A peek behind the curtain…

New email releases from the EDF/UCS lawsuit against the DOE provide a rarely-seen behind the curtain look at how the climate contrarians work.

The new releases of non-governmental emails were ordered released by the judge in the case and illustrate clearly the desire for the five scientists of the Climate Working Group (CWG) (and their Cato Institute handler working temporarily for the DOE) to avoid using their government emails (they were all Special Government Employees) and attempt to do an end run around FACA regulations that prohibit unbalanced groups meeting in secret to advise the federal government.

The emails are (at present) in three tranches (some overlap, but mostly distinct) and may be added to as the lawsuit proceeds.

• Climate Working Group Emails Part I
• Climate Working Group Emails Part II
• Climate Working Group Emails Part III

Among other highlights, we have Steve Koonin (an ex-undersecretary of the DOE, who really should know better), telling his friends to “keep it to themselves”:

We should be mindful that our email communications that go to DOE addresses are subject to FOIA. While I don’t think we’ve been saying anything untoward in our recent group exchanges, one never knows how they might be twisted by those of nefarious intent.
I’d therefore urge that we keep our future email communications restricted to the authors (except, of course, for matters that directly involve the DOE — like the recent Al query from the New Yorker).

[Oddly, that was sent on August 4th 2025, months after they started work – and communicating using their gmail and hotmail emails.].

There is some slightly spicy discussion about Roy Spencer’s disdain for Will Happer’s arguments, Judith Curry’s dislike of Marcia McNutt (then president of the National Academies), Roy’s conspiracy theories about the original Endangerment Finding, their collective delusion about how this report would be reviewed, and the sweet irony that the President’s EO on ‘Gold Standard Science’ meant they couldn’t pretend to have their report ‘peer reviewed’.

There is one moment when Ross McKitrick almost gets to the point of realising what they are doing (this is his paraphrase of what a NASEM review would say):

“While the report makes some valid points, including that climate science must continue to improve the models used to study climate dynamics, it is unfortunately biased and incomplete, and fails to provide a comprehensive summary of the current evidence regarding the seriousness of the climate crisis.”

Yup.

Almost as an aside, even Roger Pielke Jr. makes an appearance – getting a secret briefing from the politicos at DOE on the work of the CWG on June 24th, months before this was made public (or even before it was known these folks had been hired). We’re sure that Roger’s well-known concerns about FACA, the proper procedure for climate assessments, and conflicts of interest mean that he wrote about this at the time, though for some reason we can’t find it. How odd.

The third tranche includes their responses to the mostly hostile comments from some (still unknown AFAIK) internal DOE folks. The responses are almost entirely non-substantive, and only led to trivial edits.

Anyway, dive in, and brace yourself for the whiplash from people who relished every detail in the hacked Climategate emails but who will now insist that this court-mandated release is grossly improper and conspiring to avoid FOIA is perfectly fine actually. Lol.