“High Priests of Consensus Panic: The NYT’s Meltdown Over Scientific Skepticism”

Charles Rotter

The New York Times is at it again—clutching pearls and reaching for the fainting couch as the Trump administration dares to let a little oxygen into the musty, tightly sealed room of government climate “consensus.” If the tone of their latest lament, “Trump Hires Scientists Who Doubt the Consensus on Climate Change,” is any indication, you’d think the barbarians had just sacked Rome with nothing but peer-reviewed papers and calculators.

Right out of the gate, the Times wrings its hands over the shocking spectacle of scientists—yes, actual scientists—who “reject the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change” being allowed anywhere near the Energy Department. If you detect a note of moral panic, you’re not wrong. “The three scientists joined the administration after it dismissed hundreds of experts who were assessing how global warming is affecting the country,” they warn, as though these dismissed “experts” were the last line of defense against an onrushing climate apocalypse.

But let’s talk about these dangerous contrarians—and, for a moment, let’s try something radical: list their actual credentials.

First up: Steven E. Koonin. The Times notes he’s a physicist and author but doesn’t dwell on the fact that he was Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy during the Obama administration. Yes, that Obama administration. Koonin is also a former professor at Caltech, a former chief scientist at BP (one of the world’s largest energy companies), and a fellow at the Hoover Institution. His 2021 book, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t and Why It Matters, challenged the prevailing doomsday narrative by calmly pointing out that, yes, climate science remains rife with uncertainty and debate—a statement so inflammatory to consensus enforcers that it might as well have been a call to heresy. Koonin’s influence is such that even Energy Secretary Chris Wright, before his current post, reached out to Koonin to say, “‘This is great,’” and later, “Chris and I have talked quite a bit over the last couple years, and I think he is well aligned with what I wrote in the book”.

Next: John Christy. The Times breathlessly warns that he “doubts that human activity has caused global warming” and is “a vocal critic of climate models,” as if criticizing the most speculative outputs of computer simulations were akin to yelling fire in a crowded theater. But Christy is a Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and Alabama’s State Climatologist. He’s published extensively on atmospheric measurement, and—crucially—he is one of the principal researchers behind the satellite temperature record, a global data set widely cited by both sides of the debate. He’s not a crank; he’s the scientist whose data are routinely invoked even by those who disagree with his conclusions. When asked about his Energy Department role, Christy replied he was “an unpaid person who’s available to them if they need it”.

And then there’s Roy Spencer. The article describes him as a meteorologist “who believes that clouds have had a greater influence on warming than humans have,” making it sound as if he’s howling at the moon from his weather station. In reality, Spencer is a former NASA scientist and, like Christy, a principal investigator for the U.S. Science Team on the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) satellite temperature monitoring program. He spent years as a senior scientist for climate studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, with a long track record of peer-reviewed publications in atmospheric physics. Not content to stop there, the Times quickly labels him a “policy adviser at the Heartland Institute, a conservative group that rejects mainstream climate science,” and “a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing group responsible for creating Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for the new administration”. All the correct code words are deployed—“conservative,” “right-wing”—to ensure readers know these are not the sort of people you should trust with a Bunsen burner, let alone the levers of climate policy.

But don’t take my word for it—let’s watch the NYT clutch those pearls:

“A vast majority of scientists around the world agree that human activities—primarily the burning of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal—are dangerously heating the Earth. That has increased the frequency and intensity of heat waves, droughts and colossal bursts of rain like the storm that caused the deadly flooding now devastating central Texas.”

As always, the Times presents every weather event as a sign of planetary judgment. Doubt the models? You’re a heretic. Question the regulatory scaffolding erected by unelected technocrats? Prepare for excommunication.

But what about those “hundreds of experts” who were dismissed? The implication is clear: technocratic rule must never be questioned. If you replace the “right” experts with the “wrong” ones, civilization itself is imperiled. The bureaucratic caste system is alive and well at the NYT, and woe to any outsider who doesn’t chant the right slogans.

And of course, no alarmist screed would be complete without the ritual invocation of Michael Mann and Andrew Dessler. Mann—famous for his hockey stick graph and near-ubiquitous presence in any article lamenting insufficient climate alarm—pronounces with customary gravitas:

“What this says is that the administration has no respect for the actual science, which overwhelmingly points in the direction of a growing crisis as we continue to warm the planet through fossil-fuel burning, the consequences of which we’ve seen play out in recent weeks in the form of deadly heat domes and floods here in the U.S.”

Every weather event is, once again, both evidence and sermon. Dessler chimes in, warning darkly that it “would be troubling if these three scientists were involved in repealing the 2009 endangerment finding,” which gave bureaucrats sweeping power to regulate just about every engine, factory, and appliance in the country. “Troubling,” in this context, means “potentially allowing actual debate and reconsideration of a policy linchpin upon which billions in regulatory costs rest.”

To reinforce the narrative, the article even notes that Spencer “has accused federal climate researchers of being biased because they receive taxpayer money.” The implication is that bias can only possibly exist on one side of the debate, never among those whose livelihoods depend on perpetual climate crisis. Spencer’s actual words, in his book The Great Global Warming Blunder: “The popular opinion that government-funded research is unbiased must be considered quite naïve”. Apparently, calling for a little scientific humility is a bridge too far.

No critique is leveled at the climate establishment for its own potential conflicts of interest, for its tendency to brand every policy as an existential necessity, or for the repeated failures of its models to accurately predict climate sensitivity, extreme weather, or even the behavior of clouds—one of the core uncertainties highlighted by the very scientists now being vilified.

The real story here is not the hiring of three scientists who are willing to question received wisdom. The real story is the media’s all-consuming need to delegitimize dissent, their relentless efforts to police the boundaries of acceptable thought, and the spectacle of credentialed “experts” howling in protest whenever their authority is challenged. That is the consensus the New York Times truly cares about: consensus as power, not as science.

None of these men is an outsider to science. None is a failed academic, a YouTube crank, or a “denialist” with an axe to grind. Each has spent decades at the pinnacle of his field, shaping the very scientific instruments and records on which the current debate supposedly rests. This, perhaps, is what most unsettles the New York Times and its preferred “consensus” enforcers. For all the talk of “overwhelming agreement,” they must now contend with the uncomfortable reality that some of the most qualified experts on the planet—not politicians, not lobbyists, but the very people who built and interpreted the satellites and models—don’t share their narrative or their urgency.

So let the caterwauling continue. If this is what a crisis of “climate consensus” looks like, perhaps we should welcome a little more of it. The public deserves an open debate, not another sermon from the high priests of the apocalypse. If even these men see room for doubt, perhaps the real question isn’t why they’re being hired, but why anyone is still pretending there’s nothing left to debate.

H/T David D, Dr. Roy Spencer, Chris Martz