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Despite congressional threat, National Academies releases new climate report

climate change, doe, EPA, greenhouse gasses, National Academies, Science / Shannon Garcia / September 21, 2025

The National Academies responded to the EPA’s actions by saying it would prepare a report of its own, which it did despite the threat of a congressional investigation into its work. And the result undercuts the EPA’s claims even further.

Blunt and to the point

The NAS report does not mess around with subtleties, going straight to the main point: Everything we’ve learned since the endangerment finding confirms that it was on target. “EPA’s 2009 finding that the human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases threaten human health and welfare was accurate, has stood the test of time, and is now reinforced by even stronger evidence,” its authors conclude.

That evidence includes a better understanding of the climate itself, with the report citing “Longer records, improved and more robust observational networks, and analytical and methodological advances” that have both allowed us to better detect the changes in the climate, and more reliably assign them to the effects of greenhouse gases. The events attributed to climate change are also clearly harming the welfare of the US public through things like limiting agricultural productivity gains, damage from wildfires, losses due to water scarcity, and general stresses on our infrastructure.

But it’s not just the indirect effects we have to worry about. The changing climate is harming us more directly as well:

Climate change intensifies risks to humans from exposures to extreme heat, ground-level ozone, airborne particulate matter, extreme weather events, and airborne allergens, affecting incidence of cardiovascular, respiratory, and other diseases. Climate change has increased exposure to pollutants from wildfire smoke and dust, which has been linked to adverse health effects. The increasing severity of some extreme events has contributed to injury, illness, and death in affected communities. Health impacts related to climate-sensitive infectious diseases—such as those carried by insects and contaminated water—have increased.

Moreover, it notes that one of the government’s arguments—that US emissions are too small to be meaningful—doesn’t hold water. Even small increments of change will increase the risk of damaging events for decades to come, and push the world closer to hitting potential tipping points in the climate system. Therefore, cutting US emissions will directly reduce those risks.

Despite congressional threat, National Academies releases new climate report Read More »

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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RFK Jr.’s health department calls Nature “junk science,” cancels subscriptions

doe, health, NASA, Nature, NIH, USDA / Mike M. / July 2, 2025

The move comes after HHS Secretary and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on a May 27 podcast that prestigious medical journals are “corrupt.”

“We’re probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and those other journals because they’re all corrupt,” he said. He accused the journals collectively of being a “vessel for pharmaceutical propaganda.” He went on to say that “unless these journals change dramatically,” the federal government would “stop NIH scientists from publishing there” and create “in-house” journals instead.

Kennedy’s criticism largely stems from his belief that modern medicine and mainstream science are part of a global conspiracy to generate pharmaceutical profits. Kennedy is a germ-theory denier who believes people can maintain their health not by relying on evidence-based medicine, such as vaccines, but by clean living and eating—a loose concept called “terrain theory.”

Access to top scientific and medical journals is essential for federal scientists to keep up to date with their fields and publicize high-impact results. One NIH employee added to Nature news that it “suppresses our scientific freedom, to pursue information where it is present.”

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Federal agencies continue terminating all funding to Harvard

DoD, doe, Harvard, NIH, NSF, research funding, Science / 9u50fv / May 14, 2025

On Tuesday, the federal government’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism announced that it had terminated research grants to Harvard totalling $450 million, spread out across eight federal agencies. The move comes on the heels of $2.2 billion in earlier cuts and an announcement that the university will be prevented from receiving any future grants. The ongoing campaign appears to be heading toward a point where no researchers at Harvard will receive federal funding.

The announcement reiterates accusations that are familiar from earlier federal funding terminations. It references antisemitic incidents during earlier protests about Israel’s actions in Gaza and the fact that the Harvard Law Review has taken steps to diversify the authors it publishes, which the government considers illegal discrimination. Notably, the letter does not mention any more recent events, nor Harvard’s efforts to address antisemitism on campus, saying:

Harvard’s campus, once a symbol of academic prestige, has become a breeding ground for virtue signaling and discrimination. This is not leadership; it is cowardice. And it’s not academic freedom; it’s institutional disenfranchisement. There is a dark problem on Harvard’s campus, and by prioritizing appeasement over accountability, institutional leaders have forfeited the school’s claim to taxpayer support.

It’s generally difficult to understand the big picture of these cuts and the reasons for them from this announcement. Instead, it has to be pieced together from the multitude of letters that individual agencies have sent Harvard.

Multiple federal agencies, including the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense, also sent letters announcing the grant terminations on Tuesday. These sometimes contain more specific accusations, such as the Department of Energy letter, which specifically terms Harvard’s efforts to address past problems as insufficient. “Harvard has refused to take immediate, definitive and appropriate remedial action,” the letter said.

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Trump’s 2026 budget proposal: Crippling cuts for science across the board

budget, budget proposal, doe, interior, NIH, NOAA, NSF, Science, science funding, trump administration / Mike M. / May 3, 2025

Budget document derides research and science-based policy as “woke,” “scams.”

On Friday, the US Office of Management and Budget sent Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chair of the Senate’s Appropriations Committee, an outline of what to expect from the Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal. As expected, the budget includes widespread cuts, affecting nearly every branch of the federal government.

In keeping with the administration’s attacks on research agencies and the places research gets done, research funding will be taking an enormous hit, with the National Institutes of Health taking a 40 percent cut and the National Science Foundation losing 55 percent of its 2025 budget. But the budget goes well beyond those highlighted items, with nearly every place science gets done or funded targeted for cuts.

Perhaps even more shocking is the language used to justify the cuts, which reads more like a partisan rant than a serious budget document.

Health cuts

Having a secretary of Health and Human Services who doesn’t believe in germ theory is not likely to do good things for US health programs, and the proposed budget will only make matters worse. Kennedy’s planned MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) program would be launched with half a billion in funds, but nearly everything else would take a cut.

The CDC would lose about $3.6 billion from its current budget of $9.6 billion, primarily due to the shuttering of a number of divisions within it: the National Center for Chronic Diseases Prevention and Health Promotion, the National Center for Environmental Health, the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, and the Global Health Center and its division of Public Health Preparedness and Response. The duties of those offices are, according to the budget document, “duplicative, DEI, or simply unnecessary.”

Another big hit to HHS comes from the termination of a $4 billion program that helps low-income families cover energy costs. The OMB suggests that these costs will get lower due to expanded energy production and, anyway, the states should be paying for it. Shifting financial burdens to states is a general theme of the document, an approach that will ultimately hit the poorest states hardest, even though these had very high percentages of Trump voters.

The document also says that “This Administration is committed to combatting the scourge of deadly drugs that have ravaged American communities,” while cutting a billion dollars from substance abuse programs within HHS.

But the headline cuts come from the National Institutes of Health, the single largest source of scientific funding in the world. NIH would see its current $48 billion budget chopped by $18 billion and its 27 individual institutes consolidated down to just five. This would result in vast cutbacks to US biomedical research, which is currently acknowledged to be world-leading. Combined with planned cuts to grant overheads, it will cause most research institutions to shrink, and some less well-funded universities may be forced to close facilities.

The justification for the cuts is little more than a partisan rant: “NIH has broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health.” The text then implies that the broken trust is primarily the product of failing to promote the idea that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a lab, even though there’s no scientific evidence to indicate that it had.

Climate research hit

The National Science Foundation funds much of the US’s fundamental science research, like physics and astronomy. Earlier reporting that it would see a 56 percent cut to its budget was confirmed. “The Budget cuts funding for: climate; clean energy; woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences; and programs in low priority areas of science.” Funding would be maintained for AI and quantum computing. All funding for encouraging minority participation in the sciences will also be terminated. The budget was released on the same day that the NSF announced it was joining other science agencies in standardizing on paying 15 percent of its grants’ value for maintaining facilities and providing services to researchers, a cut that would further the financial damage to research institutions.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would see $1.3 billion of its $6.6 billion budget cut, with the primary target being its climate change work. In fact, the budget for NOAA’s weather satellites will be cut to prevent them from including instruments that would make “unnecessary climate measurements.” Apparently, the Administration doesn’t want anyone to be exposed to data that might challenge its narrative that climate change is a scam.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology would lose $350 million for similar reasons. “NIST has long funded awards for the development of curricula that advance a radical climate agenda,” the document suggests, before going on to say that the Institute’s Circular Economy Program, which promotes the efficient reuse of industrial materials, “pushes environmental alarmism.”

The Department of Energy is seeing a $1.1 billion hit to its science budget, “eliminating funding for Green New Scam interests and climate change-related activities.” The DOE will also take hits to policy programs focused on climate change, including $15 billion in cuts to renewable energy and carbon capture spending. Separately, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy will also take a $2.6 billion hit. Over at the Department of the Interior, the US Geological Survey would see its renewable energy programs terminated, as well.

Some of the DOE’s other cuts, however, don’t even make sense given the administration’s priorities. The newly renamed Office of Fossil Energy—something that Trump favors—will still take a $270 million hit, and nuclear energy programs will see $400 million in cuts.

This sort of lack of self-awareness shows up several times in the document. In one striking case, an interior program funding water infrastructure improvements is taking a cut that “reduces funding for programs that have nothing to do with building and maintaining water infrastructure, such as habitat restoration.” Apparently, the OMB is unaware that functioning habitats can help provide ecosystem services that can reduce the need for water infrastructure.

Similarly, over at the EPA, they’re boosting programs for clean drinking water by $36 million, while at the same time cutting loans to states for clean water projects by $2.5 billion. “The States should be responsible for funding their own water infrastructure projects,” the OMB declares. Research at the EPA also takes a hit: “The Budget puts an end to unrestrained research grants, radical environmental justice work, woke climate research, and skewed, overly-precautionary modeling that influences regulations—none of which are authorized by law.”

An attack on scientific infrastructure

US science couldn’t flourish without an educational system that funnels talented individuals into graduate programs. So, naturally, funding for those is being targeted as well. This is partially a function of the administration’s intention to eliminate the Department of Education, but there also seems to be a specific focus on programs that target low-income individuals.

For example, the GEAR UP program describes itself as “designed to increase the number of low-income students who are prepared to enter and succeed in postsecondary education.” The OMB document describes it as “a relic of the past when financial incentives were needed to motivate Institutions of Higher Education to engage with low-income students and increase access.” It goes on to claim that this is “not the obstacle it was for students of limited means.”

Similarly, the SEOG program funding is “awarded to an undergraduate student who demonstrates exceptional financial need.” In the OMB’s view, colleges and universities “have used [it] to fund radical leftist ideology instead of investing in students and their success.” Another cut is claimed to eliminate “Equity Assistance Centers that have indoctrinated children.” And “The Budget proposes to end Federal taxpayer dollars being weaponized to indoctrinate new teachers.”

In addition, the federal work-study program, which subsidizes on-campus jobs for needy students, is also getting a billion-dollar cut. Again, the document says that the states can pay for it.

(The education portion also specifically cuts the funding of Howard University, which is both distinct as a federally supported Black university and also notable as being where Kamala Harris got her first degree.)

The end of US leadership

This budget is a recipe for ending the US’s leadership in science. It would do generational damage by forcing labs to shut down, with a corresponding loss of highly trained individuals and one-of-a-kind research materials. At the same time, it will throttle the educational pipeline that could eventually replace those losses. Given that the US is one of the major sources of research funding in the world, if approved, the budget will have global consequences.

To the people within the OMB who prepared the document, these are not losses. The document makes it very clear that they view many instances of scientific thought and evidence-based policy as little more than forms of ideological indoctrination, presumably because the evidence sometimes contradicts what they’d prefer to believe.

Trump’s 2026 budget proposal: Crippling cuts for science across the board Read More »

Co-op Dungeon Crawler ‘Dungeons of Eternity’ Has Big Plans for Post-launch Content

doe, dungeon crawler, dungeons of eternity, dungeons of eternity vr, Meta Quest 3 News & Reviews, othergate, Quest 2, quest 3, vr dungeon crawler / Mike M. / November 25, 2023

Dungeons of Eternity (2023), the VR hack-n-slash adventure, has big plans for post-launch content, as developers Othergate announced its roadmap for the next year.

Released on Quest in October, Dungeons of Eternity includes both co-op and solo gameplay, pitting you against ever-changing dungeons with up to three other players.

The game’s randomly-generated dungeons also include multiple game modes and realms, featuring stuff like combat arenas, puzzles, trap rooms, secret chambers, and more—basically everything you’d expect from a DnD-style VR game.

At any rate, that’s what the game launched with a little over a month ago, but now the studio says it has a bunch of new content on the horizon, as the studio released a roadmap projecting clear out to the end of next year. Check it out below:

Studio co-founder Ryan Rutherford also says in a recent Reddit AMA that the team has a “precise vision of creating a long-lasting VR experience you can enjoy with your friends or by yourself,” noting that the studio is entertaining a host of other improvements beyond those mentioned above.

You can find it on the Meta Store for Quest, priced at $30. At the time of this writing, Dungeons of Eternity is sporting a [4.65/5] user rating.

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