Government abandons climate science, but climate scientists won't abandon government

Hello, welcome to my relaunched newsletter, read more about the deal here and please subscribe!

It is an uphill battle, of course, when faced with such clear-eyed farce. There is a sense of bringing a powerpoint presentation to a food fight — a collection of more than 85 climate scientists have issued a thorough and full-throated response to the Trump administration's intentional debacle issued as a justification to undermine the entire edifice of US climate action.

That debacle, issued from the Department of Energy and written by five of the same ghoulish climate change deniers that crawl out from under the same damp rocks every time fossil fuel-friendly interests require their services, has already been cited by the Environmental Protection Agency in its attempt to undo the "endangerment finding," the 2009 conclusion that greenhouse gases are, obviously, a danger to people and the country.

"This report makes a mockery of science," said Andrew Dessler, a Texas A&M professor and director of the Texas Center for Extreme Weather who co-edited the collective response, in a press release. "It relies on ideas that were rejected long ago, supported by misrepresentations of the body of scientific knowledge, omissions of important facts, arm waving, anecdotes, and confirmation bias."

The release issued by Dessler's new coalition accompanying its full report — which it also submitted to the Department of Energy as a public comment to the original report — is full of such commentary:

• "It seems to work backward from a desired outcome" — Kerry Emanuel
• "The same zombie arguments from the 1990's fossil fuel lobby are appearing again in this DOE report" — Ted Amdur
• "...a travesty for US scientific integrity" — Ryan Katz-Rosene
• "This report presents a perverse and distorted view..." — Abigail Swann

And so on. The full document, pulled together in basically a month, runs to more than 450 pages — a detailed and devastating debunking that, if we're being honest, those five hand-picked authors won't bother to read and won't feel a shred of embarrassment over. There are errors and cherry-picks and omissions regarding everything from coral reefs to tropical cyclones, from the urban heat island effect to temperature-related mortality. There are typos — "The impact of elevated CO2 on agriculture is discussed in Chapter 9 of the DOE CWG Report, not Chapter 10" — that at least help to lay bare the gross incompetence and gleeful impunity at the black heart of the DOE's project. Most thorough climate assessments, like the periodic IPCC reports or, prior to now at least, the National Climate Assessments, involve hundreds of people and take years to compile; the DOE's Denial Quintet completed theirs, likely illegally, in a couple of months.

On one level the response's likely futility is as grim as can be — what could these 85-plus actual experts have better spent this time on, rather than a novel-length refutation of Trumpworld "science" that will be duly included in the public record and then ignored entirely. On another, it is heartening — the country's and the world's climate scientists know that what the American government does in this realm has actual weight, and no matter how far afield it strays those scientists aren't just throwing up their hands.

As their release states, "The scientific evidence confirming the climate crisis is as strong as it has ever been." There is value, still, in a collective response to Official Bullshit.