The merchants of doubt are back

But this time, it's the U.S. government pushing doubt

If you don’t follow climate policy closely, you may not know that the Trump administration is launching an effort to overturn one of the most fundamental pillars of American climate policy: the scientific finding that carbon dioxide endangers human health and welfare (the so-called “Endangerment Finding”). If successful, this move could unravel virtually every U.S. climate regulation on the books, from car emissions standards to power plant rules.

To support this effort, the Department of Energy hand-selected five climate contrarians who dispute mainstream science to write a report, which ended up saying exactly what you would expect it to say: climate science is too uncertain to justify policies to limit warming.

I’m guessing that the goal here is very much like what the tobacco companies did in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Their goal was not to win the debate that cigarettes were safe — they clearly understood they could not — but to muddy the waters enough to head off regulations on their business.

Thus, the DOE report is designed to do exactly the same thing: muddy the waters enough that the government can claim there’s too much uncertainty to regulate carbon dioxide.

I am part of a group of 85+ scientists who have submitted a 400+ page comment to the DOE critiquing their report. You can find a link to the comment and our press release here. If you are a reporter, science communicator, podcaster, etc., who wants an interview, please email us.

You can find bios for the author team here. It is a humbling group to be a part of, full of brilliant and high-achieving individuals, many of whom I have admired for years. The team’s ranks include six members of the National Academy of Sciences, two Fellows of the Royal Society, at least two MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship recipients, and numerous Fellows of the American Geophysical Union, American Meteorological Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Reinforcing their prominence in the field, many of these authors also wrote papers that were (mis)cited by the DOE report

my personal perspective

Before I talk about our comment, let me give you my personal perspective. I did not go into science to make money, nor did I go in to push a “liberal agenda”. I went into science because I love science. I love the rigor, I love the discipline, I love looking at data and seeing how the world operates. Most importantly, I respect science.

When I read the DOE report, I saw a document that does not respect science. In fact, I saw a document that makes a mockery of science. And I thought to myself, I cannot let this go without a response. So that’s why I’ve spent a huge amount of time over the last month (when I should have been working on my classes for the fall semester) putting this comment together.

a show trial for climate science

Like any good Soviet trial, the outcome of this exercise by the Dept. of Energy is already known: climate science will be judged too uncertain to justify the endangerment finding.

Once you understand that, everything about the DOE report makes total sense. You understand why the five contrarian authors were selected: The only way to get this report was to pick these authors. If any other writing team had been chosen, the report would have been 180° different.

And you understand why it went through no serious peer review before release: the report would not have survived any legitimate peer review.

As my colleague Kerry Emanuel, arguably the world’s foremost authority on hurricanes physics, succinctly puts it:

My reading of the report uncovered numerous errors of commission and omission, all of which slant toward a conclusion that human-caused climate change poses no serious risks. It seems to work backward from a desired outcome.

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.

the scale problem

Let’s compare the IPCC and DOE reports:

where IPCC WG1 = the Sixth Assessment Report working group 1 report and WG1+WG2 = the sum of working group 1 and 2¹.

The comparison reveals that the DOE report ignores 99% of the scientific literature reviewed by the IPCC². This isn't surprising—five authors simply cannot read and analyze 24,000 papers in the scientific literature. Comprehensive analysis of this scale requires thousands of contributors, as the IPCC employs. It also requires a much longer time frame to write the text than the DOE authors apparently had.

It would be reasonable to ask yourself how you can have a meaningful discussion of any topic in science if you’re ignoring nearly all of the scientific literature on that topic.

And it’s not just that the authors don’t reference the literature — it seems clear that they have not read it. For example, Section 8.5 of the DOE report, “Attribution of Climate Impact Drivers”, is an entire section built on the authors not understanding what a climate impact-driver (CID) is.

The claims made in Section 8.5 are well-worn denier tropes (e.g, Table 12.12 shows humans aren’t affecting extreme weather!) based on this same misunderstanding. It seems likely that the authors of the report simply read a few denier blogs, thought to themselves, “Hey, this sounds like a good argument,” and copied it into their report.

Sadly, this is not the only example, although it’s among the most egregious. But it’s emblematic that these authors wrote on things that are far outside their knowledge base, leading to a sloppy report full of errors.

Again, this is also why the IPCC has thousands of authors, to ensure that every sentence written in an IPCC report is written by an expert team with deep and fundamental knowledge of the topic.

If you want to understand the problem with Section 8.5 in more detail, read that section of the DOE report and then read our comment (starting on page 312).

conclusions

It appears to me that the DOE is mirroring the tactics chronicled in Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s book Merchants of Doubt. For decades, industries facing regulation have employed the same playbook: hire contrarian experts, selectively cite favorable research, ignore contrary evidence, and claim that mainstream science is too uncertain to justify action.

We see this strategy deployed throughout the DOE report—from the hand-picked authorship team to the systematic omission of 99% of scientific literature to cherry picking favorable scientific papers and omitting unfavorable ones. Like their predecessors in the tobacco debates, these authors work backward from a predetermined conclusion rather than forward from the evidence.

I see no way that the report can be meaningfully revised while preserving its central (bogus) claim of excessive uncertainty. I therefore predict that the DOE will not actually revise this. Instead, they will declare victory and announce that their report was soooooo successful that they’re moving to the next stage of the “debate”, which will be a venue where scientific standards are even weaker — e.g., public debates, blogs, social media exchanges. These are venues where rules of evidence are weak and advocates can use rhetorical techniques³ that would never fly in the scientific community to spread uncertainty among the general public.

The history of cigarettes shows that such tactics can delay policy action for decades, but they cannot indefinitely postpone scientific reality from emerging. The only real question is how much damage the delay causes.

You can find a link to our comment here.

I'd be grateful if you could hit the like button ❤️ below! It helps more people discover these ideas and lets me know what's connecting with readers.

other stuff

On The Trade Off, Ryan Katz-Rosene has two great posts about climate change and wildfires. They are here and here. Check ‘em out and subscribe!

1. The number of authors was estimated using values of 80 citations per chapter, the number of citations is 2,000 per chapter. This is a back-of-the-envelope calculation, so the numbers are certainly not exactly right, but the order of magnitude of the numbers is correct. For a complete analysis of the citations of the DOE report, see the section starting on page 432 of our comment.

2. The DOE report authors would probably respond that their report is not designed to cover as many topics as the IPCC, which is undoubtedly true. However, the scale difference is so enormous that this can’t explain the entire difference.

3. e.g, Gish Gallop