A Red Team to end the climate wars: fun but likely to fail.

A Red Team to end the climate wars: fun but likely to fail.

By Larry Kummer. From the Fabius Maximus website.

Summary: Team Trump has proposed a Red Team project to resolve the climate debates. It’s an exciting promise of an easy solution to the public policy gridlock. It will make the situation worse.

The climate debate has — like so many other policy debates — become dominated by a proposal by Team Trump. They suggest some kind of “Red Team vs. Blue Team” debate about climate change. These articles show there is little agreement about the structure or goals of the project.

• E&E News: “Pruitt will launch program to ‘critique’ climate science.”
• NY Times: EPA to Give Dissenters a Voice on Climate, No Matter the Consensus.
• Niskanen Center: Can a Red Team Exorcise the Climate Debate?

What is “Red Teaming”?

To understand these proposals, first turn to the Red Team Journal (founded 1997). Start with “A Balanced View” of Red Teaming.

“Defined loosely, red teaming is the practice of viewing a problem from an adversary or competitor’s perspective. The goal of most red teams is to enhance decision making, either by specifying the adversary’s preferences and strategies or by simply acting as a devil’s advocate. Red teaming may be more or less structured, and a wide range of approaches exists. In the past several years, red teaming has been applied increasingly to issues of security, although the practice is potentially much broader. Business strategists, for example, can benefit from weighing possible courses of action from a competitor’s point of view. …

“Despite the many advantages of candid red teaming, the practice is subject to various limitations and constraints. A red team cannot predict with certainty what an adversary will do, nor can it uncover all possible weaknesses in a concept, plan, or system. Red teams that claim these abilities overstate the benefits of red teaming and invariably mislead their clients. Decision makers who attempt to use a red team to divine specific events risk doing worse than nothing.”

Red Teams work well to analyze an organization’s positioning and actions vs. an adversary or competitor. It is a natural tool for the military and security fields, and works well for business strategy. A Red Team artificially creates divisions within an organization, breaking consensus thinking and facilitating growth of new perspectives. No matter what the outcome, there is little risk to the organization or its staff from these projects. For example, Army officers gaming the Opposing Force in a war game will not be seen as the real enemy (Nazis, Russians, etc).

But there is no enemy organization in the climate debates, no OpFor. The existing divisions in our climate science institutions are part of the problem. Climate science today has broken into two tribes (of unequal size). Worse, their work has become politicized and tied to the polarized politics of America. Now some advocate pouring kerosene on these flames by pitting the two sides in a head to head confrontation, like a World Series of Climate Science — with the crowds cheering “their” team. It would take divine intervention for this to produce anything useful — for either climate science or the public policy debate.

A Red Team is not a relevant tool to help resolve the climate debates. It is the opposite of what we need today.

Alternative Analysis

Red Teams are one form of Alternative Analysis (A. A.). From the Red Team Journal.

“Alternative analysis is the superclass of techniques of which red teaming may be considered a member. As with red teaming, these techniques are designed to help debias thinking, enhance decision making, and avoid surprise.

“According to Fishbein and Treverton, ‘alternative analysis seeks to help analysts and policy-makers stretch their thinking through structured techniques that challenge underlying assumptions and broaden the range of possible outcomes considered.’ They further clarify the term by specifying that ‘Alternative analysis includes techniques to challenge analytic assumptions (e.g. devil’s advocacy), and those to expand the range of possible outcomes considered (e.g. what-if analysis, and alternative scenarios).'”

I doubt any A.A. tool will advance the state of climate science. I have seen no historical examples of this, let alone successful examples. But some forms of A. A. are appropriate tools to break the public policy paralysis.

Call in experts to answer a question

How can A.A. methods be used in the climate wars? First, what is the key question to answer? The answer should make a difference in the debate. It should be doable with the time and funds available. Many of the proposals flunk one or both of these, such as calls to review the IPCC’s Working Group I report — the physical science. The time and money required to this adequately would be immense.

Since 2009 I have had recommendations to re-start the public policy engines. Especially this, which fits these criteria. Others have made similar proposals.

2. A review of the climate forecasting models by a multidisciplinary team of relevant experts who have not been central players in this debate. Include a broader pool than those who have dominated the field, such as geologists, chemists, statisticians and software engineers.

Models are the fulcrum in the climate policy debate, turning theory and data into forecasts that are the primary input to the climate policy debate. There has been little work done to validate them (see this list of the literature and this example). Model validation is a well-established field. With money and time a group could investigate and evaluate one or more of the major modeling systems. Whatever the result, we would know more than we know today.

It is an operationally simple proposal, using people uninvolved in the climate wars, likely to produce useful results. So neither side will like it. That’s today’s America!

It’s not a silver bullet

Experts in alternative analysis warn that these are tools, not miracles. The success rate of these projects is unknown, but there are a lot of failures. Even simple projects often result in organizational discord or even chaos, as with the 2016 Red Team examination of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Center.

Also note that this is not the first A.A. project in the climate wars. The Berkeley Earth project raised $2.5 million (including $150,000 from the Koch Foundation) to fund a group of scientists who reanalyzed the Earth’s surface temperature record. They published their initial findings in 2012, with no visible effect on either the debate among scientists or the public policy debate. See Wikipedia for details.

An ominous example of A.A. failure

An extreme example of a failure of A.A. is the 1976 “Team B” project. A group of hawks accused the CIA of underestimating Soviet military capability. They were given free reign to produce an analysis more acceptable to the GOP’s hawks. They did so, producing what became politically useful justifications for Reagan’s massive military buildup. The CIA later concluded …

“In retrospect, and with the Team B report and records now largely declassified, it is possible to see that virtually all of Team B’s criticisms of the NIE proved to be wrong. …While Team B was estimating a relentless, continuing buildup at a growing pace, it was later learned that, in fact, Soviet leaders had just cut back the rate of spending on their military effort and would not increase it for the next nine years {in response to the Reagan buildup}. “

The USSR never built directed energy weapons, mobile ABM systems, and anti-satellite systems. The Soviet Empire collapsed in 1989 and it died in 1991. In fact, the Team B conclusions were backwards, as later analysis with data from Soviet records found that US intelligence exaggerated Soviet aggressiveness and military capabilities. See the details here.

The members were selected for their politically useful views. Most were later rewarded for their false analysis by promotion to high offices.

This is what many scientists and politicians fear will happen with any “Red Team” project conducted by the Trump Administration. They will stack the Team B with people who will produce the desired conclusions, then use the report to drive new public policy measures. But this is not 1976, nor is Team Trump the hawk neocons at the peak of their cunning. In today’s politically polarized America, a stacked Red Team will be seen as illegitimate by most climate scientists and much of the public. It will further the politicization of science, resolve nothing, and accomplish nothing.

We can do better. But we probably won’t.

A a proposal for a “Team B” project

Dr. Roy Spencer (meteorologist, principal research scientist at U AL-Huntsville) proposes a “Team B” project for climate science in “A Global Warming Red Team Warning: Do NOT Strive for Consensus with the Blue Team” at his website. It’s designed to document the skeptic position on a broad array of climate-related questions.

His proposal has two potential problems. First, I doubt there is a consistent skeptic paradigm to contrast with that expressed in the IPCC’s WGI report of AR5. The skeptics’ have a wide range of beliefs, which will add up to a grab-bag of ideas. Second, this probably will polarize the climate science field into opposition to their work (that would be my reaction if I were a climate scientist). Also, it is unlikely to have the political effect he desires. I doubt politicians will stake their careers on theories which most climate scientists loudly oppose.

For More Information

Climate scientists Judith Curry has some valuable insights about this proposal at Climate Etc.

For more information about this vital issue see the posts about the RCPs, about the keys to understanding climate change and these posts about the politics of climate change…

1. Important: climate scientists can restart the climate change debate – & win.
2. We can end the climate policy wars: demand a test of the models.
3. How we broke the climate change debates. Lessons learned for the future.
4. A story of the climate change debate. How it ran; why it failed.