The Practice and Assessment of Science: Five Foundational Flaws in the Department of Energy's 2025 Climate Report
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A Statement of the American Meteorological Society
(Adopted by the Executive Committee of the AMS Council on 27 August 2025)

Here we identify five foundational flaws in the Department of Energy’s (DoE’s) 2025 Climate Synthesis report[1]. Each of these flaws, alone, places the report at odds with scientific principles and practices. For the report to accurately characterize scientific understanding and to be useful as a basis for informed policy and decision making, the DoE must first rectify all five flaws and then conduct a comprehensive assessment of scientific evidence. Were DoE to do so, the result will almost certainly be conclusions that are broadly consistent with previous comprehensive scientific assessments of climate change, such as those from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM); American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), American Meteorological Society (AMS), and a wide-range of other scientific organizations.

The Department of Energy’s recent attempt to synthesize climate science has five foundational flaws as a scientific effort:

1. Lack of breadth across scientific fields. The science of climate change spans dozens of fields and sub-fields within the physical, natural, and social sciences relating to the Earth and environment. These include (but are not limited to): atmospheric physics; atmospheric chemistry; oceanography (physical, chemical, and biological); cryology; glaciology; biology; physiology; biogeography; biogeochemistry; health; and economics; among others. Each of these disciplines has hundreds of practicing scientists—tens of thousands of scientists overall. No group of five scientists can possess the disciplinary breadth encompassed by all who study climate change[2]. To be credible, scientific assessments must include authors who can characterize the full breadth of scientific evidence.


2. Lack of depth within scientific fields and specific topics. Comprehensive assessment of any specific scientific topic must account for the full range of scientifically defensible views among the relevant subject matter experts—those who are familiar with the evidence of that specific topic[3]. For virtually any specific scientific field or topic within that field, five authors would be insufficient to capture the depth of knowledge and range of views, even if all were narrowly focused on that specific topic and independent of one another.
   
   To be credible, scientific assessments must include authors who reflect the full range of defensible views among the subject matter experts within every specific area of science that is included in the assessment.


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