Rick Perry Floats Adversarial ‘Red Teams’ To Resolve Climate Debate

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
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Energy Secretary Rick Perry on Wednesday proposed using a process floated by a former Obama administration official to resolve the debate over global warming by allowing government scientists to hash out the facts through an open “adversarial” process.

“It’s a great opportunity for this country to have a conversation about the climate and get the politics out of it, and bring the scientists together,” Perry said while answering questions at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on the fiscal 2018 budget.

“As a matter of fact, the under secretary of energy for President Obama, Steven Koonin, has said, who is a theoretical physicist and was over at the department and knows this issue rather well, and he says it’s probably time for us to have a conversation with all the politics out of room.”

Perry referenced the “Red Team/Blue Team” process that Koonin had endorsed in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in April as a way forward on climate change, given the differences of opinion on the issue.

Koonin is “offering up the idea of having a red team come in and having this conversation,” Perry said. “And I would dearly love to be in the room while they’re having that, not to be one of the experts, but to really listen and have that opportunity to have that conversation.”

Koonin, who is now the director of New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, outlined a process used in national security circles to test assumptions called the Red Team/Blue Team process.

“The national-security community pioneered the ‘Red Team’ methodology to test assumptions and analyses, identify risks, and reduce — or at least understand —uncertainties,” he wrote ahead of the March for Science in Washington. “The process is now considered a best practice in high-consequence situations such as intelligence assessments, spacecraft design and major industrial operations. It is very different and more rigorous than traditional peer review, which is usually confidential and always adjudicated, rather than public and moderated.”

The process usually has a red team that challenges assumptions, and tries to find weaknesses, while the blue team offers evidence to detract from the red team’s challenges.

“Moving from oracular consensus statements to an open adversarial process would shine much-needed light on the scientific debates,” Koonin wrote.

“My perspective is that it is not settled science,” Perry said. “I don’t mind being [a] skeptic about things,” and “President Obama’s own under secretary at DOE … says this science is not settled.”

Koonin wrote that the “public is largely unaware of the intense debates within climate science,” adding that at a recent national laboratory meeting he attended, “I observed more than 100 active government and university researchers challenge one another as they strove to separate human impacts from the climate’s natural variability. At issue were not nuances but fundamental aspects of our understanding, such as the apparent—and unexpected—slowing of global sea-level rise over the past two decades.”

Perry offered up the red team process in responding to questions by Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., on “what it would take” to convince him that manmade carbon dioxide emissions are causing the Earth’s climate to warm.

“Senator I hope that we can agree that maybe it’s time for us to have a red team approach to this, set them in a room let’s listen to what they come up with,” Perry said.

Full story

see also: GWPF Paper: Red Teams Can Save Climate Science From Itself

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

June 23, 2017 at 04:02PM

“Don’t call me an alarmist,” says alarmist

via Climate Change Dispatch
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Sarah E. Myhre is not an alarmist. Really, she isn’t.

“Just don’t call me an alarmist,” says Sarah E. Myhre, a junior climate scientist from the University of Washington in Seattle, at the end of her article for Live Science.

Yet earlier in the same article she writes of “the immense challenge of communicating the terrifying and heartbreaking (and I mean those words specifically) risks that come with climate change”.

Here are some of her recent tweets:

Apart from climate alarm, her tweets feature remarks about white people and men.

The article contains some of the usual misleading comparisons used by climate alarmists – greenhouse gases “trap” heat like a “blanket” (no they don’t, a blanket traps warm air, but in the atmosphere hot air rises), and climate change is falsely compared to the smoking-cancer link.

She recently appeared in an odd video, intended as a response to the recent Dilbert cartoon on climate science, discussed by Ross McKitrick, who notes her alarmism and intent to shout from rooftops.

This is one of the problems of climate science. It has politicised itself into an echo-chamber of groupthink, to the extent that enthusiastic young activists who already have the alarmist mindset are attracted into the field, enhancing the bias further. The chances of these people doing decent, objective, professional science are very slim. Near the end, the article laments “a crisis of trust between the American public and climate scientists,” but sadly the author does not have the self-awareness to understand the causes of this mistrust.

Read more at Climate Scepticism

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June 23, 2017 at 02:38PM

WaPo Weatherman Claims EPA Issued ‘A Declaration Of War’ By Taking Down Climate Change Website

via Climate Change Dispatch
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The Washington Post’s lead weatherman published a lengthy screed attacking the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) removal of web pages on global warming science — web pages he spent years working on.

“To me, a scientist who managed this website for more than five years, its removal signifies a declaration of war on climate science by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt,” wrote WaPo’s Jason Samenow, a meteorologist who heads the paper’s Capital Weather Gang.

“There can be no other interpretation,” Samenow wrote in an op-ed published Thursday night. “I draw this conclusion as a meteorologist with a specialization in climate science and as an independent voter who strives to keep my political and scientific views separate.”

Samenow conceded the issue was “personal” since he spent years working on EPA’s climate science web pages, and admitted, “it is any administration’s prerogative to revise or archive Web pages that relate to policies and programs it is no longer pursuing.”

Still, Samenow argued “it should be obvious to anyone how this senseless action runs counter to principles of good governance and scientific integrity” and there’s “no justification for political interference with authoritative, carefully vetted scientific information.”

In late April, EPA began remodeling its web pages on global warming, taking down the Obama administration’s page that included links to science pages and to policies they were pushing. The move seemed to fan the flames of activists who alleged the Trump administration would “delete” public climate data.

No data has been deleted, but activists have continually pointed to instances where “climate change” were removed from government websites. Samenow claims these instances are “a reckless and dangerous abdication of his responsibility.”

“The site not only presented climate science, it was also a portal to data on warming’s effects and greenhouse gas emissions, along with guidance and tools to help people, municipalities, and states reduce their carbon footprints,” Samenow wrote. “It included a vibrant kids’ site treasured by educators, featuring interactive teaching tools and videos, which was also taken down.”

Samenow and others have attacked Pruitt for not accepting “mainstream climate science conclusions.” Activists see government web page changes, which aren’t unprecedented, as further attacks on science.

More than a dozen Democratic mayors have republished EPA’s old climate pages online. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel was the first mayor to re-post the pages in May, and at least one dozen others have since followed suit.

“Neither the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration nor NASA has altered its online climate science content — which is not substantively different than the material on the EPA’s site,” Samenow wrote, not realizing the irony.

“Instead, one of the world’s best climate science sites has vanished,” Samenow not so humbly said of the websites he spent years working on. Samenow worked for EPA for about 10 years and left to join WaPo in 2010.

EPA’s climate pages drew heavily on public NOAA and NASA data, which is still readily available online. EPA still has pages on global warming, though the main climate page was being “updated” as of Friday.

“Pruitt’s order to delete the site feels purely spiteful as if he simply couldn’t abide knowing that the agency he leads was publishing information he doesn’t believe,” Samenow wrote.

Read more at Daily Caller

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June 23, 2017 at 02:38PM

HBO’s John Oliver sued by Murray Energy CEO over anti-coal segment

via Climate Change Dispatch
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The CEO of the nation’s largest coal company on Thursday filed a defamation suit against comedian and HBO star John Oliver, claiming the “Last Week Tonight” host “demeaned and disparaged” him, his miners, and the entire coal industry during a segment that aired last Sunday.

In the segment, Mr. Oliver — who in the past has taken on the oil industry and vehemently opposed President Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. from the Paris climate accord — critiqued the coal sector as a whole and specifically took aim at Robert Murray, a 77-year-old former miner and the country’s most vocal coal champion.

“An honest conversation about coal and its miners needs to be had,” Mr. Oliver said during the segment, before going on to question the way Murray Energy responded to a 2007 mine collapse that killed six miners.

Expecting a lawsuit, Mr. Oliver closed the segment by holding up a fake check that read “Eat sh*t Bob!” and included the phrase “kiss my ass” in the memo.

The HBO host also referred to Mr. Murray as a “geriatric Dr. Evil,” and more broadly questioned whether Mr. Trump had made false promises to revive the coal industry during his 2016 presidential campaign.

In its lawsuit, Murray Energy charged that the segment was both unfair to the coal industry and hurtful to Mr. Murray, whose health is declining.

“They did this to a man who needs a lung transplant, a man who does not expect to live to see the end of this case. They attacked him in a forum in which he had no opportunity to defend himself, and so he has brought this suit to try to set the record straight,” reads the lawsuit, filed in Marshall County, West Virginia, court.

“Worse yet, Defendants employed techniques designed solely to harass and embarrass plaintiffs, including Mr. Murray, a seventy-seven year-od citizen in ill health and dependent on an oxygen tank for survival,” the suit continues, “who, despite the foregoing, continuously devoted his life, including by working seven days each week, to save the jobs and better the lives of the thousands of coal miners that he employs in West Virginia and elsewhere.”

The company specifically cited Mr. Oliver’s “jokes about Mr. Murray’s health, and appearance,” and how the comedian “made light of a tragic mining incident” as reasons for the legal challenge. It also said that the segment may have “incited” viewers to do harm to Mr. Murray.

In response, an HBO spokesperson told USA Today that the company does “not believe anything in the show this week violated Mr. Murray’s or Murray Energy’s rights.”

Mr. Murray wants financial damages from HBO and a court order preventing any rebroadcasts of the segment, which has already racked up millions of views on YouTube and elsewhere.

Video here (TV-MA):

Read more at Washington Times

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June 23, 2017 at 02:38PM