Last April, we flagged that both Judith Curry and Steven Koonin had raised the idea of the EPA forming a red team to challenge the climate consensus. We’ve spent much of the last year following this idea from its origins in the fossil fuel industry’s playbook into a potential Pruitt project.
We relayed a “leaked” statement from the climate science community and recounted how Koonin tried this exact thing at the American Physics Society but bailed when it didn’t go his way. We pointed out that Heartland didn’t think Pruitt would do it, and that they even admitted the project was political, not scientific. We showed how the potential members of the red team are a bunch of benchwarmers. And we celebrated back in December, when E&E’s Robin Bravender reported the White House put the idea on hold.
Well, Bravender’s back again to provide further clarity on the embattled idea. It appears that Chief of Staff John Kelly is resolutely opposed to a red team, at least in part because, according to someone who attended the December meeting, the exercise “would have exposed the administration to litigation risk." (Put simply, the red team would get swamped by the blue team, which would provide a factual basis of record that would undercut anti-climate policies in court, triggering our good friends Arbitrary and Capricious.)
According to Bravender, the White House reportedly proposed soliciting public comments on a petition to reconsider the Endangerment Finding as an alternative to Pruitt’s red/blue exercise. That way, deniers would get to present their case, but policymaking wouldn’t be bound to its outcome (which as we know will not be in their favor). Bravender mentions a petition filed by CEI in February as the potential starting point for the comments.
The petition attempts to make three main points against the endangerment finding. The first, citing Roy Spencer, is that during “the pause,” CO2 concentrations increased 10%, but temperatures remained flat. (Of, course when one looks at the statistics and the full temperature record, particularly incorporating the Arctic and ocean temperatures, there was no pause.)
The petition’s second point is that current warming isn’t unusual. Even if our friends with hockey sticks didn’t say otherwise, this would still be a logical fallacy. That there was natural warming in the past doesn’t mean greenhouse gases aren’t warming the climate now--just like past forest fires started by lightning don’t make it impossible for a careless camper to start one now.
The third plank of CEI’s petition is congressional testimony from Dr. Christy, who claimed thermometers on land or in the oceans are untrustworthy, and that the only way to get a reliable climate measurement is from balloons and satellites. Christy claims those records show that models overestimate warming, and are therefore unreliable.
Coincidentally, our July post about the red team included a refutation of this exact point: a study showing that once you correct for errors in the satellite record, we have warmed 140% faster since 1998 than the trend since 1979.
And Dana Nuccitelli did a great job dissecting both Christy’s biased, misleading graph way back in 2016, and covering a study disproving Christy’s contention that models are broken.
For deniers, the petition may serve as the red ream’s highlight reel. But to legitimate scientists, it’s more of a blueper reel.
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