Rood team

Eerder rapporteerde ik dat de nieuwe directeur van het Amerikaase ‘Environmental Protection Agency’ (EPA), Scott Pruitt, bezig is met de samenstelling van een zogenoemd ‘Red Team’ om de menselijke broeikashypothese (AGW = ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’) kritisch te toetsen.

Onder de titel, ‘Red Teaming Climate Change. An effective way to improve climate science and challenge the “climate establishment”?’ schreef Ronald Bailey daarover voor ‘Reason’:

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt wants to set up a Red Team vs. Blue Team approach to evaluating climate change science and policy, E&E News reports. “Defined loosely, red teaming is the practice of viewing a problem from an adversary or competitor’s perspective,” notes Red Team Journal. In this context, the idea is to assemble a group of climate science and policy experts who would dispassionately seek to challenge the assumptions, data, and policy proposals that constitute the climate consensus.

In a sense, science is supposed to be Red Team vs. Blue Team all the way down. Researchers test each other’s hypotheses and findings, trying to poke holes in what has been reported. If a hypothesis survives numerous attempts to falsify it, it is generally accepted as provisionally true. Clearly, Pruitt and some researchers who are skeptical of the more catastrophic predictions believe that the normal processes for evaluating evidentiary and policy claims have broken down with respect to climate science.

One of those researchers is John Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. In his March 2017 testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Christy claimed that a “climate establishment” consisting of a small coterie of like-minded researchers has forged a “consensus of those selected to agree with a particular consensus.” These gatekeepers, he argued, exclude the views and findings of more skeptical climate scientists from consideration in various scientific reports, most especially the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s periodic global climate assessment reports.

Pikant is dat Steven Koonin, die staatssecretaris voor energie was onder de Obama-regering, het voorstel steunt, zoals hij in een opinieartikel in de ‘Wall Street Journal’ heeft laten blijken.

Steven Koonin, a physicist who served as undersecretary of energy for science under Obama, endorsed the idea in an April 20 Wall Street Journal op-ed. Red Teaming, Koonin argued, would “put the ‘consensus’ to a test, and improve public understanding, through an open, adversarial process.” This, he hoped, would lead to “transparent apolitical science” and better-informed policy discussions.

Lees verder hier.

Voor mijn eerdere bijdragen over klimaat en aanverwante zaken zie hier, hier, hier, hier en hier.