone would, wanna guess what happened to them?
Western colonialism never ended, slavery is alive and well, genocide is not only "Never again", but "We'll destroy anyone who gets in our way". This is all very obvious for someone who takes a few months to deprogram from the propaganda and look at some good sources. And despite of me being engaged in radical communities for a while now,
I've never heard of HIV denialism. So either it's the world's best kept secret, or it's simply the truth, and someone lied to you.
Someone lied to me about what the democratically elected president of South Africa from 1999 to 2008 said?
I didn’t say that ‘they’ ie researchers were dumb, and I was one of them for many years working in pathology, I said they hadn’t looked into it, just accepted the dogma and what they’d been taught and told.
Interesting you should say that about unprotected sex- there is zero evidence of transmission via intercourse of HIV positiveness (ie those with one or more protein or antibody that’s been found in healthy people, pregnant people and those with other non AIDS symptoms) to HIV negative people either by vaginal or anal sex. The only increase in risk of testing positive (for a protein never shown to be from an entity) is from increased frequency of passive anal sex. So while I would sleep with someone who was “HIV” positive if they were healthy and clean I wouldn’t receive frequent anal sex to prove a point.
I do enjoy some schadenfreude knowing Chris Wright's stock in Liberty Energy has lost half its value since January.