"Alternative Facts" about Climate Change

Climate Change, Anthropocene, & Associated Issues

Ben Santer opines that recently, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and Energy Secretary Rick Perry have called for the establishment of an adversarial “Red Team/Blue Team” (RT/BT) process to assess the credibility of key findings of climate science. These highly publicized requests echo earlier calls for an RT/BT process by New York University physicist Steven Koonin. The underlying premise is that previous assessments of climate science are untrustworthy, self-serving, underestimate key uncertainties, and lack participation from critical voices. The implicit message in RT/BT requests is simple: only the current administration can conduct a fair and unbiased assessment of climate science.

Both the underlying premise and the implicit message are wrong. Climate science has been reviewed for decades, by the national academies of dozens of countries, relevant professional societies, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and many other entities with real domain expertise. Review processes are arduous. They typically involve industry stakeholders and a variety of non-governmental organizations. Critical voices are not excluded. They are part of the review process. If critical voices fail to persuade, it is because their scientific arguments are weak. It is not because their arguments are ignored. In the fierce scientific marketplace of ideas and theories, only the science that passes “extreme vetting” stands the test of time.

Likewise, key uncertainties are not “confined to hushed sidebar conversations at academic conferences,” as Prof. Koonin has argued. Uncertainties are the daily bread and butter of every climate scientist, and of every scientist. Science is a never-ending quest to understand, quantify, and reduce important uncertainties. That is where the action is—at the uncertain frontiers, where much is left to uncover and discover.

Read on .... an interesting, well-written article.