National Academies Report Affirms Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding

A report from the Department of Energy on the climate impacts of greenhouse gas emissions is at the center of conflict between not only the department and mainstream climate scientists, but also the National Academies and House Republicans.

The National Academies released a fast-tracked report on Wednesday that supports the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 endangerment finding, which underpins the agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and says the finding is now reinforced by even stronger evidence collected since 2009.

The finding contrasts with that of the DOE report, which said warming induced by carbon dioxide “appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed, and that aggressive mitigation strategies may be misdirected.”

The DOE report was authored by four scientists and one economist, all of whom were handpicked by DOE Secretary Chris Wright and have expressed skepticism about leading climate change impact assessments. The EPA cited the report in its proposal to rescind the endangerment finding, though DOE says the report is not yet finalized and may change in response to comments.

Climate scientists and scientific societies have offered rebuttals to the DOE report, including one report, led by Andrew Dessler and Robert Kopp, that provides a line-by-line critique drawn from the input of more than 85 scientists.

The National Academies report focuses on evidence since 2009, prioritizing observational evidence and identifying alignment between “independent lines” of evidence, report authors said at a release event on Wednesday. The report relied on peer-reviewed literature, scientific assessments, more than 200 public comments, and more than a dozen peer reviewers, study chair Shirley Tilghman added.

However, the National Academies itself has now come under fire from the chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee for its decision to review the EPA proposal. “This decision appears to be inconsistent with the purpose of the National Academies and a blatant partisan act to undermine the Trump Administration,” Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) wrote in a letter to National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt earlier this month, citing potential bias arising from certain members of the committee, use of private donor funds, and previous “questionable decisions” under McNutt’s leadership.

Speakers at the report release said that the Clean Air Act says EPA shall consider input from the National Academies in its decisions. They also noted that funds for the study came from two of the organization’s endowments “to ensure the independence of the project” and that the report was fast-tracked to meet the EPA’s Sept. 22 deadline for public comment.

Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee have criticized the National Academies more broadly in recent months, stating in their appropriations bill report for the National Institutes of Health that the committee “remains concerned with the lack of objective nonpartisan research methods, including inaccurate references to data and removal of panel participants, demonstrated by” the National Academies, and urges agencies to “consider alternative means for obtaining objective scientific review.” The bill report does not provide examples of the issues it mentions, and McNutt told Science she does not know which studies the committee is referencing.

Backlash against the DOE report

The American Meteorological Society issued a statement arguing that the DOE report cherry-picks data to support its findings and that its five authors are unrepresentative of climate scientists and lack the expertise needed to capture the full range of available evidence. Authors of the Dessler-led report have raised similar points. Both groups point to assessments from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Climate Assessment, which have hundreds of authors and undergo multiple rounds of peer review, as more accurate and comprehensive. (AMS is an AIP Member Society.)

“Scientific assessment is very different than, say, legal advocacy or policy debate in which one assembles the strongest case and leaves it to somebody else to develop their case or the counter case,” said Paul Higgins, associate executive director of AMS. “As a scientist, your job is to look at all of the evidence and consider all of the evidence based on merit.”

In a blog post, DOE report author Judith Curry rejected these criticisms as “political considerations, not scientific principles or practices.” Furthermore, she argued that parts of AMS’s stated standards for scientific assessments “emphasize the need for something like the DOE report,” such as including “authors who reflect the full range of defensible views among the subject matter experts” and “unusual perspectives and disagreement.”

Curry commended the Dessler-led report and said the DOE report authors would go through it in much more detail. However, “in my initial assessment, the Dessler et al. report didn’t land any strong punches on the DOE Report, and I wouldn’t change any of the conclusions in the DOE Report in response,” she wrote, adding that the combination of the two reports illustrates how different analyses of the evidence can lead to different conclusions, and that “the existence of this kind of disagreement is essential information for policy makers, which hitherto has been hidden under the banner of ‘consensus’ enforcement.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists and the Environmental Defense Fund have sued DOE for allegedly violating the law by failing to disclose the group’s existence until months after it began working, failing to disclose the group’s meetings and records, and stacking the committee with “adherents of only one point of view.”

Wright disbanded the group of authors on Sept. 3, but DOE has not retracted the report. Curry told CNN last week that the group is “still working independently,” and plans to “issue a revised report and respond to any serious comments.” DOE’s request for comment on the report closed on Sept. 2.

“We’ll hear input and ideas from everyone,” Wright told the Washington Examiner in August. However, he added that the data on climate change “is pretty clear and pretty compelling. It’s a real physical phenomenon. It’s just not even remotely close to the world’s greatest problem, and it’s nowhere near the United States’ greatest problem.”