https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/doe-climate-working-group-rip
By ROGER PIELKE JR.
Excerpt:
We rarely break news here at THB, but we are today.The Department of Energy’s Climate Working Group (CWG) was disbanded on September 3 and its work under DOE will not continue in any manner. Presumably its work product(s) and submitted public comments will all be withdrawn. This will be formally announced shortly.
Based on my connecting the dots, the disbanding is the direct result of a lawsuit filed by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists arguing that the empanelment of the CWG violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA).
When I first read the lawsuit, I expected that it would be dismissed — Surely, I thought, DOE had taken steps to ensure that the five members of the CWG were either employed by DOE or otherwise detailed to the agency, such that they would not fall under the provisions of FACA.1
Apparently, one of the members of the CWG did not file the paperwork necessary to be considered internal to DOE, thus legitimizing the UCS/EDF lawsuit. Given this, on the merits, UCS/EDF were correct and would likely have prevailed. With the stakes so high, DOE was sloppy in not ensuring that the CWG was procedurally air tight.
The disbanding of the CWG says nothing about the substance of the CWG report — which, as THB readers know, made several important critques relying heavily on my work and that of colleagues — notably related to scenarios, extreme weather, “billion dollar disasters,” and extreme event attribution. Of course, in areas outside my expertise the report has seen other critiques that I have not discussed.
The most important accomplishment of the short-lived working group was to reveal the censorious and politicized response of many in the media and climate science community to the very idea that other accomplished and credentialed experts might have views that deviate in small or large degree from an acceptable orthodoxy — all in the context of climate politics.
Responses to the CWG were often expressed with expletives, in personal terms, and focused on the alleged political and financial motivations of the members of the CWG.
The responses of climate scientists to the CWG report also included multiple false claims — such as in defenses of RCP8.5, sowing confusion about time of emergence and detection/attribution, on the integrity of “billion dollar disasters,” contradicting IPCC on extreme weather and more. None of the critques chose to take on any of our research cited in the CWG report. It’s as if they dismissed more contentious claims of CWG in order to avoid having to take on those that were obviously correct.
