A new report released yesterday by the Department of Energy purports to provide “a critical assessment of the conventional narrative on climate change.” But nine scientists across several different disciplines told WIRED that the report mishandled citations of their work by cherry-picking data, misrepresenting findings, drawing erroneous conclusions, or leaving out relevant context.
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The DOE says that it is opening the report up to a public comment process. In an email, Department of Energy spokesperson Andrea Woods said that the questions WIRED sent over about the use of research in specific portions of the report were too complex for the agency to answer thoroughly on a short turnaround, and encouraged scientists who spoke with WIRED to submit a public comment to the federal register.
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The DOE report’s section on ocean acidification cites research by Josh Krissansen-Totton, an assistant professor at the University of Washington who specializes in planetary science and biogeochemistry, to support a claim that “the recent decline in [ocean] pH is within the range of natural variability on millennial time scales.” Research has shown that the oceans have been absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution, causing it to become considerably more acidic over the past two centuries.
“Ocean life is complex and much of it evolved when the oceans were acidic relative to the present,” that section of the report states. “The ancestors of modern coral first appeared about 245 million years ago. CO2 levels for more than 200 million years afterward were many times higher than they are today.”
Krissansen-Totton told WIRED in an email that his work on ocean acidity billions of years ago has “no relevance” to the impacts of human-driven ocean acidification today, and that today calcium carbonate saturation is quickly diminishing in the ocean alongside rising acidity. Dissolved calcium carbonate is essential for many marine species, particularly those that rely on it to build their shells.
“The much more gradual changes in ocean pH we observe on geologic timescales were typically not accompanied by the rapid changes in carbonate saturation that human CO2 emissions are causing, and so the former are not useful analogs for assessing the impact of ocean acidification on the modern marine biosphere,” he says.
The consensus among mainstream academics on climate change’s severity and importance does not mean that there aren’t still open questions about portions of the science. Jeff Clements, a marine ecologist who runs a research lab at Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans, says that the way the DOE report cites his research on ocean acidification and fish behavior is accurate “from an explicit textual perspective.” Clements’s work on this topic focuses on correcting alarming earlier studies connecting the effects of ocean acidification on fish.
In the DOE report, his work is used to bolster the section downplaying ocean acidification. “Much of the public discussion of the effects of ocean ‘acidification’ on marine biota has been one-sided and exaggerated,” the DOE report states.
Clements said in an email to WIRED that just because his review of the literature found fish behavior to be relatively unaffected by ocean acidification does not mean that a myriad of other ocean ecosystems, biological processes, and species will fare similarly. Other work from his lab, meanwhile, has underscored the vulnerability of mussels to ocean warming and looked at how heat waves negatively alter clam behavior.
“I want to make it clear that our results should not be interpreted to mean ocean acidification (or climate change more generally) is not a problem,” he tells WIRED. “While effects on fish behavior may not be as severe as initially thought, other species and biological processes are certainly vulnerable to the impacts of acidification and the compendium of other climate change stressors that our oceans are experiencing.”
Molly Taft, Wired, 30 July 2025. Full article.
