Department Of Energy Report On The Impacts Of Greenhouse Gas Emissions

On July 29 — the same day that EPA initiated the process of revoking the absurd “endangerment finding” that demonizes CO2 emissions from energy production (covered at Manhattan Contrarian here) — there was another equally momentous development on the energy front at the federal government. On that day, the Department of Energy released a lengthy Report with the title “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate.” (Although the Report bears a date of July 23, the 29th appears to be the date when it was signed by Energy Secretary Chris Wright and officially released.)

The Report is attributed to something called the “Climate Working Group,” consisting of five prominent members of the climate skeptic community: John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Ross McKitrick, and Roy Spencer. Full disclosure: I know four of the five (Judith Curry is the exception), and consider two of them friends.

These are all highly competent and accomplished people, which is a dramatic contrast to the lightweights and grifters who constitute essentially all of the “mainstream” climate science community. 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. The Report overall comes off as a fair and balanced assessment of risks and trade-offs, rather than what normally comes from climate academics and journalists, which are cheap attempts to use speculation and fake projections to scare you out of your wits.

The frank acknowledgement of limitations in knowledge is best expressed in this concluding paragraph of the Report:

This report supports a more nuanced and evidence-based approach for informing climate policy that explicitly acknowledges uncertainties. The risks and benefits of a climate changing under both natural and human influences must be weighed against the costs, efficacy, and collateral impacts of any “climate action”, considering the nation’s need for reliable and affordable energy with minimal local pollution. Beyond continuing precise, un-interrupted observations of the global climate system, it will be important to make realistic assumptions about future emissions, re-evaluate climate models to address biases and uncertainties, and clearly acknowledge the limitations of extreme event attribution studies. An approach that acknowledges both the potential risks and benefits of CO2, rather than relying on flawed models and extreme scenarios, is essential for informed and effective decision-making.

We all owe a great debt of gratitude to Secretary Wright for identifying these authors and asking them to write this Report.

Two notable subjects covered in the Report are often suppressed in the “mainstream” science and media on the subject: (1) the benefits of added CO2 in the atmosphere, and (2) the negligible potential impact of potential CO2 suppression policies by the U.S. government. As to the first, there are two substantial sections of the Report (pages 3-6 and 104-110) dealing with “global greening” and the effects of CO2 in enhancing plant growth and agricultural productivity. Excerpt from page 3:

While plant models predict increased photosynthesis in response to rising CO2, Haverd et al. (2020) reported a CO2 fertilization rate much larger than model predictions. That is, CO2 fertilization had driven an increase in observed global photosynthesis by 30 percent since 1900, versus 17 percent predicted by plant models. If true it would indicate that global models of the socioeconomic impacts of rising CO2 have understated the benefits to crops and agriculture.

On the subject of the global impact of U.S. policies to suppress CO2 emissions, here is an excerpt from page 130, relating to potential reduction of CO2 emissions from vehicles in the U.S.:

In 2022, the emissions from U.S. cars and light duty trucks totaled 1.05 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (GtCO2, EPA 2024). Meanwhile global CO2 emissions from energy use totaled 34.6 GtCO2 (Energy Institute 2024). Hence U.S. cars and light trucks account for only 3.0 percent of global energy-related CO2 emissions. To a first approximation we can say that even eliminating all U.S. vehicle-based emissions would retard the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere by a year or two over a century. It would also reduce the overall warming trend by at most about 3 percent. For the period 1979-2023, which has the most extensive global coverage of a variety of weather data types, warming trends are determined to a precision of about ±15 percent, so the impact of reducing the rate of global warming by eliminating U.S. vehicle CO2 emissions would be far below the limits of measurability.

The largest sections of the Report are devoted to the questions of how much warming can be expected from increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, and to the issue of attribution of extreme weather events to greenhouse-gas-induced warming. Here is a key quote as to extreme weather events (from page 46):

Most types of extreme weather exhibit no statistically significant long-term trends over the available historical record. While there has been an increase in hot days in the U.S. since the 1950s, a point emphasized by AR6, numbers are still low relative to the 1920s and 1930s. Extreme convective storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts exhibit considerable natural variability, but long-term increases are not detected.

Extensive references are provided for the data as to the types of extreme weather events listed. If temperatures have warmed over the past century, but there is no corresponding “long-term increase” in the frequency of extreme weather events, then it is simply not possible to attribute any particular hurricane, tornado, flood, drought, or the like, to human-caused global warming. Every media account to the contrary that you read is an exercise in fraudulent scaremongering.

Perhaps my favorite section of the Report is the section covering ocean “acidification.” I have always thought this among the most absurd of the scare stories associated with CO2 emissions. From page 6-7:

A neutral aqueous solution has a pH of 7.0, while one with pH greater than 7.0 is alkaline (also termed basic) and with pH less than 7.0 is acidic. The modern-day global average pH of surface sea water is estimated to be 8.04 (Copernicus Marine Service 2025, Figure 2.3), down from an estimated value of 8.2 in pre-Industrial times (Gattuso and Hansson, 2011). As CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere increased, the oceans absorbed more, which decreases their pH. Depending upon the oceans’ buffering capacity, they are expected to become somewhat less alkaline over time, consistent with the observed decrease in pH. . . . While this process is often called “ocean acidification”, that is a misnomer because the oceans are not expected to become acidic; “ocean neutralization” would be more accurate. . . . [O]cean biota appear to be resilient to natural long-term changes in ocean pH since marine organisms were exposed [in the past] to wide ranges in pH.

Do you have the impression that “ocean acidification” is destroying the Great Barrier Reef off Australia? Consider this:

De’ath et al. (2009) reported that a portion of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (GBR, the world’s largest coral reef ecosystem) had experienced a 14 percent decline in calcification since 1990. This was tentatively attributed to increasing water temperature and decreasing pH. But Ridd et al. (2013) showed that report to have resulted from a biased data analysis that, when corrected, showed no change in calcification rates. Nevertheless, the alarm produced by the original paper has persisted as evidenced by the large number of published citations (541) to the original study compared to only 11 citations to the correction (as of 30 April 2025).

Overall, it is fabulous to see the U.S. government finally listening to competent people and making some sense in the area of climate science. Now, defund the charlatans.