A group of 85 climate scientists has released a review on Monday refuting a Trump administration report that downplays climate change and its impacts.

The new review comes as public comment is being made in response to an Energy Department report that claims that “global climate models generally run ‘hot’,” and that “most extreme weather events in the U.S. do not show long-term trends.”

It also downplays the connection between human activity and the changing climate, saying, “Attribution of climate change or extreme weather events to human CO2 emissions is challenged by natural climate variability, data limitations, and inherent model deficiencies.”

That report was released in conjunction with the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) efforts to overturn a landmark 2009 finding that climate change poses a threat to public health.

The authors of the latest review say that the Trump administration’s report has “pervasive problems with misrepresentation and selective citation of the scientific literature, cherry-picking of data, and faulty or absent statistics.”

They address each section of the Energy Department’s 150-page report with a more than 450-page one of their own.

“There's a style throughout this of cherry-picking evidence that raises doubts about mainstream climate science while ignoring or downplaying the much larger body of evidence that supports it,” said Robert Kopp, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Rutgers University. 

Kopp pointed to a section of the Energy Department report that discusses sea level rise, claiming, based on five U.S. locations, that tide gauges show “no obvious acceleration” in rising sea levels.

“How do they show this? Well, they look at five U.S. tide gauges, and there are thousands of tide gauges around the world. They draw lines [through] them, ...and say, 'Oh, it looks like you can draw a line through it. Therefore there's no obvious acceleration.' That's not how you do science,” Kopp said. 

“We have statistics to test things like, is there an acceleration there? And in fact, there is.... and you also just don't pick five tide gages, right? There's a large body of evidence that sea level rise is accelerating, and they don't mention it at all,” he added.

The review from the 85 scientists began on social media, when Andrew Dessler, a professor at Texas A&M University, asked on the website Bluesky whether there was interest in putting together a response to the Energy Department report. Dessler then coordinated the effort, and Kopp co-edited. 

Energy Department spokesperson Ben Dietderich defended the Trump administration’s effort. 

"Unlike previous administrations, the Trump administration is committed to engaging in a more thoughtful and science-based conversation about climate change and energy,” Dietderich said in a written statement. “Following the public comment period, we look forward to reviewing and engaging on substantive comments.”

The scientists push back on additional claims made in the Trump administration’s report. 

Addressing the claim that models exaggerate surface temperature projections, for example, the scientists said that the Energy Department focuses “on a subset of the historical period, which results in a misleading comparison of models and observations.”

Similarly, they refute the department’s claim that “while there has been an increase in hot days in the U.S. since the 1950s…numbers are still low relative to the 1920s and 1930s.”

They write, “The intellectual framework… ignores a wealth of peer-reviewed science linking anthropogenic global warming to changes in extremely high temperatures while focusing on trends, which conflates a decadal climate anomaly over the Eastern U.S. during the 1930s with the long-term global trend over the entire record.”