President Barack Obama’s chief science adviser compared the Trump administration’s use of “red teams” to debate climate science to a “kangaroo court” meant to “create a sense of continuing uncertainty about the science of climate change.”
“But I suspect that most of the advocates of the scheme are disingenuous, aiming to get hand-picked non-experts from federal agencies to dispute the key findings of mainstream climate science and then assert that the verdict of this kangaroo court has equal standing with the findings of the most competent bodies in the national and international scientific communities,” former President Barack Obama’s science czar John Holdren wrote in a Boston Globe op-ed published Monday.
“The purpose of that, of course, would be to create a sense of continuing uncertainty about 
the science of climate change, as an underpinning of the Trump administration’s case for not addressing it. Sad,” Holdren wrote in his op-ed, railing against the “perversity of the climate science kangaroo court.”
The idea of using red teams gained traction with Trump administration officials this year after former Obama administration official Steve Koonin suggested the arrangement in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in April.
Koonin, a physicist and former top Department of Energy official, argued red teams could strengthen climate science by exposing its faults and uncertainties. The military and intelligence communities often pit red teams against blue teams to expose weaknesses in policies and strategies being pursued. It could work in a similar way for climate science, with a red team of researchers given the goal of finding pitfalls in blue team’s scientific argument.
“A Red/Blue exercise would have many benefits,” Koonin wrote in the WSJ. “It would produce a traceable public record that would allow the public and decision makers a better understanding of certainties and uncertainties. It would more firmly establish points of agreement and identify urgent research needs.”
Many climate scientists, however, say it has no place in their field. One group of prominent researchers even argued red team exercises amount to “dangerous attempts to elevate the status of minority opinions” that undercut mainstream science.
Holdren argued the scientific peer-review process already acts as a check on bad science, further arguing a red team exercise is a ‘right-wing’ plot against climate science.
“Climate science has been repeatedly ‘red-teamed,’ both by groups of avowed contrarians sponsored by right-wing groups and by the most qualified parts of the world’s scientific community,” Holdren wrote in his op-ed.
“The right wing’s ‘red team’ efforts have consistently been characterized by brazen cherry-picking, misrepresentation of the findings of others, recycling of long-discredited hypotheses, and invention of new ones destined to be discredited,” Holdren wrote. “Almost none of this material has survived peer review to be published in the respectable professional literature.”
Despite this, Trump administration officials have begun looking for scientists to participate in a red-blue team exercise to test scientific claims about man-made global warming. Media reports suggest the Trump team is considering asking Koonin to lead the exercise.
The administration also sought recommendations for who should participate in the red team exercise from the Heartland Institute, which is known for its skepticism of man-made warming.
“The White House and the Environmental Protection Agency have reached out to the Heartland Institute to help identify scientists who could constitute a red team,” Heartland spokesman Jim Lakely told reporters Monday.
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This article originally appeared in The Daily Caller
Umm, just like the Roman Church and the Globe shape of the Earth. The time for debate was over, our consensus…
Exactly right. The more things change the more they stay the same.
When key findings are disputable, that means their is a question to the link they have in their role in the functions that arise out of the data: In other words are the key findings values that change as a function of another value, or are the key findings values that cause other values to change? If there is a question to causation and correlation, then the key findings are disputable. So far these climate experts have not provided any specific functions as to how their key findings relate to other values with in the whole scheme of the climate change model, would give the model the ability to make accurate predictions. So ya, we are still debating key findings and trying to be able to say for sure they are part of the causation of the problem.
As January 2014 and 2015 arrived with
blasts of EXTREMELY cold air, the White House released a video in which the
Chief Science Advisor to President Obama, Dr. John Holdren, managed to get
on both sides of it, declaring the “extreme cold” to be “a pattern that we
expect to see with increasing frequency as global warming continues.” How the
Earth is getting both colder and
warmer at the same time defies reality, but that is of little concern to Dr.
Holdren and, indeed, the entire Global Warming—now called Climate Change hoax.
And this year of 2017 is the 21th consecutive year of considerable
global cooling!
Those interested in this ongoing conspiracy should find on the Internet “Oregon Petition” and “Manhattan Declaration” to read the names of some 32,000 US and world scientists and professionals de-masking that gigantic conspiracy by the government-paid drones supervised by the United Nations socialist panel. I am one of the signatories – MS, PhD, Engineering, UCLA, with specialties in Thermodynamics and Heat & Mass Transfer.
Marc…as someone with a BS in Chemistry and a minor in physics, I genuinely appreciate your comment, and the fact, based on the number of professional “skeptics” involved, that something as complex as climate science, and having so many variables with far more impact than man’s burning of fossil fuels, is ever “settled science.” And I will call “Bravo Sierra” on anyone who says that it is “settled.”
Anyway, here are some recent not completely technical articles that you and others might find of at least passing interest:
Al Gore’s AGW Hoax and “fudged” data: http://conservativetribune.com/obama-insider-climate-change/
http://conservativetribune.com/global-warming-agency-in-fraud/
Long article in the liberal New Republic about how Al Gore is the most polarizing figure in climate politics:
https://newrepublic.com/article/143966/troubling-return-al-gore-profile-inconvenient-sequel
Washington Times article, 7/27 on Gore’s self-promoting “Inconvenient Sequel” movie:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jul/27/al-gores-inconvenient-sequel-meets-with-skepticism/
Gore’s movie, “Inconvenient Sequel” hit from the Right and the Left, article in Conservative Tribune, 7/29/17:
http://conservativetribune.com/al-gore-smugly-publishes-film/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=libertyalliance&utm_campaign=dailypm&utm_content=libertyalliance
Sea level rising…whoops…not so fast! — Silence from the MSM
http://conservativetribune.com/nasa-statement-blackout-msm/2/
Thank you Marc, I agree too. BS geology/geochemistry, BA environmental studies/ resource management, and additional GIS major. Having studied in an environmental faculty for my BA after finishing my earth science work, I can assure you of the general scientific illiteracy in such echo chambers, and the nonsense that passes for objectivity over there. That Holdren was chosen for that job after his nonsense “scholarship” with the likes of population alarmists like Paul Ehrlich (+ politically-driven theories of Barry Commoner) speaks volumes. Having heard Chris Essex’s thermodynamic argument about the impossibility of developing an “average temperature” (without losing the mathematical meaning of temperature through differential equations) I’d love to hear your views on Hansen’s “Venus climate greenhouse” hype. For instance, how much surface T is due to P=90 atm, and would be present regardless of the atmospheric chem composition? Would love to work through the equations.
https://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2008/12/the-insights-of-paul-ehrlich/55882/
Sorry my friend; I have been retired now for 20 years and given my books to libraries. No help here.
All good Marc, keep up the commentary. So glad you could chip your opinion in. It’s a lonely planet with all these alarmists all about, so I hope to read more of your welcome words.
The significant point affecting human activity and resource utilization remains unmentioned in the article. I hope this does not imply that this will be a grand comedy about the accuracy of climate models versus actual climate which only centuries if not millennia to come will reveal without considering the principle issue of the moment, which is whether there’s any way that humans can significantly overcome natural forces that influence climate. An issue concerning climate, one of which we do have evidence in geologic history which does not seem to arise in these debates: We have had, in recent history, very massive extraterrestrial objects pass close to the earth – one, I believe, within the orbit of the moon. There is good reason to assume the terrestrial impact of one of these could significantly affect our climate – and Green Energy won’t stop it. Using our economic resources to develop a means of detecting and diverting such objects might have some value in preventing radical climate change.
Yeah, we need an asteroid deflector. I don’t want to have the bad luck of being alive when the next asteroid strikes Earth. Hemorrhoids are bad enough. Although I suppose you could call those assteroids, too…..
The GHG assertion is anti-science . No quantitative analytical physical equation nor experimental demonstration of the purported effect ever presented .
And they determinedly leave gravity the universal asymmetric force out of their attempted explanations for why the bottoms of atmospheres are hotter than their tops .
It’s game over except for dumpstering the trash .
Bob Armstrong wrote:
“The GHG assertion is anti-science . No quantitative analytical physical equation nor experimental demonstration of the purported effect ever presented .”
“Radiative forcing – measured at Earth’s surface – corroborate the increasing greenhouse effect,” R. Philipona et al, Geo Res Letters, v31 L03202 (2004)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2003GL018765/abstract
“Observational determination of surface radiative forcing by CO2 from 2000 to 2010,” D. R. Feldman et al, Nature 519, 339–343 (19 March 2015)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v519/n7543/full/nature14240.html
The question Bob Armstrong Won’t Answer: explaining how gravity accounts for this fact:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/schmidt_05/curve_s.gif
This scares you climate alarmists? Good, it’s meant to.
What scares me is the “My mind’s made up, don’t bother me with facts! Apres moi le deluge.” mentality of the Trumpanzees.
You’re the idiots who won’t face the facts, that’s why you’re caught lying about them at every turn. Explain that away.