“Basically the secretary of energy brought together climate deniers to write a report on climate change. And surprise surprise, they say climate change is not so bad, not so dangerous. The DOE report wasn't grounded in science. There's so much wrong here, it's hard to unpack everything." Scientists respond to the US Department of Energy 2025 climate working group report- Watch: Climate Chat Streamed live on Oct 26 "Debunking the DoE Climate Denial Report with Andrew Dessler” selected quotes follow:
{"Climate Chat is a YouTube channel where we discuss all things climate with scientists, technologists, authors, advocates, communicators and others helping us understand and fight climate change."]
RELATED POST: https://cityofangels25.blogspot.com/2025/10/anti-trump-climate-responses-showed-up.html
Selected Quotes:
4.00: They only cited 1% of the peer-reviewed literature. And that 1% they cited, they often cited incorrectly. And in their arguments there was cherrypicking, there was misrepresentation of the science.
***
[KE: You’ve gotta be informed before you can misinform]
***
Can you just tell us about authors of the DOE report on climate change? I wouldn't refer to them as climate deniers as much as climate misinformers, right?
Yeah. And back to the first paragraph, the DOE executive summary sounds fine until you get to the second paragraph. It starts off with okay we're releasing greenhouse gases that makes the earth warmer. So it sounded promising. But by the time you got to the second paragraph you realized there’s going to be some problems.
I want to ask you this question. I always wonder this about misinformers, because when you look at what they're writing, it's very clever.
It takes real thought to manipulate information and to cherrypick. I mean, you you know, you can't be dumb and cherrypick. You got to be pretty smart to cherrypick.
***
[KE: Yes, the misinformation came from very professional, well educated propagandists.]
***
The Earth is warming, humans are primarily responsible for this warming, and future warming will be geologically large. I would say that the DOE authors are part of that 0.1% that disputes those claims.
When they say evidence suggests that the impact is very low, it's because they're throwing out 99% of the evidence. If you're willing to throw out all of the evidence that doesn't agree with you, you can always say the evidence agrees with you. And this is one of the most powerful plots that really shows the intellectual gymnastics these people had to go through to make the case.
***
[KE: The DOE report claims CO2 is good for agriculture and helps plants grow.]
***
14.14: There's no question that CO2 is required for plant growth. If you removed all the CO2 from the atmosphere that would be very bad. But of course that's not what anybody is talking about. And while in controlled situations increasing CO2 can help plants, like in a greenhouse where the temperatures are controlled, they're getting optimal nutrients, optimal humidity, optimal water, adding CO2 is good.
But when you add CO2, you end up changing all of those other things, and you end up changing the precipitation patterns.
If you talk to the experts, the people who really work on this, the people who wrote the section in our response, experts, they're very concerned about climate change, in particular the increasing temperature.
Increasing temperature is going to be a big problem for agriculture. And as far as the earth greening, that is really misleading. The earth is greening, no doubt about it, but a lot of that is in China and India, and that's a result of agricultural policies.
***
[KE: Half of USA believes misinformation on climate and other subjects, and the whole country is falling apart right now. But misinformation about the heating planet is affecting the entire globe. Who produced the misinformation and what was their motive?]
***
10.05: There's many people fooled by this misinformation, and I guess if you're just watching Fox News and you just listen to AM talk radio, you'll kind of believe that climate change isn't that bad. But those are not the people creating the report.
Like what you said, they pick the worst grid point and and just focus on one issue and totally ignore the other issues that we all know about; and they they must know about, too. It kind of deserves a show all on its own.
***
[KE: YES a whole SERIES on how misinformation caused global warming to get worse, almost as if someone wanted parts of the planet to overheat, thinking the propagandists themselves would benefit?]
***
In China, for example, they're really trying to reforest sections that were deforested earlier. In addition, they give big subsidies to farmers. So, they're really trying to ramp up their agricultural productivity, and that's completely unrelated to CO2 fertilization.
If you go to northern Canada it was too cold for plants to grow or for certain types of plants to grow. And now we've added so much carbon dioxide the temperature's gone up. So now plants can grow there. But that doesn't help anybody. that doesn't help agricultural productivity.
***
[KE: unless everyone migrates; sure that won’t cause any new problems]
***
As the temperature goes up, sure, the atmosphere becomes thirstier and evaporation goes faster, so you end up drying out soils very quickly. In fact, as the temperature goes up, you end up with drought not because of changes in rainfall, but just because evaporation increases. We call that agricultural ecological drought. And that can occur even if your rainfall doesn't change. So yeah, there's a big problem with the warming temperatures really affecting agriculture in important ways. And of course this report doesn't-
I actually looked into some of the statistics of this and all of the references that said that climate change would be bad for agriculture, they don't talk about them. They just ignore them. So it's not in any way a legitimate scientific document.
***
[KE: The US DOE report released by the Trump administration is not in any way a legitimate scientific document; surprise surprise]
***
In a world without science, something will fill the void. And because we live in a world where you can monetize misinformation, I think people will be, you know, on Twitter and making podcasts and getting rich, in much the same way they did it with COVID cures. I think that very well may be the future in a world with fewer scientists. That is just tragic.
***
[KE: Everything climate scientists predicted about global warming since the 1970s is coming true, only faster. But I don't think anyone predicted this weird anti-science disinformation that's causing the problem to get so much worse.]
No comments:
Post a Comment