DOE Climate Working Group RIP

We rarely break news here at THB, but we are today.The Department of Energy’s Climate Working Group (CWG) was disbanded on September 3 and its work under DOE will not continue in any manner. Presumably its work product(s) and submitted public comments will all be withdrawn. This will be formally announced shortly.

Based on my connecting the dots, the disbanding is the direct result of a lawsuit filed by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists arguing that the empanelment of the CWG violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA).

UPDATE: DOE has filed a response to the lawsuit arguing that they don’t believe that there is a FACA violation but even if there was, it is all moot as the CWG is disbanded. DOE also objected to the request that the report be taken down (it remains up). For their part, UCS/EDF have requested that the court rule that EPA not be allowed to rely on the report or the CWG members as individuals unless DOE goes through the FACA process. Stay tuned.

When I first read the lawsuit, I expected that it would be dismissed — Surely, I thought, DOE had taken steps to ensure that the five members of the CWG were either employed by DOE or otherwise detailed to the agency, such that they would not fall under the provisions of FACA.1

Apparently, one of the members of the CWG did not file the paperwork necessary to be considered internal to DOE, thus legitimizing the UCS/EDF lawsuit. Given this, on the merits, UCS/EDF were correct and would likely have prevailed. With the stakes so high, DOE was sloppy in not ensuring that the CWG was procedurally air tight.

The disbanding of the CWG says nothing about the substance of the CWG report — which, as THB readers know, made several important critques relying heavily on my work and that of colleagues — notably related to scenarios, extreme weather, “billion dollar disasters,” and extreme event attribution. Of course, in areas outside my expertise the report has seen other critiques that I have not discussed.

The most important accomplishment of the short-lived working group was to reveal the censorious and politicized response of many in the media and climate science community to the very idea that other accomplished and credentialed experts might have views that deviate in small or large degree from an acceptable orthodoxy — all in the context of climate politics.

Responses to the CWG were often expressed with expletives, in personal terms, and focused on the alleged political and financial motivations of the members of the CWG.

The responses of climate scientists to the CWG report also included multiple false claims — such as in defenses of RCP8.5, sowing confusion about time of emergence and detection/attribution, on the integrity of “billion dollar disasters,” contradicting IPCC on extreme weather and more. None of the critques chose to take on any of our research cited in the CWG report. It’s as if they dismissed more contentious claims of CWG in order to avoid having to take on those that were obviously correct.

It would easy for outside observers to see all this and become quite cynical about the public face of climate science. Don’t be — science is self-correcting, even if it takes a while. The CWG may be RIP, but issues of scientific integrity in climate science remain. Many hard-working and ethical climate scientists recognize this.

I asked members of the CWG for comment and here are some responses I’ve received so far:

Steve Koonin: “I think the draft report and subsequent reactions to it are forcing a more serious engagement between supporters of the alleged consensus and those with differing views. I welcome that development and will continue to promote serious public discussion of the science.”

Judy Curry: “The 5 members of the Climate Working Group intend to keep working as an independent team on revising the Report, responding to comments, and preparing additional reports.”

Ross McKitrick: “We have been told that we are free as individual scientists to continue to engage in the debate our report gave rise to.”

Travis Fisher, who helped to organize the report at DOE, sent me this:

The line between climate science and climate policy is vanishing, and that should make us all uneasy. Scientists shouldn’t try to play policymakers. Science can inform us; it cannot govern us.

Here at THB we will continue to focus on the fallout from the DOE CWG and responses to it.