The Energy Department released a report this week promising a “critical review” of climate science, coinciding with the Environmental Protection Agency’s move to end climate regulation across the federal government. But scientists say the report, drafted by researchers known for questioning mainstream climate science, is riddled with errors and cherry-picked data.

“They cherrypick data points that suit their narratives and exclude the vast majority of the scientific literature that does not,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and the climate research lead at the payment company Stripe, whose work was cited in the new report, said in a text message. “This gives a terribly skewed view of the underlying climate science.”

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“The Climate Working Group report is a much-needed reevaluation of what climate science tells us and what it doesn’t,” an Energy Department spokesperson said in an email.

The Washington Post annotated key sections of the new report with the help of climate scientists.

Page iii, Climate working group

Climate Working Group: John Christy, Ph.D. Judith Curry, Ph.D. Steven Koonin, Ph.D. Ross McKitrick, Ph.D. Roy Spencer, Ph.D.

Scientists argue that the new report, composed in less than two months by five authors known to have skeptical views on climate science, would not pass any peer review process. “If almost any other group of scientists had been chosen, the report would have been dramatically different,” Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said in a statement.

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“There is a history of some of the authors of this document cherry-picking dates to show that there is no change, but they’re not providing the evidence to support that,” said Kristie Ebi, a professor of global health at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington.

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Judith Curry, a climatologist and professor emerita at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said in an email that “any scientist that isn’t skeptical isn’t doing their job,” in response to being characterized as a climate skeptic.

“Science is a process, and the ‘mainstream’ attempt to enforce a faux consensus to support political objectives is antithetical to science,” she wrote.

Page 3, Section 2: Direct impacts of CO2 on the environment

“The growing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has the important positive effect of promoting plant growth by enhancing photosynthesis and improving water use efficiency. That is evident in the “global greening” phenomenon discussed below, as well as in the improving agricultural yields discussed in Chapter 10. … The IPCC has only minimally discussed global greening and CO2 fertilization of agricultural crops.”

The new report highlights a positive effect of carbon dioxide — that it promotes “global greening” — without acknowledging the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on rising droughts, heat and crop stress.

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Ben Sanderson, climate scientist at the Center for International Climate Research in Oslo, said the effect of CO2 on plant growth is well-documented and incorporated into all of the climate models and studies that examine food security.

“It’s a case of extracting one particular part of the science — which is in this case incredibly uncontroversial — and then excluding the much wider, more complex discussion about how climate change is going to impact vegetation,” Sanderson said.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there is “high confidence” that warming “is negatively affecting crop and grassland quality and harvest stability.”

Page 15, Section 3: Human influences on the climate

Although the IPCC does not claim its emission scenarios are forecasts, they are often treated as such. Comparisons of past scenario groups against observations show that IPCC emission projections have tended to overstate actual subsequent emissions.

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But scientists say that multiple IPCC reports have acknowledged this limitation — and that the U.N. body has taken steps to prioritize the models that track more closely with observations. “This was a central theme of the last IPCC report,” Sanderson said.

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“I have been pretty public in arguing that a subset of the latest generation of models is probably running too hot,” Hausfather said. Still, he added, the past few years of record heat have brought observations more in line with modeling. The current rate of warming is in line with central estimates of the last generation of models.

The same section of the report also takes some research out of context. For example, the report includes a figure from one of Hausfather’s papers to argue that models have historically outpaced observations. The paper, however, actually argued the opposite — that models have historically been quite accurate at predicting global temperature change.

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“They’re cherry-picking the small number of contrary studies on each of these topics, and not featuring any of the larger literature that finds different results,” Hausfather said.

Page 46, Section 6: Extreme weather

Most types of extreme weather exhibit no statistically significant long-term trends over the available historical record. While there has been an increase in hot days in the U.S. since the 1950s, a point emphasized by AR6, numbers are still low relative to the 1920s and 1930s. Extreme convective storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts exhibit considerable natural variability, but long-term increases are not detected.

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Climate scientists say the report’s assertion that there are “no statistically significant long-term trends” in most types of extreme weather is misleading and omits a growing body of evidence to the contrary.

“We are seeing an increase in the incidence of floods, droughts and heat waves, and if anything — as we’ve shown in our own work — climate models are probably underestimating the impact human-caused warming is having on these events,” Michael Mann, professor of earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania, said in an email.

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Jim Kossin, a former scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said this is particularly true for hurricanes, for which significant trends have been identified in how quickly tropical cyclones intensify, the locations where they achieve maximum intensity, the proportion of time they are of high intensity and how quickly these storms move along their tracks.

He said that recent Energy Department reports and statements fail to think of the paths that storms follow and how quickly they move along that path as “trends.” He added that scientists largely agree that it is not storm frequency that will increase under global warming, but rather that their peak intensities will be greater.

“The studies showing no changes in ‘tropical cyclone activity’ can be very misleading out of context,” Kossin wrote in an email. “We should be looking at how the risk landscape as a whole might be changing. These reports do not do this.”

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Kerry Emanuel, meteorology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, agreed that the report’s section on extreme weather was disappointing.

He said that it cited data about hurricanes that made landfall without considering the whole picture. He found no mention of rain or flooding from tropical cyclones, which are responsible for the most damage and mortality in hurricanes.

“It’s sort of a interlacing of things that are true but limited, and yet they make it seem like it’s a universal thing” he said.

Page 52, Section 6.3: Temperature Extremes

Changes in warm extremes are more nuanced than changes in cold extremes. For instance, the warmest daily temperature of the year increased in some parts of the West over the past century, but there were decreases in almost all locations east of the Rocky Mountains.

Ebi said that while this claim from the National Climate Assessment is correct, the Energy Department’s report inserts it without appropriate context.

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“They’re cherry-picking geographic regions over particular years where there’s variability,” Ebi said. “So the underlying assumption is that with climate change, every place has to see the same increase in temperatures, the same increase in the intensity of extreme events. That’s never been true historically.”

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Ebi said climate change is not felt evenly across the U.S., so there are locations that don’t match the global trends of warming. For many years, she said, the American Southeast cooled while the rest of the U.S. warmed. But this does not negate the overall trend of global warming.

Page 112, Section 10.3: Mortality from temperature extremes

Mortality during heat extremes is typically caused by heat stroke and heat exhaustion, while mortality during cold extremes typically stems from hypothermia and heart strain.

John Balbus, a physician and former director of the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity in the Biden administration, said the parts of the report on extreme temperature’s health effects were clearly written by people who are not health experts. “They make statements that without citing them that are just kind of wrong,” he said.

Heat stroke and exhaustion are not the top killers in extreme-heat events, Balbus said. Instead, respiratory, heart and kidney disease are the biggest threats to human health. High temperatures require more blood to be pumped to the skin, straining people who already have heart disease, with heat also pushing people with respiratory and kidney disease beyond their limits.

Unlike with heat-related mortality, cold-weather risks set in even at moderately cold conditions (Gasparini et al. 2015, Lee and Dessler 2023).

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Heat-related mortality and cold-weather risks are similar, in that the moderate conditions generally present greater risk, Balbus said. Climate change means a few additional extremely hot days but many more moderately hotter days, increasing the overall risk. People are more likely to stay in their air-conditioned or heated homes at the most extreme high and low temperatures, while they will venture out in moderately hotter or colder weather.

Page 129, Section 12: Global climate impacts of U.S. emissions policies

Lomborg (2016) estimated that full compliance with the initial commitments in the Paris Accord would not stop warming, it would only prevent about 0.1C warming and delay hitting the baseline year 2100 temperature levels by about a decade. Thus, in contrast with conventional air pollution control, even drastic local actions will have negligible local effects, and only with a long delay. The practice of referring to unilateral U.S. reductions as “combatting climate change” or “taking action on climate” on the assumption we can stop climate change therefore reflects a profound misunderstanding of the scale of the issue.

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These findings are broadly rejected by mainstream climate scientists. The commitments countries made to reduce emissions under the Paris agreement have already been key to slowing projected global warming by 1.3 to 2.2 degrees Celsius by 2100, according to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The idea that U.S. climate action is happening in a vacuum — imposing considerable cost on the country for negligible results — is also inaccurate, climate scholars say. “The idea that the U.S. reducing its emissions has no impact on what others do is nonsense,” said Daniel Schrag, a professor of geology and environmental science and engineering at Harvard. In multiple sectors of the global economy, U.S. emissions targets are motivating other nations to step up their reductions in fossil fuel use and embrace of cleaner technologies, Schrag said. The same is now happening for China, Schrag said, citing as an example its mass production of affordable electric cars that is motivating other countries to step up their transition away from the internal combustion engine. Last year, Ethiopia banned the importation of new gas-powered cars because Chinese electric models offer a superior alternative.

Experts also say the report’s argument that the U.S. should prioritize cutting local air pollution because it would have a more direct impact on improving lives is contradicted by the administration’s rejection of climate actions that would reduce those pollutants. Coal-burning and car and truck fumes are considerable hazards to human health, yet the report argues in favor of rolling back restrictions on them. “It is not just carbon dioxide that comes out of a tailpipe,” said Robert Stavins, director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program and the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements.