Michael Bastasch
2:01 PM 07/25/2017
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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Tags: Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Energy, John Holdren
I guess you never know when a ‘breakout peer reviewed’ paper about midi-chlorians will destroy all of Climate Science.
I think that the red team blue team suggestion is a good idea. It is used extensively in major civil and structural engineering projects, in which the design of a project is audited by a separate design team, using independent models and methods of analysis.
This process results in safer and more efficient structures when compared with unaudited projects. Indeed, several jurisdictions have written auditing into their building codes.
If climate change is important then why should the routine auditing process used in major engineering projects not be adopted by climate scientists?
So, does that mean that red team members haf to BELIEVE that unscientific findings are true? Or can a red team member be a main stream scientist who is just acting as a devils advocate?
Belief is for religion and politics. If you really were a scientist you’d only care about facts, not belief.
No.
Why not?
Ya know ‘ReallySkepical” I’m a ‘scientist’ as well. Well I have a science degree with Hons at least. I am part of the famous 97%. Yes, the world is warming yes anthropogenic CO2 is very likely contributing to that, but how much?
How much is natural variation, are feedbacks like clouds positive? How good are the models at predicting future temperature or future sea level? how certain are we? All valid questions that people you call ‘deniers’ have.
PS.
My dad, who was a ‘real’ scientist had a favourite quote. “There is no room for belief in science, only working hypotheses” (the plural for hypothesis before someone corrects me)
Nonsense. The plural of hypothesis is hypothesi. Everyone knows that, just as the plural of feces is feci…
Looks to me (non expert) the sun is about to have the last word.
I am with Holdren. Red team/Blue team is a dumb idea.
What we need is something like the NRP (National Reading Panel) that reviewed research on the teaching of reading.
When the government makes absurdly large sums of money available for “Research” you get tens of thousands of peer reviewed papers that contain little science in the generally accepted meaning of the word.
“Climate Science” is similar to public education. No matter how many research studies are done nothing useful emerges.
While there are many research topics relating to K-12 education here are some interesting statistics on one of them.
K-12 READING INSTRUCTION IN THE USA
The National Reading Panel (NRP) carried out a comprehensive review of reading research that amounted to 115,000 papers written between 1966 and 2000. A screening was carried out to select only studies that met criteria .normally used in medical and behavioral research At the end of the screening, only 428 studies met the panels high standards, and in September 2000 the findings were presented to the US Congress.
Thus the panel found that only 0.37% of the studies met generally accepted standards for scientific research.
The 14-member reading panel was chaired by Donald N. Langenberg, chancellor of the University System of Maryland. Karin Chenoweth (Washington Post) asked him why he, an experimental physicist by training, was chosen. One of the reasons, he said, was, I know what good research looks like.
That answer is the key to winnowing the chaff of Climate Science with the aim of extracting the few grains of real science buried within it. Thus I would contend that there is no need to spend another taxpayer dollar on new research studies until we have extracted the few grains of gold buried in the heap of excrement called Climate Science.
If Scott Pruitt sets up a “Climate Science Panel” headed by someone like Donald Langenburg what proportion of papers would be considered “Scientific”?
My guess is that 97% of climate scientists would not make the cut. Probably the same 97% that tell us the “Debate Is Over”.
Great idea! +100
““Climate Science” is similar to public education. No matter how many research studies are done nothing useful emerges. “
Or maybe a public restroom?
A megateam of reproducibility-minded scientists is renewing a controversial proposal to raise the standard for statistical significance in research studies. They want researchers to dump the long-standing use of a probability value (p-value) of less than 0.05 as the gold standard for significant results, and replace it with the much stiffer p-value threshold of 0.005.
Backers of the change, which has been floated before, say it could dramatically reduce the reporting of false-positive results—studies that claim to find an effect when there is none—and so make more studies reproducible. And they note that researchers in some fields, including genome analysis, have already made a similar switch with beneficial results.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/07/it-will-be-much-harder-call-new-findings-significant-if-team-gets-its-way
0.05 is only used when things are so expensive that it’s hard to get the $$ to proceed further. 0.001 is much more common.
The IPCC claims of probable human effect on global temperatures are based on “Expert Opinion”, the experts of course, being those promoting the theory.
Nature science publication has become a complete @ur momisugly@@ur momisuglyt rag http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v547/n7664/full/547400a.html?foxtrotcallback=true
Plesae let editors know if you are a scientist
If blue team is leading by example, they can be ignored.
The tell for a con artist is when he dodges tough reviews and audits of their brilliant plan.
As I said of Gore’s refusal to debate, “He ducks like a quack.”
(That’s Bartlett’s-worthy, IMO.)
+10, Roger Knights.
With your permission I am going to use that one.
Thansk,
hunter
Lord Monckton should be on the Red Team. If there’s criticism for using a Brit on the Red Team, just point to the fact that the British are already trying to get the mayors of U.S. cities to ignore much of what Trump is trying to accomplish.
noaa…the British are already trying to get the mayors of U.S. cities to ignore much of what Trump is trying to accomplish…
Member of a foreign government, The UK Climate and Industry Minister, and how about that for a portfolio!) involving them self and interfering with USA Domestic matters.
The Mainstream Press must be outraged by such interference.
Surely?
noaaprogrammer
Um Ops! the Brit. gov. have just past a law banning gasoline and diesel vehicles from the Brit. roads in 2040 ??? ( hp )
No they didn’t. Read again. They are talking about banning the sale of ….
Still not good but get your facts straight.
“The Mainstream Press must be outraged by such interference.
Surely?”
No, the MSM does not care about that. They only care about reporting on things that make Trump and conservatives look bad.
Just forget the whole Red vs. Blue exercise and appoint a Twitter Tzar or two for Trump from among the informed contributors to WUWT, and start educating and exacerbating the MSM on the weaknesses of the religion of man-made catastrophic warming.
May I humbly suggest, that whatever the subject, more twitter from the Trump administration would be a bad thing!
Funny how all his opponents want him to stop by-passing the press and talking directly to his people.
Go figure.
Joel,
What is funny is to see his opponents using twitter to criticize the President for…using twitter.
Also ridiculous are the claims that using twitter is beneath the office of the President while offering no objection to it being used by US Representatives, US Senators, US Supreme Court Justices, and, of course, the previous President.
Correction: Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. Has the consensus changed?
Three cheers for not using “comprise”!
— 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.” –Is Barack Obama is still the President of USA?
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
It is formal custom to refer to all ex-Presidents by the title President. Unless you were simply remarking on the irrelevance of a quote from the exPotus’s exadavisor.
I’ve read somewhere that the usage is that presidents who were defeated, like Ford, are called ex-presidents, and so is Nixon (forced out). Others are called former presidents.
When you address an ex-president in person, you call him, Mr. President, or President (name-goes-here). When you are not addressing an ex-president in person, you call him Former President (name-goes-here).
The science is settled. The skeptics win.
You could settle a dispute, but science?
One man can prove the science wrong. In a consensus setting however? Not so much.
But I agree with you that skeptics have the better arguments, supported by real data, in the discussion on agw.
There is a red team already. Judith Curry, Christie , Spencer, Singer, Lindzen, Kirstein, and some more. There is no shortage. (peer review is no red team, its part of the blue team!)
Except none of them denies that C02 causes warming
Steve, no one’s perfect.
The recent decision in Australia to void out low instrumental temperatures means that one of the planks of the global warming CO2 hypotheses is not testable, at least in Australia.
That is that minimum night time temperatures in dry air conditions should rise due to an increase in CO2.
We are not talking about UHI effect.
Its ironic that BOM was caught out at an airport site in Goulburn, one where the local heat effect could be easily enhanced.
The two other planks, that CO2 driven GCM’s are predictive and, of course the essentially mysterious upper troposphere hot spot, are yet to be laid in place.
To state, on authority, that the science is settled is not true.
We need to have reliable data and better models.
We’re almost to the point where we need lie detector tests published as supporting documents for climate science papers!
john, you have a lot of good ideas! Lie Detector Tests! 🙂
What I get from this has nothing to do with science. The left wing politicians are right, and the right wing politicians are wrong.
Some science advisor.
Holdren has a long history of failed predictions going back to the days of the alarmism generated by people such as Paul Ehrlich and the publications funded by the Club of Rome; for example “Limits to Growth”. He is best viewed as a rent seeking charlatan of the first order – sadly even more so than M. Mann. Read all about it: https://www.pop.org/president-obamas-bizarre-science-czar-dr-john-p-holdren-professional-alarmist/
Pretty obvious that Obama gave these positions to completely unqualified activists who understood that they were there to provide supporting “evidence” for his Socialist vision.
Imo, the red team could also argue the case from the standpoint of asking why the many predictions made by the blue team have failed over the decades as well as arguing science based understandings of the physics. The science involved in climate science can be endlessly debated in large part because there is much that science does not know at this time concerning the many interacting drivers which comprise climate shifts.
I would think that attacking the warmists talking points of the dangers which they claim are headed our way would be a potent tool to use against their fixed position of settled science, as if everything is known about what drives the climate of this planet. This argument would also be something that would be more readily understood by reasonably educated people, who might follow the debate. Also, bringing up topics such as SLR, more severe storms, unprecedented Arctic melting, etc would aid in exposing the argument that the warmists have tampered with the data. The use of historical data to disprove claims of unprecedented changes in natural systems would be a strong argument, and also one that even an average person could grasp.
“I would think that attacking the warmists talking points of the dangers which they claim are headed our way would be a potent tool to use against their fixed position of settled science”
The alarmists are claiming all the time that this or that severe weather event is caused by human-caused CO2 in the atmosphere. The Red Team should ask the Blue Team to detail just one severe weather event and show how human-caused CO2 was the driver of this event.
We all know they cannot do it. The Red Team should be required to explain why they can’t show the mechanism for human-driven local weather events, but alarmists still make the claim that humans are the cause, without evidence.
They should just show how one severe weather event was caused by CO2 in the atmosphere, human-derived, or not. They can’t do it. They can’t prove CO2 is driving the global weather, much less local weather events but that doesn’t stop alarmists from making this claim. Prove It!
A red team should be able to carry out its own calculations on two things: 1) is there negative, positive or no water feedback in the atmosphere, 2) what is the real radiative forcing (RF) of CO2. I have calculated these things and published also: 1) The positive water feedback exists only during short term ENSO events, not during the long-term changes longer than 3-5 years. Therefore, the climate sensitivity parameter is not 0.8 K/(W/m2) or 0.5 but 0.27. The RF is not 5.35 * ln(CO2/280) but 3.12 * ln(CO2/280). This means that both TCS (TCR) and ECS is only 0.6 C.
You can find links to original publications on my web site: https://www.climatexam.com/publications
Publications numbers are 6, 12 and 13. These papers are published in the lower category but peer-reviewed journals. Why? I do not have money to publish on the higher level journals and I do not have any name on this field. But I can show pretty good validations for my results. Where are the validations of IPCC results?
Dr. Antero Ollila
P.S. There are optional results for a red team. They should be just professional enough to test, which ones are correct.
Doing research would just drag them down into the political fight. They can, however, identify areas that are uncertain and where additional research should be undertaken to fill in the unknowns.
Epic debate of the century: Red Team vs. Blue Team
Red Team:
Richard Lindzen
Judith Curry
John Christy
William Happer
Freeman Dyson
Blue Team:
Bill Nye – The Bullshit Guy
Naomi Oreskes – The Merchant of Dumb
John Holdren – The Pseudoscience Adviser
James Hansen – The Prophet of Doom
Michael Mann – The Hockey sTrickster
Let’s get it on!
5-hour marathon debate. One hour each pair. Televised live on Fox News and CNN
Is the science settled? – Judith Curry vs. Naomi Oreskes
Is current warming unprecedented? – John Christy vs. Michael Mann
Is global warming mostly man-made or natural? – Richard Lindzen vs. James Hansen
Is global warming catastrophic? – William Happer vs. John Holdren
Is warm climate good or bad? – Freeman Dyson vs. Bill Nye
I would only change the last to:
Is increasing CO2 better or worse for the environment/human race? – Freeman Dyson vs. Bill Nye.
Epic debate of the century: Red Team vs. Blue Team
Organizer: Office of Science & Technology Policy (Science adviser, Steven Koonin)
Sponsor: Ivanka Trump (private funding)
Venue: Trump Hotel, Washington DC
Moderators: Dana Perino and Anderson Cooper (alternating)
Free live audience: 300 randomly selected applicants. Registered voters apply online
Calling on the Blue Team
Who from red is going to argue that case that AGW is a fraud? or have you given up that position?
Oh,
A) you dont get to pick Blue
B0 if the red team does not select various bloggers and commenters to represent red you will have lost.
Why don’t you argue that case that AGW is a fraud? Since you believe that and heartbroken that nobody else believes it. Oh, you get to pick Blue so you can pick idiots you can easily beat with your fraud argument. Afraid you can’t beat Bill Nye? LOL
Mr. Mosher: We seem to agree this red/blue team thing won’t work, but you indicate a willingness to debate, so you and I can debate. I’m not a scientist but I know a bit about fraud. I’ll take “AGW is a fraud’, and go first. AGW is a fraud because the hockey stick is a lie, and the hockey stick was used successfully to push higher cost energy generation to fight AGW. These higher costs are the “damages” resulting from “fighting AGW”, not “fighting a hockey stick graph”. Although man-made CO2 may warm, there is no evidence that it will have catastrophic consequences. The bit of truth in AGW is used by Holdren et al to promote CAGW, which is fraudulent on its face. Will you argue that CAGW is NOT a fraud, or will you need to add a member to your team?
“Almost none of this material has survived peer review to be published in the respectable professional literature.”
That would be a given, when you check out the editorial boards of the various “respectable professional journals”
Take this current ‘scare’ as the latest in a long line of scares.
It is little different from all its predecessors, Global Cooling, Nuclear Winter, Silent Spring etc etc
The mistake being made is that these kinds of things are ‘The Norm’ or perhaps, that 2-party adversarial politics is ‘The Norm’
Surely it is now obvious that such things are leading to utter craziness, such as solar panels, windmills, anti-nukes, wood burning, biofuel, the smashing up perfectly serviceable power stations and not least, epic rises in taxation. And so on.
What kind of people take on and indulge in self destructive’ activities, all the while maintaining that “they are fine, its everyone else that’s wrong and if you don’t agree, I’ll get my many, bigger-than-you friends to sort you out”
What is propelling these people, and has done for 10s of thousands of years? They have an equitable society, are not over-weight, diabetic, riddled with auto-immune diseases and/or cancer and particularly, have not trashed their environment.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p058jh5q
I am not a crank and am not suggesting we all take on hunter gathering. There are far too many of us just for a start.
I want to impose a (trade haha) ban.
I suggest that folks who want to be leaders, politicians and scientists with close contact with politics…
1. Do not in any measure consume alcohol
2. Are not overweight or pre-diabetic
3. Do not consume more than 2 standard espresso coffees per day and no more than 5 cigarettes
4. A|re not afraid to eat saturated fat
This is my assertion from actual life experience. It is a simple experiment any one of you can undertake, the human body & mind is THE perfect laboratory and recording apparatus combined in one. (Just don’t quite go as far as I did and damn near kill yourself.)
If you are unable/unwilling to do the experiment, you prove my point exactly.
Because if we get leaders who are bound by my preconditions, we will get leaders with clear heads, good memories, quick wits, the abilities to take difficult decisions quickly and to act on them.
They will be honest and consequently be able to admit mistakes.
We will get leaders who do not relentlessly pass the buck, who constantly appeal to authority or consensus, are not easily swayed by popular opinion (itself propelled by consumers of sugar and alcohol)
Sadly our medics insist we should eat sugar and say its OK to drink alcohol and even do mary-jane.
So our behaviour now, that of a riotous drunken party on a cliff-top, lurches ever closer to the edge.
PS
CO2 is NOT the edge in that CO2 is a symptom of The Problem, not the cause.
Holdren certainly wasn’t picked as a science advisor on the basis of his scientific expertise, which was practically non-existent. It was a politically based appointment. His recommendation of “per review” as a syubstitute for the red team approach is pretty dumb – peer reviews are nowhere near as open and transparent and depend entirely upon the work of a selected few, usually chosen because their opinions coincide with those of the “respected journal.” Time to trot out some previous articles that were peer reviewed and are now discredited,. Peer reviews are a joke. Science needs open debates, not peer reviews.
And what makes Holdren think that there are as many scientific articles coming from skeptics, given his administration’s plicy of only funding like-mined researchers? Holdren is a political guy, not a scientist.
I don’t think he will be volunteering to be a member of the blue team.
Science progresses through trial and error, through conflicting debates, and there is no place for consensus. Sometimes a single scientist can overturn the theses in force, accepted by the majority of scientists in the field concerned. Let us recall Einstein who, by himself, has atomized the notion of ether and published the theory of restricted relativity, which makes it possible to explain many observations, such as the invariance of the speed of light regardless of the observer. If a scientific thesis refuses the debate, it is because it is pseudo-science that is under the control of an ideology. Mainstream climatology does not want debate because it highlights its inadequacies and serious mistakes, so it is pseudo-science, supported by an ideology supported by most politicians, the media, and NGOs.