A few months back, we pointed out that an op-ed in the WSJ and Judith Curry’s congressional testimony both called for a red team/blue team effort on climate science, and that we should expect to see a similar call from the Trump administration.
Since last week’s Paris debacle, Scott Pruitt has been talking a lot about such an “experiment” lately. (And they say alarmists never get any predictions right!) Apparently, he thinks the best time to have a debate about climate change is after you convince the president to leave the Paris Agreement.
There are a lot of red flags here, not least of which is that the peer review process is already set up much like the whole red/blue team thing. Reviewers are the red team who look to poke holes in submitted papers (blue team), and, if they find enough, papers doesn’t get published. In terms of climate science, the cumulative result is a peer-reviewed body of evidence that points decidedly in one direction.
This “red team” would also fulfill the fossil fuel industry’s well-known plan to inject doubt into the public and downplay the degree to which (honest) scientists agree about climate science. As we’ve seen from deniers touting debunked Paris reports this week, it would give the administration cover for their industry-friendly, denial-derived policies, regardless of how thoroughly the red team is debunked.
Even if the effort were to tap legitimate, honest scientists for the red team, the very act of elevating the position of 3% of scientists to a situation in which they’re portrayed as being 50/50 with the “blue team” would be misleading. And giving equal weight to a handful of studies at the fringe and thousands of studies that underlie the consensus would be scientifically dishonest.
Which means we can expect Pruitt to make the announcement of a red team any day now.
Top Climate and Clean Energy Stories:
