Climate - Department of Energy Report 2025

On July 23, 2025, the US Department of Energy released a report titled A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate to US Energy Secretary Christopher Wright. The report was widely criticized by scientists for misrepresenting decades of climate science. It should also be noted that Chris Wright is the CEO of a fracking company and has openly engaged in new climate change denial, for example, stating that “there is no climate crisis” in 2023.

As an exercise in fact-checking, I picked one of the first figures that caught my attention while browsing the report, which happened to be Figure 6.8.3 on p.71, reproduced here with the original figure legend:

Figure 1: Misleading figure on US wildfires from DOE Report.

The figure is described in the report as follows:

U.S. data from the National Interagency Fire Centre (NIFC) from 1926 to 2023 are shown in Figure 6.8.3. The NIFC has removed the pre-1960 data from its current website on the grounds that measurement methods changed after 1960 making the comparison unreliable. Nonetheless just focusing on the post-1985 interval the number of fires is not increasing. The area burned did increase but only until about 2007.

The authors obtained their data from an archived NIFC site from February 12, 2020. The original site states the following:

Prior to 1983, sources of these figures are not known, or cannot be confirmed, and were not derived from the current situation reporting process. As a result the figures prior to 1983 should not be compared to later data.

First, we note that the DOE report falsely claims that pre-1960s data is unreliable, when it is in fact pre-1983 data that is unreliable. A fact-check by PolitiFact explains the reason for the unreliablity of older federal wildfire data:

However, over the years, researchers concluded that the federal data was deeply flawed. While there might have been some undercounting, double and triple counting also took place. Most damaging of all, in the 1920s and 1930s, millions of acres of intentional fires in the southeast were counted as wildfires.

Although the DOE report acknowledges in the text that older data is unreliable, the authors still decided to include this unreliable data in their figure, and make no reference to this fact in the figure itself. Conveniently, including the unreliable data obscures the actual trend shown by the reliable data. The left panel in Figure 2 shows only the reliable data for 1983 – 2024. Although the number of fires post-1984 has stayed roughly constant, the total acres burned has substantially increased. Therefore, also the number of acres burned per fire has substantially increased (right panel), indicating more intense wildfires.

Figure 2: Corrected figure on US wildfires. Data scraped from the NIFC site on 11 September 2025.

Finally, the report states that the area burned stopped increasing after 2007, which is also misleading. Although a linear regression of acres vs. year from 2008 – 2024 is not signficant (albeit showing a slightly positive correlation, \(r=0.183\), \(p=0.483\), not shown), this range is likely too short to draw any meaningful conclusions. The “staircase of denial” is a known misinformation technique in which short-term noise is used to obscure long-term trends.