Is the US abandoning climate alarmism?

By derimot*no - Petter Tuvnes - July 23, 2025

Trump hires leading climate scientists .The New York Times  reports that Trump is hiring scientists who doubt the consensus on climate change. The U.S. Department of Energy has hired at least three new scientists after laying off hundreds of employees who had an alarmist stance on climate change.

The administration has also systematically removed mentions of climate change from government websites, while cutting federal funding for research on global warming.

The US Department of Energy has hired at least three new scientists after hundreds of employees who had an alarmist attitude towards climate change were dismissed.

"Trump Hires Scientists Who Doubt the Consensus on Climate Change
The three scientists joined the administration after it dismissed hundreds of experts who were assessing how global warming is affecting the country. »

The three hired are Professor Steven E. Koonin, a physicist and author of a best-selling book that calls climate science “Unsettled”; Professor John Christy, an atmospheric scientist who doubts the extent to which human activity has caused global warming; and Dr. Roy Spencer, a meteorologist who believes that clouds have had a greater influence on warming than humans have.

The book "Unsettled" by Koonin is about climate science and is published in Norwegian by Document Forlag with the title " Unsettled  science ". The essence of the book is that Koonin believes that attempts to limit CO2 in the air to prevent climate change are futile, and that we must instead adapt to climate change. There will always be new natural climate changes as before. Koonin was also a science advisor under President Obama. In Trump's first term, Koonin advocated for realistic views on climate in addition to the UN climate panel IPCC, which has been the dominant authority.

Climate journalist Marc Morano comments on his blog "climatedepot.com":

Cheers! NEW: ' Trump  Hires Scientists Who Doubt the Consensus on Climate Change ' - John Christy, Roy Spencer & Steven E. Koonin.

From Morano:

The scientists are listed on the Energy Department’s internal email system as current employees of the agency, records show. Their hiring comes after the Trump administration fired hundreds of scientists and experts who had compiled the federal government’s flagship report on how climate change is affecting the country. The administration has also systematically removed mentions of climate change from government websites while slashing federal funding for global warming research.

In addition, Trump officials have recruited scientists to help them overturn the 2009 “threat finding,” which determined that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare and now underpins much of the government’s legal authority to slow global warming, according to two people briefed on the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.

Professor Koonin is also a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative research organization on the campus of Stanford University.

He previously worked as a physicist at New York University, a researcher for the oil and gas company BP, and deputy secretary of the Department of Energy under the Obama administration.

In his 2021 book, “ Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t and Why It Matters, ” Professor Koonin argued that while the planet was warming and human activity had played a role, the scientific consensus was not as certain or as bleak as often portrayed.

In a telephone interview in November 2024, Professor Koonin said the book had made an impression on Chris Wright, who ran the oil and gas company Liberty Energy before being confirmed as energy secretary in February.

“ He got in touch when I was writing the book and said, ‘This is great,’” Professor Koonin recalled. “He asked me to come and talk to his company at some point – it was a couple of years ago – and we got to know each other. ”

He added: " Chris and I have talked quite a bit over the last couple of years, and I think he is very much in line with what I wrote in the book ."

Dr. Spencer, a researcher at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, also has a connection to Wright.

In a report published in 2024 by Liberty Energy, Wright cited atmospheric temperature measurements that Dr. Spencer had collected. The overall report, titled “Bettering Human Lives,” argued that fossil fuels were “essential” to solving global poverty, a claim that some experts have called misleading.

In addition to his role at the University of Alabama, Dr. Spencer is a policy advisor to the Heartland Institute, a conservative group that rejects mainstream climate science.

He previously worked as a researcher at NASA and as a visiting scholar at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing group responsible for creating Project 2025, a conservative plan for the new administration.

Dr. Spencer has argued that while human activity has caused some warming, its influence has been less than natural variations in global cloud cover.

Although some of Dr. Spencer's previous work has been funded by the government, he has accused federal climate scientists of being biased because they receive tax money.

“ The popular belief that government-funded research is impartial must be considered quite naive ,” he wrote in his 2010 book, “ The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists .”

Professor Christy has worked closely with Dr. Spencer to conduct atmospheric temperature records at the University of Alabama, Hadfield (UAH). Together they publish satellite temperature data, which our local professor Ole Humlum believes is the most reliable.

Christy is behind the revelations that climate models exaggerate the risk of future destructive global warming. Climate models predict a 3 times stronger increase in global temperature than reality, see attached figure.

The employment of these climate realist researchers gives us other climate realists hope that climate policy will also become more sober and realistic with adaptation to the ever-occurring climate change as the goal, something that Prof. Koonin advocates in the book "Uncertain Science".

The post is taken from the Climate Realists.

Petter Tuvnes

The editorial team has added photos.

The text represents the author's opinion, not necessarily that of www.derimot.no.