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: