Climate Debate – DOE CWG & Experts’ Review – Special Review…

September 3, 2025

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Jump to: Major flaws (at-a-glance) • Section notes • Who the experts are • Download the reports

What this post is (and isn’t)

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Climate Working Group (CWG) released a 151-page report. In response, 85+ climate experts assembled a comprehensive ~434–439-page review that critiques the CWG report’s methods, sourcing, and conclusions.

This page curates the primary source materials — the DOE report, the experts’ review, and the author bios — and highlights how to read them. It’s designed so you can dig into the originals yourself, or share them with others.

1) Major flaws flagged by the Experts’ Review (at-a-glance)

Evidence handling: points to pervasive cherry-picking, selective citation, and missing statistics in the CWG report.
Process/quality: argues the CWG product lacks the transparent, independent peer review standards used for highly influential assessments (e.g., IPCC/NCA).
Scope/expertise: contends a very small author team wrote far outside their specialties, leading to errors and omissions the review catalogs.
Key topic gaps: underestimation/misframing across heat, extreme precipitation, drought, hurricanes, wildfires, sea-level rise, agriculture, health, and economic risk.

2) Section notes: what’s inside the Experts’ Review

The review is organized as 48 focused comments, each written by topic specialists. Here are quick “signposts” so readers can jump to what they need:

Climate sensitivity & models (how sensitive the system is; near-term vs long-term metrics).
Observations: surface/tropospheric warming, vertical profiles, stratospheric cooling, snow cover, albedo.
Extreme events: temperature extremes, heavy precipitation, hurricanes & TCs, tornadoes, flooding, drought, wildfires.
Sea-level rise: observed acceleration, coastal flooding, 2050 outlook.
Attribution & variability: methods, oceans, solar variability, time-series methods.
Impacts & risk: agriculture, billion-dollar disasters, temperature-related mortality, economy & social cost of carbon.
Omissions called out: wildlife & biodiversity impacts.

Each comment cites the literature and calls out specific issues or claims to check in the CWG report. Tip: Skim the Table of Contents at the front of the PDF to hop directly to any topic.

3) Who the experts are

The review was co-edited by Andrew E. Dessler (Texas A&M) and Robert E. Kopp (Rutgers), and assembled contributions from more than 85 climate scientists across career stages and institutions in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Australia, and Canada. A separate Biographical Sketches file provides credentials and affiliations for transparency.