As one of us observed years ago, it is a mistake to go on vacation because either your absence will cause disaster or you won’t be missed and both are bad. We went anyway… and did a webinar, our concept of “vacation” being a little different than some people’s. But just as we left a major new climate report from the U.S. Department of Energy, released on July 23 and written by five authors including our webinar guest, dared to say that the science is not settled and that much that journalists say experts say is not happening at all. It has been subjected to the usual abuse, proving the authors’ point that this field desperately needed a “Red Team” to offer contrary opinions to a conventional wisdom that had become smug and obnoxious as well as wildly inaccurate. The authors have decided not to answer their critics in the press but to establish a portal for respectful debate. We however feel that their critics need to be answered in every forum in which they seek to avoid respectful debate.

As is our wont, we quote John Stuart Mill here, from On Liberty:

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them... he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”

Thus alarmists, especially those queasily aware of a “greenlash” against the various practical failures and rhetorical excesses of their side, ought to read this document with great interest. As Kim Strassel said to start in a Wall Street Journal opinion video, “The Department of Energy issues a new report attempting to reset the national discussion on climate change.” And surely we could use it.

Here in Canada politicians frequently take the spineless position that it is not prudent to question the “science” of alarmism because “we lost that debate”. Do not however ask them when and where they engaged in it and why and how they lost it, because they never did. So maybe we too could stand a “reset” where we have the trial before reaching a verdict. It is, after all, how science works.

In this particular case, five distinguished climate scientists, and only a donkey could question that report authors John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Ross McKitrick and Roy Spencer are climate scientists, in the sense of all having Ph.Ds and distinguished careers in areas directly relevant to the topic, have delivered a thorough overview of areas of uncertainty and of overblown claims. And are the alarmists grateful? Are they at once confident that their position is sound, and willing to reconsider some points where they may have gotten it wrong?

Hoo hah. Heatmap fired off an email in which Alexander C. Kaufman started his top five thusly:

“1. Scientists decry Energy Department’s climate skeptic report/ The Department of Energy issued a report on Tuesday calling into question the global consensus on climate change and concluding that global warming poses less economic risk than previously believed…. But scientists whose work appeared in the 151-page report decried an analysis they said ‘fundamentally misrepresents’ their research.”

Oh dear. Notice that it’s not a critique of what they said but a claim of scientific malpractice. Indeed, Kaufman continued:

“I rounded up some comments they’ve made over the past couple of days: ‘It’s really surreal to think that’s where we are in 2025, Jennifer Jacquet, a professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami, told Bloomberg. ‘These guys have a history of being wrong on important scientific issues. The notion that their views have been given short shrift by the scientific community is just plain wrong,’ Ben Santer, a climate researcher and an honorary professor at the University of East Anglia, told, Wired’s Molly Taft. ‘Complete decarbonisation in the long run requires partial decarbonisation in the short run. In other words, this attempt by the DoE to undermine the economic case for climate policy fails — and thus inadvertently strengthens said case,’ University of Sussex scientist Richard Tol wrote on his Substack. ‘It is a coordinated, full-scale attack on the science. This was present in the first Trump administration, but it’s being exacerbated in the second,’ Dave White, who directs the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation at Arizona State University, told The New York Times. ‘This shows how far we have sunk. Climate denial is now the official policy of the U.S. government,’ Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University, told Science.”

You get the idea. If any of them even knew what the report said, and mentioned it to Heatmap, Kaufman didn’t pass it on to their readers. Instead they got the party line, red-hot. These people are counterrevolutionary insects.

As Pielke Jr. sighed on his Substack, “The Honest Broker” or THB, and honesty is certainly needed here:

“The reactions to the DOE Climate Working Group (CWG) report released last week have been just as interesting as the report itself. The degree of vitriol and freak-out by activist climate scientists and journalists has surprised even me, who has seen it all. For instance, one NASA climate scientist wrote on X of the authors of the report: ‘In any other community these people would have been shunned for scientific misconduct long ago. But it is indeed only in climate science that enough useful idiots exist and serious people have to pretend it’s reasonable… ‘ He is not the only one to accuse the authors of the report of “scientific misconduct.’ Others have suggested in the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Guardian that there is nothing accurate in the report. The self-appointed science sheriffs are of the same small group who appear in the same media outlets trying to police discourse on climate – It is an incredibly sad statement about this field. In reality, the DOE CWG report substantially overlaps with the most recent assessment of the IPCC – it cites the IPCC over 100 times. One would think that the nuanced, in most cases small differences, between the CWG and the IPCC provide an opportunity for the climate science community to acknowledge these views and in the process enlarge the tent and help to make climate science more robust and worthy of trust. Instead, we see an organized smear campaign.”

How organized? Well, to continue quoting RPJ from another THB instalment:

“Last week, a colleague of mine sent me a copy of an email that they had received from CarbonBrief, a UK-based advocacy journalism group. The email asked for examples of how their published research had been ‘falsely or misleadingly characterised’ in the Department of Energy (DOE) Climate Working Group (CWG) report. That email began as follows: ‘I’m contacting you because we have noticed that at least one of your studies has been cited in a new report published this week by the US Dept of Energy titled, “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate.” A number of scientists cited in the report have already publicly highlighted that their findings have been falsely or misleadingly characterised. It seems that the report is intended to be used as scientific justification by the Trump administration in its efforts to revoke the US Environmental Protection Agency’s “endangerment finding” on greenhouse gases. Carbon Brief is now seeking your help to assess whether your own study, or indeed your area(s) of expertise more widely, have been mischaracterised in the report. This is part of a wider ‘crowdsourced’ fact-checking effort we are now convening to draw on inputs from experts in their respective fields.’ I thought it was curious because I did not receive the same email, despite my (and colleagues) peer-reviewed research being among the most cited in the CWG report. So, as one does in 2025, I called out CarbonBrief on Twitter/X. Today, perhaps in response to my Tweet, I received the same emailed invitation from CarbonBrief, and with this post I am responding in public.”

He proceeds to do so, citing chapter and verse on their 30 citations of his work and giving them “Overall grade = a strong A-.” And we invite you to check it. Unlike the usual suspects.

On July 8, a New York Times “Climate” story, which didn’t attempt to tell the readers whether it was news or opinion, struck a pre-emptive blow against the authors rather than their actual views under the headline:

“Trump Hires Scientists Who Doubt the Consensus on Climate Change/ The three scientists joined the administration after it dismissed hundreds of experts who were assessing how global warming is affecting the country.”

Double-plus-ungood, right? The focus isn’t on what they said, let alone why. It’s on telling you not to doubt what the Ministry of Climate tells you. And the piece, by a writer who instead of having, say, a PhD in theoretical physics and a distinguished career like Steven Koonin, appears to be a fledgling with a “Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), English (nonfiction writing)” which isn’t even an academic discipline, begins:

“The Energy Department has hired at least three scientists who are well-known for their rejection of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, according to records reviewed by The New York Times.”

And how does the writer know there’s a consensus? Well, everyone she knows seems to think so, and a fresh look at the subject is not welcome. Instead:

“A vast majority of scientists around the world agree that human activities – primarily the burning of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal – are dangerously heating the Earth. That has increased the frequency and intensity of heat waves, droughts and colossal bursts of rain like the storm that caused the deadly flooding now devastating central Texas.”

As for the notion of vigorous debate, contrary opinions, and testing theories in the crucible of experimentation and discussion, the heck with that nonsense:

“During President Trump’s first term, Dr. Koonin proposed that the Environmental Protection Agency conduct a “red-team, blue-team” exercise to challenge mainstream climate science. A “red team” of climate skeptics would critique major scientific reports on global warming, and a “blue team” of climate scientists would then rebut these claims. At the time, mainstream climate scientists said the proposal would make a mockery of scientific research and create a platform for marginal views that had already been disproved in the normal course of scientific debate.”

To be fair, she wrote that:

“In his 2021 book, ‘Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t and Why It Matters,’ Dr. Koonin argued that while the planet was warming and human activities had played a role, the scientific consensus was not as certain or as dire as it was frequently portrayed.”

But she didn’t quote anything from the book, let alone say it was worth considering, and we’d bet dollars to doughnuts she never read it. For her it’s all about gatekeeping, to the point that she gives the final word to two vocal alarmists one of whom is, yes, Michael Mann, whose legally expensive habit of fibbing goes unmentioned.

Contrast this screed with Roger Pielke Jr’s initial comment on THB that it does indeed seem to be a “red team” report despite not using the term, followed by this thoughtful critique:

“I certainly agree with Koonin that legitimate views and voices have been excluded from major climate assessments, as leaders in the community have sought to present a tidy story, convenient for climate politics. However, rather than having dueling assessments, I would much prefer that scientific assessments be run as big tents, with the full diversity of views included, highlight not just areas of consensus, but also areas of uncertainty, disagreement, and ignorance. Climate science has seen far too much gatekeeping.”

Agree or disagree, and we disagree on the grounds that judging by history, scientific progress requires duelling assessments on anything from the inheritance of acquired characteristics to quantum physics, it’s something worth talking about. Instead, sadly:

“Today, I see on social media many climate scientists who often appear in the media responding to the report with name calling. We won’t do that here at THB and the comments will be tightly moderated.”

Meanwhile the report authors are trying to create a forum for:

“dialogue, learning, and clarification of areas of disagreement. We expect to spend considerable time and effort in responding to the comments.”

The question remains whether those whose position is critiqued will be making comments, there or elsewhere, or just engaging in character assassination. If the latter, you know whose characters will come out looking ugly.

In case unlike the critics you have some interest in what the authors said, the Manhattan Contrarian drew attention to a key theme of the report and of much of their distinguished work:

“Most important about these five is that they are all willing to acknowledge the limitations of the knowledge possessed by the scientific community about the world’s climate.”

Indeed a central point about the climate debate, or lack of it, is that it is not a matter of duelling certainties. On the contrary, it’s between one side so arrogantly certain of their position that they brush critics aside with a tarry brush and one side that, in the humble spirit of true science, realizes there is much we do not know and is keen to talk about what we think we know, how we think we know it, and the limits of our knowledge. Thus famously Koonin’s book about his growing doubts about what “the science” said and how it was conducted was called Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.

For more on which, we encourage you to read the report.