climate change

Feds try to dodge lawsuit against their bogus climate report

climate change, doe, Energy, EPA, greenhouse gasses, lawsuit, Policy, Science / Mike M. / September 13, 2025

Meanwhile, Congress is trying to keep serious scientists from weighing in.

While the Trump administration has continued to refer to efforts to avoid the worst impacts of climate change as a scam, it has done almost nothing to counter the copious scientific evidence that demonstrates that climate change is real and doing real damage to the citizens of the US. The lone exception has been a draft Department of Energy report prepared by a handful of carefully chosen fringe figures that questioned the mainstream understanding of climate change. The shoddy work and questionable conclusions of that report were so extensive that an analysis of it required over 450 pages to detail all of its shortcomings.

But its shortcomings may not have been limited to the science, as a lawsuit alleges that its preparation violated a law that regulates the activities of federal advisory panels. Now, in an attempt to avoid dealing with that lawsuit, the Department of Energy is claiming that it dissolved the committee that prepared the report, making the lawsuit moot.

Meanwhile, Congress is also attempting to muddy the waters. In response to the DOE report, the National Academies of Science announced that it would prepare a report describing the current state of climate science. Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight have responded by announcing an investigation of the National Academies “for undermining the EPA.”

The vanishing committee

As we noted in our original coverage, the members of the advisory group that prepared the DOE report were carefully chosen for having views that are well outside the mainstream of climate science. Based on their past public statements, they could be counted on to produce a report that would question the severity of climate change and raise doubts about whether we had any evidence it was happening. The report they produced went beyond that by suggesting that the net effect of our carbon emissions was likely to be a positive for humanity.

Not only was that shoddy science, but a lawsuit filed by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists suggested that it was likely illegal. Groups like the one that wrote the report, the suit alleges, fall under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which (among other things) dictates that these groups must be “fairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented,” rather than be selected in order to reinforce a single point of view.

The “among other things” that the law dictates is that the advisory groups have public meetings that are announced in advance, be chartered with a well-defined mission, and all of their records be made available to the public. In contrast, nobody within the Department of Energy, including the contrarians who wrote the report, acknowledged the work they were doing publicly until the day the draft report was released.

The suit alleges that the work of this group fell under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, and the group violated the act in all of the above ways and more. The act asks the courts to force the DOE to disclose all the relevant records involved with the preparation of the report, and to cease relying on it for any regulatory actions. That’s significant because the Environmental Protection Agency cited it in its attempts to roll back its prior finding that greenhouse gases posed a danger to the US public.

This week, the DOE responded in court by claiming the panel that produced the report had been dissolved, making the suit moot. That does not address the fact that the EPA is continuing to rely on the report in its attempts to argue there’s no point in regulating greenhouse gases. It also leaves the report itself in a weird limbo. Its release marked the start of a period of public comment, and said comments were supposed to be considered during the revisions that would take place before the draft was finalized.

Failure to complete the revision process would leave the EPA vulnerable to claims that it’s relying on an incomplete draft report for its scientific justifications. So, while the DOE’s tactics may protect some of its internal documents, it may ultimately cause larger problems for the Trump administration’s agenda.

Attacking the academies

Earlier this year, we were critical of the US’s National Academies of Science for seemingly refusing to respond to the Trump administration’s attacks on science. That reticence appeared to end in August with the release of the DOE climate report and the announcement that the EPA was using that report as the latest word on climate science, which it argued had changed considerably since the initial EPA decisions on this issue in 2009.

In response, the National Academies announced that it would fast-track a new analysis of the risks posed by greenhouse gases, this one done by mainstream scientists instead of a handful of fringe figures. The goal was to get it done before the EPA closed its public comment period on its proposal to ignore greenhouse gases.

Obviously, this poses a threat to the EPA’s planned actions, which apparently prompted Republicans in Congress to step in. Earlier this month, the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), announced he was investigating the National Academies for preparing this report, calling it “a blatant partisan act to undermine the Trump Administration.”

Comer has also sent a letter to the National Academies, outlining his concerns and demanding a variety of documents. Some of these are pretty convoluted: “The study is led by a National Academies member who serves as an external advisor to the Science Philanthropy Alliance, which has ties to the left-wing group Arabella Advisors through the New Venture Fund, an organization that promotes a variety of progressive causes and funds major climate litigation,” Comer says, suggesting … it’s not entirely clear what. Another member of the study panel had the audacity to endorse former President Biden for his climate policies. Separately, Comer says he’s concerned about the source of the funds that will pay for this study.

Some of Comer’s demands are consistent with this, focusing on funding for this review. But he goes well beyond that, demanding a list of all the National Academies’ sources of funding, as well as any internal communications about this study. He’s also going on a bit of a witch hunt within the federal government, demanding any communications the NAS has had with government employees regarding the DOE’s report or the EPA’s greenhouse gas decisions.

It’s pretty clear that Comer recognizes that any unbiased presentation of climate science is going to undercut the EPA’s rationale for reversing course on greenhouse gas regulations. So, he’s preparing in advance to undercut that presentation by claiming it’s rife with conflicts of interest—and he’s willing to include “supporting politicians who want to act on climate change” as a conflict.

All of this maneuvering is taking place before the EPA has even finalized its planned U-turn on greenhouse gases, a step that will undoubtedly trigger additional investigations and lawsuits. In many ways, this is likely to reflect many of these parties laying the groundwork for the legal fight to come. And, while some of this is ostensibly about the state of the science that has supported the EPA’s past policy decisions, it’s clear that the administration and its supporters are doing their best to minimize science’s impact on their preferred course of action.

John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.

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Geoengineering will not save humankind from climate change

climate change, Geoengineering, Science, syndication / Kelly Newman / September 9, 2025

A team of the world’s best ice and climate researchers studied a handful of recently publicized engineering concepts for protecting Earth’s polar ice caps and found that none of them are likely to work.

Their peer-reviewed research, published Tuesday, shows some of the untested ideas, such as dispersing particles in the atmosphere to dim sunlight or trying to refreeze ice sheets with pumped water, could have unintended and dangerous consequences.

The various speculative notions that have been floated, mainly via public relations efforts, include things such as spreading reflective particles over newly formed sea ice to promote its persistence and growth; building giant ocean-bottom sea walls or curtains to deflect warmer streams of water away from ice shelves; pumping water from the base of glaciers to the surface to refreeze it, and even intentionally polluting the upper atmosphere with sulfur-based or other reflective particles to dim sunlight.

Research shows the particle-based sunlight-dimming concept could shift rainfall patterns like seasonal monsoons critical for agriculture in some areas, and also intensify regional heat, precipitation, and drought extremes. And the authors of the new paper wrote that some of the mechanical interventions to preserve ice would likely disrupt regional ocean ecosystems, including the marine food chain, from tiny krill to giant whales.

Lead author Martin Siegert, a glaciologist at the University of Exeter, said that to provide a comprehensive view of the challenges, the new paper included 40 authors with expertise in fields including oceanography, marine biology, glaciology, and atmospheric science.

The paper counters a promotional geo-engineering narrative with science-based evidence showing the difficulties and unintended consequences of some of the aspirational ventures, he said. Most geoengineering ideas are climate Band-Aids at best. They only address symptoms, he added, but don’t tackle the root cause of the problem—greenhouse gas emissions.

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GOP may finally succeed in unrelenting quest to kill two NASA climate satellites

climate change, Donald Trump, Earth science, greenhouse gases, NASA, nasa budget, orbiting carbon observatory, Science, Space, space policy / DJ Henderson / September 6, 2025

Before satellite measurements, researchers relied on estimates and data from a smattering of air and ground-based sensors. An instrument on Mauna Loa, Hawaii, with the longest record of direct carbon dioxide measurements, is also slated for shutdown under Trump’s budget.

It requires a sustained, consistent dataset to recognize trends. That’s why, for example, the US government has funded a series of Landsat satellites since 1972 to create an uninterrupted data catalog illustrating changes in global land use.

But NASA is now poised to shut off OCO-2 and OCO-3 instead of thinking about how to replace them when they inevitably cease working. The missions are now operating beyond their original design lives, but scientists say both instruments are in good health.

Can anyone replace NASA?

Research institutes in Japan, China, and Europe have launched their own greenhouse gas-monitoring satellites. So far, all of them lack the spatial resolution of the OCO instruments, meaning they can’t identify emission sources with the same precision as the US missions. A new European mission called CO2M will come closest to replicating OCO-2 and OCO-3, but it won’t launch until 2027.

Several private groups have launched their own satellites to measure atmospheric chemicals, but these have primarily focused on detecting localized methane emissions for regulatory purposes, and not on global trends.

One of the newer groups in this sector, known as the Carbon Mapper Coalition, launched its first small satellite last year. This nonprofit consortium includes contributors from JPL, the same lab that spawned the OCO instruments, as well as Planet Labs, the California Air Resources Board, universities, and private investment funds.

Government leaders in Montgomery County, Maryland, have set a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2027, and 100 percent by 2035. Mark Elrich, the Democratic county executive, said the pending termination of NASA’s carbon-monitoring missions “weakens our ability to hold polluters accountable.”

“This decision would … wipe out years of research that helps us understand greenhouse gas emissions, plant health, and the forces that are driving climate change,” Elrich said in a press conference last month.

GOP may finally succeed in unrelenting quest to kill two NASA climate satellites Read More »

“Mockery of science”: Climate scientists tear into new US climate report

clean air act, climate change, department of energy, EPA, Science, syndication / DJ Henderson / September 3, 2025

While it is not uncommon for scientists to disagree, many of the review’s authors feel what the DOE produced isn’t science at all. “Trying to circumvent, bypass, undermine decades of the government’s own work with the nation’s top scientists to generate definitive information about climate science to use in policymaking—that’s what’s different here,” said Kim Cobb, a professor of Earth, environmental, and planetary sciences at Brown University and director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. Cobb co-authored two sections of the review.

Under President Donald Trump’s second administration, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced that it is reconsidering the 2009 endangerment finding that allows the agency to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. In its proposal to rescind the finding, the EPA cited the DOE’s climate report as one of many that led the agency to develop “serious concerns” with how the US regulates greenhouse gases.

“It’s really important that we stand up for the integrity of [climate science] when it matters the most,” Cobb said. “And this may very well be when it mattered the most.”

Roger Pielke Jr., a science policy analyst and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who is cited in the DOE report, doesn’t believe the push to overturn the endangerment finding will come down to that report. In his view, the administration’s arguments are mostly legal, not scientific. “I think that given the composition of the Supreme Court, the endangerment finding might be in danger. But it’s not going to be because of the science,” he said.

But as more communities grapple with the fallout of hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and other natural disasters exacerbated by climate change, Cobb fears the federal government is turning away from the best tool it has to help people across the US adapt to a warming planet.

“Science is a tool for prosperity and safety,” she said. “And when you turn your back on it in general—it’s not just going to be climate science, it’s going to be many other aspects of science and technology that are going to be forsaken—that will have grave costs.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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Experiment will attempt to counter climate change by altering ocean

carbon sequestration, climate change, oceanography, Science, syndication / Kelly Newman / August 11, 2025

Gulf of Maine will be site of safety and effectiveness testing.

Woods Hole researchers, Adam Subhas (left) and Chris Murray, conducted a series of lab experiments earlier this year to test the impact of an alkaline substance, known as sodium hydroxide, on copepods in the Gulf of Maine. Credit: Daniel Hentz/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Later this summer, a fluorescent reddish-pink spiral will bloom across the Wilkinson Basin in the Gulf of Maine, about 40 miles northeast of Cape Cod. Scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will release the nontoxic water tracer dye behind their research vessel, where it will unfurl into a half-mile wide temporary plume, bright enough to catch the attention of passing boats and even satellites.

As it spreads, the researchers will track its movement to monitor a tightly controlled, federally approved experiment testing whether the ocean can be engineered to absorb more carbon, and in turn, help combat the climate crisis.

As the world struggles to stay below the 1.5° Celsius global warming threshold—a goal set out in the Paris Agreement to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change—experts agree that reducing greenhouse gas emissions won’t be enough to avoid overshooting this target. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, published in 2023, emphasizes the urgent need to actively remove carbon from the atmosphere, too.

“If we really want to have a shot at mitigating the worst effects of climate change, carbon removal needs to start scaling to the point where it can supplement large-scale emissions reductions,” said Adam Subhas, an associate scientist in marine chemistry and geochemistry at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who will oversee the week-long experiment.

The test is part of the LOC-NESS project—short for Locking away Ocean Carbon in the Northeast Shelf and Slope—which Subhas has been leading since 2023. The ongoing research initiative is evaluating the effectiveness and environmental impact of a marine carbon dioxide removal approach called ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE).

This method of marine carbon dioxide removal involves adding alkaline substances to the ocean to boost its natural ability to neutralize acids produced by greenhouse gases. It’s promising, Subhas said, because it has the potential to lock away carbon permanently.

“Ocean alkalinity enhancement does have the potential to reach sort of gigatons per year of carbon removal, which is the scale at which you would need to supplement emissions reductions,” Subhas said. “Once the alkalinity is dissolved in seawater, it reacts with carbon dioxide and forms bicarbonate—essentially dissolved baking soda. That bicarbonate is one of the most stable forms of carbon in the ocean, and it can stay locked away for tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years.”

But it will be a long time before this could happen at the magnitude needed to mitigate climate change.

According to Wil Burns, co-director of the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University, between 6 and 10 gigatons of carbon need to be removed from the atmosphere annually by 2050 in order to meet the Paris Agreement climate target. “It’s a titanic task,” he said.

Most marine carbon dioxide removal initiatives, including those involving OAE, are still in a nascent stage.

“We’re really far from having any of these technologies be mature,” said Lisa Levin, an oceanographer and professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, who spoke on a panel at the United Nations Ocean Conference in June about the potential environmental risks of mining and carbon dioxide removal on deep-sea ecosystems. “We’re looking at a decade until any serious, large-scale marine carbon removal is going to be able to happen—or more.”

“In the meantime, everybody acknowledges that what we have to do is to reduce emissions, right, and not rely on taking carbon out of the atmosphere,” she said.

Marine carbon dioxide removal

So far, most carbon removal efforts have centered on land-based strategies, such as planting trees, restoring soils, and building machines that capture carbon dioxide directly from the air. Increasingly, researchers are exploring whether the oceans might help.

“Looking at the oceans makes a lot of sense when it comes to carbon removal, because the oceans sequester 70 times more CO₂ than terrestrial sources,” Burns said. What if it can hold more?

That question is drawing growing attention, not only from scientists. In recent years, a wave of private companies have started piloting various methods of removing carbon from the oceans.

“It’s really the private sector that’s pushing the scaling of this very quickly,” Subhas said. In the US and Canada, he said, there are at least four companies piloting varied ocean alkalinity enhancement techniques.

Last year, Ebb Carbon, a California-based startup focused on marine carbon dioxide removal, signed a deal with Microsoft to remove up to 350,000 metric tons of CO₂ over the next decade using an ocean alkalinity enhancement process that splits seawater into acidic and alkaline streams. The alkaline stream is then returned to the sea where it reacts with CO₂ and stores it as bicarbonate, enabling the ocean to absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In return, Microsoft will purchase carbon removal credits from the startup.

Another company called Vesta, which has headquarters in San Francisco, is using an approach called Coastal Carbon Capture. This involves adding finely ground olivine—a naturally occurring olive-green colored mineral—to sandy beaches. From there, ocean tides and waves carry it into the sea. Olivine reacts quickly with seawater in a process known as enhanced weathering, increasing ocean alkalinity. The company piloted one of their projects in Duck, North Carolina, last year where it estimated approximately 5,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide would be removed through coastal carbon capture after accounting for project emissions, according to its website.

But these efforts are not without risk, AU’s Burns said. “We have to proceed in an extremely precautionary manner,” he said.

Some scientists are concerned that OAE initiatives that involve olivine, which contains heavy metals like nickel and chromium, may harm marine life, he said. Another concern is that the olivine could cloud certain ocean areas and block light from penetrating to deeper depths. If too much alkalinity is introduced too fast in concentrated areas, he said, some animals might not be able to adjust.

Other marine carbon dioxide removal projects are using other methods besides OAE. Some involve adding iron to the ocean to stimulate growth in microscopic plants called phytoplankton, which absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis. Others include the cultivation of large-scale farms of kelp and seaweed, which also absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis. The marine plants can then be sunk in the deep ocean to store the carbon they absorbed.

In 2023, researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution conducted their first OAE-related field experiment from the 90-foot research vessel R/V Connecticut south of Massachusetts. As part of this first experiment, nontoxic water tracer dye was released into the ocean. Researchers tracked its movement through the water for 72 hours to model the dispersion of a plume of alkalinity over time. Credit: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

One technique that has not yet been tried, but may be piloted in the future, according to the science-based conservation nonprofit Ocean Visions, would employ new technology to accelerate the ocean’s natural process of transferring surface water and carbon to the deep ocean. That’s called artificial downwelling. In a reverse process—artificial upwelling—cooler, nutrient-rich waters from the deep ocean would be pumped to the surface to spur phytoplankton growth.

So far, UC San Diego’s Levin said she is not convinced that these trials will lead to impactful carbon removal.

“I do not think the ocean is ever going to be a really large part of that solution,” she said. However, she added, “It might be part of the storage solution. Right now, people are looking at injecting carbon dioxide that’s removed from industry activities on land and transporting it to the ocean and injecting it into basalt.”

Levin said she’s also worried that we don’t know enough yet about the consequences of altering natural ocean processes.

“I am concerned about how many field trials would be required to actually understand what would happen, and whether we could truly understand the environmental risk of a fully scaled-up operation,” she said.

The experiment

Most marine carbon dioxide removal projects that have kicked off already are significantly larger in scale than the LOC-NESS experiment, which Subhas estimates will remove around 50 tons of CO₂.

But, he emphasized, the goal of this project is not to compete in size or scale. He said the aim is to provide independent academic research that can help guide and inform the future of this industry and ensure it does not have negative repercussions on the marine environment.

There is some concern, he said, that commercial entities may pursue large-scale OAE initiatives to capitalize on the growing voluntary carbon market without first conducting adequate testing for safety and efficacy. Unlike those initiatives, there is no profit to be made from LOC-NESS. No carbon credits will be sold, Subhas said.

The project is funded by a collection of government and philanthropic sources, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Carbon to Sea Initiative, a nonprofit that brings funders and scientists together to support marine carbon dioxide removal research and technology.

“We really feel like it’s necessary for the scientific community to be delivering transparent, trusted, and rigorous science to evaluate these things as these activities are currently happening and scaling in the ocean by the private sector,” Subhas said.

The LOC-NESS field trial in Wilkinson Basin will be the first “academic only” OAE experiment conducted from a ship in US waters. It is also the first of its kind to receive a permit from the Environmental Protection Agency under the Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act.

“There’s no research in the past or planned that gets even close to providing a learning opportunity that this research is providing for OAE in the pelagic environment,” said Carbon to Sea Initiative’s Antonius Gagern, referring to the open sea experiment.

The permit was granted in April after a year of consultations between the EPA and other federal agencies.

During the process’ public comment periods, commenters expressed concerns about the potential impact on marine life, including the critically endangered North Atlantic right whales, small crustaceans that they eat called copepods, and larvae for the commercially important squid and mackerel fisheries. In a written response to some of these comments, the EPA stated that the small-scale project “demonstrates scientific rigor” and is “not expected to significantly affect human health, the marine environment, or other uses of the ocean.”

Subhas and his interdisciplinary team of chemists, biologists, engineers, and physicists from Woods Hole have spent the last few years planning this experiment and conducting a series of trials at their lab on Cape Cod to ensure they can safely execute and effectively monitor the results of the open-water test they will conduct this summer in the Gulf of Maine.

They specifically tested the effects of sodium hydroxide—an alkaline substance also known as lye or caustic soda—on marine microbes, phytoplankton, and copepods, a crucial food source for many marine species in the region in addition to the right whales. “We chose sodium hydroxide because it’s incredibly pure,” Subhas said. It’s widely used in the US to reduce acidity in drinking water.

It also helps counter ocean acidification, according to Subhas. “It’s like Tums for the ocean,” he said.

Ocean acidification occurs when the ocean absorbs excess carbon dioxide, causing its pH to drop. This makes it harder for corals, krill, and shellfish like oysters and clams to develop their hard calcium carbonate shells or skeletons.

This month, the team plans to release 50 tons of sodium hydroxide into a designated area of the Wilkinson Basin from the back of one of two research vessels participating in the LOC-NESS operation.

The basin is an ideal test site, according to Subhas, because there is little presence of phytoplankton, zooplankton, commercial fish larvae, and endangered species, including some whales, during this season. Still, as a precautionary measure, Woods Hole has contracted a protected species observer to keep a look out for marine species and mitigate potential harm if they are spotted. That person will be on board as the vessel travels to and from the field trial site, including while the team releases the sodium hydroxide into the ocean.

The alkaline substance will be dispersed over four to 12 hours off the back of one of the research vessels, along with the nontoxic fluorescent red water tracer dye called rhodamine. The dye will help track the location and spread of the sodium hydroxide once released into the ocean, and the vessel’s wake will help mix the solution in with the ocean water.

After about an hour, Subhas said, it will form into a “pinkish” patch of water that can be picked up on satellites. “We’re going to be taking pictures from space and looking at how this patch sort of evolves, dilutes, and stretches and disperses over time.”

For a week after that, scientists aboard the vessels will take rotating shifts to collect data around the clock. They will deploy drones and analyze over 20 types of samples from the research vessel to monitor how the surrounding waters and marine life respond to the experiment. They’ll track changes in ocean chemistry, nutrient levels, plankton populations and water clarity, while also measuring acidity and dissolved CO₂.

In March, the team did a large-scale dry run of the dispersal at an open air testing facility on a naval base in New Jersey. According to Subhas, the trial demonstrated their ability to safely and effectively deliver alkalinity to surface seawater.

“The next step is being able to measure the carbon uptake from seawater—from the atmosphere into seawater,” he said. That is a slower process. He said he expects to have some preliminary results on carbon uptake, as well as environmental impacts, early next year.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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National Academies to fast-track a new climate assessment

climate change, endangerment finding, EPA, National Academies, Science, syndication / Kelly Newman / August 8, 2025

The nation’s premier group of scientific advisers announced Thursday that it will conduct an independent, fast-track review of the latest climate science. It will do so with an eye to weighing in on the Trump administration’s planned repeal of the government’s 2009 determination that greenhouse gas emissions harm human health and the environment.

The move by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to self-fund the study is a departure from their typical practice of responding to requests by government agencies or Congress for advice. The Academies intend to publicly release it in September, in time to inform the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision on the so-called “endangerment finding,” they said in a prepared statement.

“It is critical that federal policymaking is informed by the best available scientific evidence,” said Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences. “Decades of climate research and data have yielded expanded understanding of how greenhouse gases affect the climate. We are undertaking this fresh examination of the latest climate science in order to provide the most up-to-date assessment to policymakers and the public.”

The Academies are private, nonprofit institutions that operate under an 1863 congressional charter, signed by President Abraham Lincoln, directing them to provide independent, objective analysis and advice to inform public policy decisions.

The Trump administration’s move to rescind the endangerment finding, announced last month, would eliminate the legal underpinning of the most important actions the federal government has taken on climate change—regulation of carbon pollution from motor vehicles and power plants under the Clean Air Act. Since assuming his role, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has made clear he intends to repeal the climate rules that were put in place under the Biden administration, but his job will be far easier with the elimination of the endangerment finding.

The EPA based its proposal mainly on a narrow interpretation of the agency’s legal authority, but the agency also cited uncertainties in the science, pointing to a report published the same day by the Department of Energy that was authored by a hand-picked quintet of well-known skeptics of the mainstream consensus on climate change. The administration has given a short window of opportunity—30 days—for the public to respond to its endangerment finding proposal and to the DOE report on climate science.

The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the announcement by the National Academies. Critics of the Trump administration’s approach applauded the decision by the scientific panel.

“I think the National Academies have identified a very fundamental need that is not being met, which is the need for independent, disinterested expert advice on what the science is telling us,” said Bob Sussman, who served as deputy administrator of the EPA in the Clinton administration and was a senior adviser in the agency during the Obama administration.

Earlier Thursday, before the National Academies announcement, Sussman posted a blog at the Environmental Law Institute website calling for a “blue-ribbon review” of the science around the endangerment finding. Sussman noted the review of the state of climate science that the National Academies conducted in 2001 at the request of President George W. Bush’s administration. Since then, the Academies have conducted numerous studies on aspects of climate change, including the development of a “climate-ready workforce,” how to power AI sustainably, and emerging technologies for removing carbon from the atmosphere, for example.

The National Academies announced in 2023 that they were developing a rapid response capacity to address the many emerging scientific policy issues the nation was facing. The first project they worked on was an assessment of the state of science around diagnostics for avian influenza.

Andrew Dessler, director of the Texas Center for Extreme Weather at Texas A&M University, said the new controversy that the Trump administration had stirred around climate science was a fitting subject for a fast-track effort by the National Academies.

“The National Academies [were] established exactly to do things like this—to answer questions of scientific importance for the government,” he said. “This is what the DOE should have done all along, rather than hire five people who represent a tiny minority of the scientific community and have views that virtually nobody else agrees with.”

Dessler is leading an effort to coordinate a response from the scientific community to the DOE report, which would also be submitted to the EPA. He said that he had heard from about 70 academics eager to participate after putting out a call on the social media network Bluesky. He said that work will continue because it seems to have a slightly different focus than the National Academies’ announced review, which does not mention the DOE report but talks about focusing on the scientific evidence on the harms of greenhouse gas emissions that has emerged since 2009, the year the endangerment finding was adopted by the EPA.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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Analysis: The Trump administration’s assault on climate action

clean air act, climate change, Earth science, EPA, global warming, misinformation, Policy, Science, Supreme Court / Kelly Newman / August 6, 2025

Official actions don’t challenge science, while unofficial docs muddy the waters.

Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency made lots of headlines by rejecting the document that establishes its ability to regulate the greenhouse gases that are warming our climate. While the legal assault on regulations grabbed most of the attention, it was paired with two other actions that targeted other aspects of climate change: the science underlying our current understanding of the dramatic warming the Earth is experiencing, and the renewable energy that represents our best chance of limiting this warming.

Collectively, these actions illuminate the administration’s strategy for dealing with a problem that it would prefer to believe doesn’t exist, despite our extensive documentation of its reality. They also show how the administration is tailoring its approach to different audiences, including the audience of one who is demanding inaction.

When in doubt, make something up

The simplest thing to understand is an action by the Department of the Interior, which handles permitting for energy projects on federal land—including wind and solar, both onshore and off. That has placed the Interior in an awkward position. Wind and solar are now generally the cheapest ways to generate electricity and are currently in the process of a spectacular boom, with solar now accounting for over 80 percent of the newly installed capacity in the US.

Yet, when Trump issued an executive order declaring an energy emergency, wind and solar were notably excluded as potential solutions. Language from Trump and other administration officials has also made it clear that renewable energy is viewed as an impediment to the administration’s pro-fossil fuel agenda.

But shutting down federal permitting for renewable energy with little more than “we don’t like it” as justification could run afoul of rules that forbid government decisions from being “arbitrary and capricious.” This may explain why the government gave up on its attempts to block the ongoing construction of an offshore wind farm in New York waters.

On Friday, the Interior announced that it had settled on a less arbitrary justification for blocking renewable energy on public land: energy density. Given a metric of land use per megawatt, wind and solar are less efficient than nuclear plants we can’t manage to build on time or budget, and therefore “environmentally damaging” and an inefficient use of federal land, according to the new logic. “The Department will now consider proposed energy project’s capacity density when assessing the project’s potential energy benefits to the nation and impacts to the environment and wildlife,” Interior declared.

This is only marginally more reasonable than Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s apparent inability to recognize that solar power can be stored in batteries. But it has three features that will be recurring themes. There’s at least a token attempt to provide a justification that might survive the inevitable lawsuits, while at the same time providing fodder for the culture war that many in the administration demand. And it avoids directly attacking the science that initially motivated the push toward renewables.

Energy vs. the climate

That’s not to say that climate change isn’t in for attack. It’s just that the attacks are being strategically separated from the decisions that might produce a lawsuit. Last week, the burden of taking on extremely well-understood and supported science fell to the Department of Energy, which released a report on climate “science” to coincide with the EPA’s decision to give up on attempts to regulate greenhouse gases.

For those who have followed public debates over climate change, looking at the author list—John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Ross McKitrick, and Roy Spencer—will give you a very clear picture of what to expect. Spencer is a creationist, raising questions about his ability to evaluate any science free from his personal biases. (He has also said, “My job has helped save our economy from the economic ravages of out-of-control environmental extremism,” so it’s not just biology where he’s got these issues.) McKitrick is an economist who engaged in a multi-year attempt to raise doubt about the prominent “hockey stick” reconstruction of past climates, even as scientists were replicating the results. Etc.

The report is a master class in arbitrary and capricious decision-making applied to science. Sometimes the authors rely on the peer-reviewed literature. Other times they perform their own analysis for this document, in some cases coming up with almost comically random metrics for data. (Example: “We examine occurrences of 5-day deluges as follows. Taking the Pacific coast as an example, a 130-year span contains 26 5-year intervals. At each location we computed the 5-day precipitation totals throughout the year and selected the 26 highest values across the sample.” Why five days? Five-year intervals? Who knows.)

This is especially striking in a few cases where the authors choose references that were published a few years ago, and thus neatly avoid the dramatic temperature records that have been set over the past couple of years. Similarly, they sometimes use regional measures and sometimes use global ones. They demand long-term data in some contexts, while getting excited about two years of coral growth in the Great Barrier Reef. The authors highlight the fact that US tide gauges don’t show any indication of an acceleration in the rate of sea level rise while ignoring the fact that global satellite measures clearly do.

That’s not to say that there aren’t other problems. There’s some blatant misinformation, like claims that urbanization could be distorting the warming, which has already been tested extensively. (Notably, warming is most intense in the sparsely populated Arctic.) There’s also some creative use of language, like referring to the ocean acidification caused by CO₂ as “neutralizing ocean alkalinity.”

But the biggest bit of misinformation comes in the introduction, where the secretary of energy, Chris Wright, said of the authors, “I chose them for their rigor, honesty, and willingness to elevate the debate.” There is no reason to choose this group of marginal contrarians except the knowledge that they’d produce a report like this, thus providing a justification for those in the administration who want to believe it’s all a scam.

No science needed

The critical feature of the Department of Energy report is that it contains no policy actions; it’s purely about trying to undercut well-understood climate science. This means the questionable analyses in the report shouldn’t ever end up being tested in court.

That’s in contrast to the decision to withdraw the EPA’s endangerment finding regarding greenhouse gases. There’s quite an extensive history to the endangerment finding, but briefly, it’s the product of a Supreme Court decision (Massachusetts v. EPA), which compelled the EPA to evaluate whether greenhouse gases posed a threat to the US population as defined in the Clean Air Act. Both the Bush and Obama EPAs did so, thus enabling the regulation of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide.

Despite the claims in the Department of Energy report, there is comprehensive evidence that greenhouse gases are causing problems in the US, ranging from extreme weather to sea level rise. So while the EPA mentions the Department of Energy’s work a number of times, the actual action being taken skips over the science and focuses on legal issues. In doing so, it creates a false history where the endangerment finding had no legal foundation.

To re-recap, the Supreme Court determined that this evaluation was required by the Clean Air Act. George W. Bush’s administration performed the analysis and reached the exact same conclusion as the Obama administration (though the former chose to ignore those conclusions). Yet Trump’s EPA is calling the endangerment finding “an unprecedented move” by the Obama administration that involved “mental leaps” and “ignored Congress’ clear intent.” And the EPA presents the findings as strategic, “the only way the Obama-Biden Administration could access EPA’s authority to regulate,” rather than compelled by scientific evidence.

Fundamentally, it’s an ahistorical presentation; the EPA is counting on nobody remembering what actually happened.

The announcement doesn’t get much better when it comes to the future. The only immediate change will be an end to any attempts to regulate carbon emissions from motor vehicles, since regulations for power plants had been on hold due to court challenges. Yet somehow, the EPA’s statement claims that this absence of regulation imposed costs on people. “The Endangerment Finding has also played a significant role in EPA’s justification of regulations of other sources beyond cars and trucks, resulting in additional costly burdens on American families and businesses,” it said.

We’re still endangered

Overall, the announcements made last week provide a clear picture of how the administration intends to avoid addressing climate change and cripple the responses started by previous administrations. Outside of the policy arena, it will question the science and use partisan misinformation to rally its supporters for the fight. But it recognizes that these approaches aren’t flying when it comes to the courts.

So it will separately pursue a legal approach that seeks to undercut the ability of anyone, including private businesses, to address climate change, crafting “reasons” for its decisions in a way that might survive legal challenge—because these actions are almost certain to be challenged in court. And that may be the ultimate goal. The current court has shown a near-complete disinterest in respecting precedent and has issued a string of decisions that severely limit the EPA. It’s quite possible that the court will simply throw out the prior decision that compelled the government to issue an endangerment finding in the first place.

If that’s left in place, then any ensuing administrations can simply issue a new endangerment finding. If anything, the effects of climate change on the US population have become more obvious, and the scientific understanding of human-driven warming has solidified since the Bush administration first acknowledged them.

Analysis: The Trump administration’s assault on climate action Read More »

Southwestern drought likely to continue through 2100, research finds

climate change, drought, Science, southwestern united states, syndication / Shannon Garcia / July 20, 2025

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

The drought in the Southwestern US is likely to last for the rest of the 21st century and potentially beyond as global warming shifts the distribution of heat in the Pacific Ocean, according to a study published last week led by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin.

Using sediment cores collected in the Rocky Mountains, paleoclimatology records and climate models, the researchers found warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions can alter patterns of atmospheric and marine heat in the North Pacific Ocean in a way resembling what’s known as the negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), fluctuations in sea surface temperatures that result in decreased winter precipitation in the American Southwest. But in this case, the phenomenon can last far longer than the usual 30-year cycle of the PDO.

“If the sea surface temperature patterns in the North Pacific were just the result of processes related to stochastic [random] variability in the past decade or two, we would have just been extremely unlucky, like a really bad roll of the dice,” said Victoria Todd, the lead author of the study and a PhD student in geosciences at University of Texas at Austin. “But if, as we hypothesize, this is a forced change in the sea surface temperatures in the North Pacific, this will be sustained into the future, and we need to start looking at this as a shift, instead of just the result of bad luck.”

Currently, the Southwestern US is experiencing a megadrought resulting in the aridification of the landscape, a decades-long drying of the region brought on by climate change and the overconsumption of the region’s water. That’s led to major rivers and their basins, such as the Colorado and Rio Grande rivers, seeing reduced flows and a decline of the water stored in underground aquifers, which is forcing states and communities to reckon with a sharply reduced water supply. Farmers have cut back on the amount of water they use. Cities are searching for new water supplies. And states, tribes, and federal agencies are engaging in tense negotiations over how to manage declining resources like the Colorado River going forward.

Southwestern drought likely to continue through 2100, research finds Read More »

Ars Live recap: Climate science in a rapidly changing world

Berkeley Earth, climate change, Earth science, global temperatures, Science / Beth Washington / July 10, 2025

The conversation then moved to the record we have of the Earth’s surface temperatures and the role of Berkeley Earth in providing an alternate method of calculating those. While the temperature records were somewhat controversial in the past, those arguments have largely settled down, and Berkeley Earth played a major role in helping to show that the temperature records have been reliable.

Lately, those temperatures have been unusually high, crossing 1.5° C above pre-industrial conditions for the first time and remaining elevated for months at a stretch. Scientists have been coming up with a number of explanations and figuring out how to test them. Hausfather described those tests and what we’re learning about how these things might be influencing the trajectory of our warming.

From there, we moved on to user questions, which addressed issues like tipping points, the potential use of geoengineering, and what things Hausfather would most like to see in terms of better data and new questions to answer. For details on these issues and the answers to viewer questions, see the video above. We also have a full transcript of the conversation.

Ars Live recap: Climate science in a rapidly changing world Read More »

Ocean acidification crosses “planetary boundaries”

climate, climate change, ocean acidification, Science, syndication / Beth Washington / June 10, 2025

A critical measure of the ocean’s health suggests that the world’s marine systems are in greater peril than scientists had previously realized and that parts of the ocean have already reached dangerous tipping points.

A study, published Monday in the journal Global Change Biology, found that ocean acidification—the process in which the world’s oceans absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, becoming more acidic—crossed a “planetary boundary” five years ago.

“A lot of people think it’s not so bad,” said Nina Bednaršek, one of the study’s authors and a senior researcher at Oregon State University. “But what we’re showing is that all of the changes that were projected, and even more so, are already happening—in all corners of the world, from the most pristine to the little corner you care about. We have not changed just one bay, we have changed the whole ocean on a global level.”

The new study, also authored by researchers at the UK’s Plymouth Marine Laboratory and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), finds that by 2020 the world’s oceans were already very close to the “danger zone” for ocean acidity, and in some regions had already crossed into it.

Scientists had determined that ocean acidification enters this danger zone or crosses this planetary boundary when the amount of calcium carbonate—which allows marine organisms to develop shells—is less than 20 percent compared to pre-industrial levels. The new report puts the figure at about 17 percent.

“Ocean acidification isn’t just an environmental crisis, it’s a ticking time bomb for marine ecosystems and coastal economies,” said Steve Widdicombe, director of science at the Plymouth lab, in a press release. “As our seas increase in acidity, we’re witnessing the loss of critical habitats that countless marine species depend on and this, in turn, has major societal and economic implications.”

Scientists have determined that there are nine planetary boundaries that, once breached, risk humans’ abilities to live and thrive. One of these is climate change itself, which scientists have said is already beyond humanity’s “safe operating space” because of the continued emissions of heat-trapping gases. Another is ocean acidification, also caused by burning fossil fuels.

Ocean acidification crosses “planetary boundaries” Read More »

Renewable power reversing China’s emissions growth

carbon emissions, china, climate change, Energy, renewable energy, Science, solar, Wind / Shannon Garcia / May 15, 2025

China has been installing renewable energy at a spectacular rate, and now has more renewable capacity than the next 13 countries combined, and four times that of its closest competitor, the US. Yet, so far at least, that hasn’t been enough to offset the rise of fossil fuel use in that country. But a new analysis by the NGO Carbon Brief suggests things may be changing, as China’s emissions have now dropped over the past year, showing a one percent decline compared to the previous March. The decline is largely being led by the power sector, where growth in renewables has surged above rising demand.

This isn’t the first time that China’s emissions have gone down over the course of a year, but in all previous cases the cause was primarily economic—driven by things like the COVID pandemic or the 2008 housing crisis. The latest shift, however, was driven largely by the country’s energy sector, which saw a two percent decline in emissions over the past year.

Image of a graph, showing a general rise with small periods of decline. A slight decline has occurred over the last year. — China’s emissions have shown a slight decline over the last year, despite economic growth and rising demand for electricity. Credit: Carbon Brief

Carbon Brief put the report together using data from several official government sources, including the National Bureau of Statistics of China, National Energy Administration of China, and the China Electricity Council. Projections for future growth come from the China Wind Energy Association and the China Photovoltaic Industry Association.

The data indicate that the most recent monthly peak in emissions was March of 2024. Since then, total emissions have gone down by one percent—a change the report notes is small enough that it could easily reverse should conditions change. The report highlights, however, that the impact of renewables appears to be accelerating. The growth of clean power in the first quarter of 2025 was enough to drive a 1.6 percent drop compared to the same quarter a year before, outpacing the overall average of a one percent decline.

Renewable power reversing China’s emissions growth Read More »

Dangerous clear-air turbulence is worsening due to global warming

airlines, climate change, flight, jet stream, Science, syndication / Kelly Newman / May 7, 2025

“Global warming is faster at the poles,” Faranda said, “and it’s melting ice and it’s also warming differently in oceans and on continents.”

As global warming jars climatic patterns, it affects the jet streams, he said.

Williams, the University of Reading scientist, was “the first to understand that if the jet stream is affected, then turbulence in the jet stream is affected, and therefore flight operations are affected,” Faranda said.

In his EGU presentation, Williams said it’s important to look at vertical wind shear because the signal in the data is much stronger compared to the noise.

“Why do we care about stronger wind shear? Well, of course, it’s because we fly through it,” he said, showing a photo of a grounded jet plane that lost an engine in severe clear-air turbulence. The data shows there has been a 55 percent increase of severe air turbulence since the 1970s, he added.

Climate models show that, under the most realistic greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, a “hotspot in the tropical upper troposphere will continue to grow, which means an even stronger midlatitude temperature gradient,” he said.

That hotspot in the upper troposphere is an area of amplified warming resulting partly from water vapor feedbacks, as moist, hot air steams off the tropical oceans. That heat bulge is increasing the temperature gradient in areas near some of the busiest flight paths, including transatlantic routes.

If rapid warming continues, Williams said, studies show vertical wind shear could increase 29 percent by 2100, or 17 percent if global emissions are halved by mid-century and keep dropping.

“This, of course, means a lot more turbulence in not that many years from now,” he said.

Faranda added that his own experiences and research on clear-air turbulence won’t keep him from flying. New measurements by weather instruments and greater awareness of the potential for such turbulence will help keep most flights safe, and changes to wing design and plane construction could make them less vulnerable, he added.

“In principle, you can fly through these areas without consequences in most cases,” Faranda said. But with projections for more intense and frequent turbulence, it’s important to maintain observation programs, he added.

“With the new global political situation, there is a lot of talk of reducing instruments for monitoring the weather and the climate, and this would produce worse weather forecasts,” he said. And fewer weather observations will likely lead to shakier flights.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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