Dozens of scientists find errors in a new Energy Department climate report

The DoE report citing heavily co2science.org as a source is laughable.

I did some random spot checks of the DoE report and this new rebuttal. The rebuttal is crap. If this is the best they can do, the new DoE conclusions should stand.

Example 1. A dispute over the effect of pH on coral reefs. DoE: "De’ath et al. (2009) ... [said] Great Barrier Reef experienced 14% decline in calcification since 1990 ... [that] resulted from a biased data analysis that, when corrected, showed no change in calcification rates". DoE points out that climatologists cited the flawed study hundreds of times and the correction just 14 times. The rebuttal agrees that the analysis was biased and flawed, then cites the very same De'ath guy - the one they just agreed did bad work - to argue that there is still a problem, just smaller than stated.

If the best defense against a charge of bogus scientific claims is to cite more claims from the same source, that defense is weak.

Example 2. DoE points out that temperature records are heavily corrupted by urban development around the weather stations (UHI), that climatologists know this and claim to have taken it into account, but there's lots of evidence they haven't. They present examples of the bogus things climatologists have done, like presenting readings from the middle of cities of 100,000 people as "rural", or announcing UHI is insignificant without giving any evidence. And they cite papers showing that much of the warming announced by climatologists isn't real, it's just measurement error.

The rebuttal simply cites those very same datasets that the IPCC has already agreed are corrupted and then says "We have shown that [everything is fine]". But they haven't shown anything! None of the evidence presented by the DoE report has been addressed. They just repeated their standard line and ignored all the arguments in the report.

If your best defense against a set of arguments is to repeat your initial position and declare victory, your defense is weak.

Example 3. Storm intensity. DoE points out that storms aren't getting worse, contrary to common media reports, and that anyway Earth has a long history but our records are short, so labeling individual events as "extreme" doesn't make sense because we don't really know what the extremes are. The rebuttal agrees with all of this. Then it starts a list of criticisms. The very first one is "The DOE CWG Report neglects important evidence from theory and models". Models and theories don't yield evidence! They make predictions, which aren't evidence of anything except the beliefs of the model authors. Their statement is stupid and implies a loss of grip on the scientific method.

If your best defense is to agree with your critics then attack them for not conflating ideas with data, then your defense is weak and so is your whole field. They should be ashamed to make an argument like that.

I can't be bothered reading more of this stuff. The rebuttal is a gish gallop. They hope that by spamming 400+ pages they know no journalist will ever read, they'll get the headlines they want and people will just default to believing them through inertia and lazyness.

Climate Change Deniers in the Energy Department File Climate Change Report full of lies, no surprise here.

Wait until CDC starts issuing reports, those will make you toes curl.

It turns out replacing departments of the gov with chatgpt isn't going as well as they'd hoped