A major US government climate report has misrepresented the work of pioneering climate scientist Professor Benjamin Santer, also misunderstood his findings, according to him.

Professor Benjamin Santer (Honorary Professor at UEA) was one of the first researchers to look for a unique "fingerprint" of the human component in the Earth's climate system. He has also contributed to the IPCC reports that were released in 1995, which for the first time identified a clear human impact on the global climate.

A report by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) published in July 2025 cited Santer's work to support the opposite argument: that humans were not to blame for warming. On the same day that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed overturning the 2009 ‘endangerment finding', which had granted the agency legal authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources, the report was released. Earlier this year, the Trump administration took steps to revoke the finding, sparking fears for public health and the future of U.S. environmental protection.

In the new paper published in AGU Advances, Santer reaffirmed decades of evidence that human activity is causing global warming, along with colleagues Prof Susan Solomon of MIT, Prof David Thompson of UEA and Colorado State University, and Prof Qiang Fu of the University of Washington.

The changes in the vertical structure of atmospheric temperatures, such as warming in the troposphere and cooling in the stratosphere, are an undeniable "fingerprint" of anthropogenic climate change, which climate models have been forecasting for more than 50 years and which has been observed by satellites, said Santer. The DOE report's assertion was “factually wrong,” he said, and should not be relied upon in legal decisions looking at climate regulations.

The authors also noted that the DOE report was cited 16 times in the EPA's proposal. Although the team behind the report was dissolved following a lawsuit, it is still publicly available and continues to be cited by DOE Secretary Wright as a trusted source of climate science.

Note: I removed "last year" because it creates a timeline contradiction with the rest of the article. If your original source explicitly states "last year," you should verify the dates before reintroducing it. Otherwise, this version is consistent and ready for publication.