In Congressional testimony last week, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said there is probably a red team/blue team exercise coming soon, to officially explore the climate change debate.

He has talked about the need for a Red Team to critique the climate change alarmism that infects the Federal Government for some time, but now he seems to have committed to it.

When asked about the prospects for a Red Team exercise, Pruitt said this:

That’s an ongoing review internally, and it’s something we hope to do. That would be a process where we would focus on objective, transparent real-time review of questions and answers around the issue of CO2. We may be able to get there as early as January next year.

He gave no details as to how this exercise would be run and there are lots of possibilities. The issue has been widely discussed in the skeptical climate science community.

The Heartland Institute reportedly has been holding meetings of scientists to explore the Red Team idea. They have a lot of experience in this area, having produced a series of comprehensive, multi-author reports critiquing the scientific claims of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other climate alarmist groups. They have also run major annual skeptical conferences for many years.

Not surprisingly, the very idea of an official Red Team critique of climate alarmism has produced howls of outrage from the alarmist community. I can hardly wait for their apoplectic reaction to the real thing.

It is not that alarmism has not been extensively criticized before, just not officially by a federal agency. This is sorely needed to counter the wildly alarmist official reports coming from the US Global Change Research Program. These outrageous reports especially include the recent Climate Science Special Report and the upcoming National Climate Assessment. A draft of the latter has been released for review and it is atrociously alarmist.

The Red Team critique may be just what EPA needs in order to reverse the Obama EPA’s nonsensically alarmist finding that CO2 emissions endanger human health and welfare. This so-called Endangerment Finding triggered procedural requirements for regulating CO2 emissions under the Clean Air Act, something that Congress never intended.

In his testimony, Pruitt said that the 2009 Endangerment Finding was indeed endangered, which is very good news indeed. He criticized the process that produced the finding, saying it was rushed under the Obama administration and took its work from the IPCC without proper research on EPA’s part.

Pruitt says “The work done in 2009 was accelerated by the agency. In fact, there was something done in 2009 that in my estimation has never been done since and has not been before that event. There was a breach of process that occurred in 2009.”

A breach of process plus an official presentation of the very real climate change debate may be just what EPA needs to overturn the Obama EPA’s Endangerment Finding. If that alarmist finding is overturned then there is no longer any legal basis for the unnecessary regulation of harmless CO2 emissions. The Red Team exercise might be very important indeed, far beyond simply making the climate change debate official, although that alone would be a useful outcome.

So it looks like climate alarmism may soon be in the Federal crosshairs, where it certainly belongs. Let’s hope so. What a Happy New Year that would be.