The second Trump administration may take a page out of military strategy to challenge established climate science.
Some former administration officials are hoping President-elect Donald Trump resurrects an idea that never came to fruition in his first term: a red team/blue team exercise that pits climate scientists against the handful of researchers who argue climate change fears are overblown.
“If there’s an honest review that is done honestly, and the people who are worried about the climate make a good case, they’ll be even stronger afterwards, because they stood up to the best criticism that exists in the world, and they’re still whole,” said Will Happer, a former adviser on Trump’s National Security Council and an emeritus physics professor at Princeton University.
Happer pushed the first Trump administration to organize the effort, but he said it was ultimately scuttled by political appointees who were worried it would affect Trump’s electoral chances. But Trump, he said, promised him that it would be revived in his second term.
The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment.
The idea assumes there is significant debate among scientists that humans are driving the planet to dangerous levels of warming through the burning of fossil fuels. There isn’t. Most of the researchers who question the reality of climate change have connections with the fossil fuel industry or conservative groups that oppose climate regulations.
Military strategy has no relevance for climate science, said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University.
Dessler called the red team idea a “political process to try to slow down action on climate change.” The few researchers who deny climate change have already been repeatedly proven wrong by an overwhelming amount of peer-reviewed research, he said. He predicted that a red team effort would consist of cherry-picked data paired with unfounded claims of doubt around climate modeling.
“They’re not credible climate scientists,” Dessler said. “They’re not guys who are just asking questions. These are people who have been wrong a lot.”
The effort would also further diminish the standing of the United States within the global community, said Michael Mann, a climate scientist and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania.
“At a time when we’re seeing devastating and deadly consequences of inadequate climate action, to continue to deny the reality and threat of climate change — as these clowns are doing — will make us a global pariah,” he said. “But maybe that’s the point.”
Trump has called climate change a “hoax” and long mocked global warming research, but his first administration generally stayed out of meddling with federal climate research.
That restraint is highly unlikely this time around.
Project 2025 — the blueprint Trump allies wrote for his second term — lays out plans to cut out entire sections of the government’s climate work, particularly at NOAA and EPA. The proposal includes offering the public incentives “to identify scientific flaws and research misconduct” in the studies backing federal regulations, which would allow industry-funded researchers to sow doubt about peer-reviewed science.
The red team/blue team exercise was crafted during Trump’s first term by a group of researchers critical of climate policy. For the effort to work properly and have merit, it needs a blue team of climate scientists who argue that the established research holds up, said Steve Koonin, a New York University physicist and architect of the red team plan in Trump’s first term.
Koonin said the effort would require four or five researchers on each side. Koonin, a former chief scientist at BP, argued that the case for an adversarial review has only grown in the last four years.
“I think we’ve got more data, more understanding, more misrepresentation in the media,” Koonin said. “But the essential mechanism is to get a credible blue team lined up.”
Koonin said he expects that climate scientists would be hesitant to participate in such an effort. That’s why he wants the Trump administration to compel the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to put together a team of researchers. They would then have to review the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report or the National Climate Assessment.
“I think the right way to do it is to take a prior document — it could be the most recent National Climate Assessment — and simply go through that point by point,” Koonin said.
The National Academies did not respond to a request for comment.
The scientific research published in the last four years has continued to show the myriad ways global warming is shaping and threatening the planet. The scientific consensus has long held that the best solution is to cut carbon emissions as quickly as possible. That’s why world leaders are meeting in Azerbaijan this week to hash out a deal on climate finance — and set the stage for the next round of countries’ emissions reduction plans under the Paris agreement. Trump has said he will withdraw from the agreement, though the Biden administration still plans to submit its 2035 emissions target by February.
Dessler, the climate scientist, said he expects the next Trump administration to prompt a number of attacks on research from people with a vested interest in tearing down climate policy. Whether it does any lasting damage to the field of science remains to be seen, he said.
“I think what we’re going to see is a lot of climate grifters coming out of the woodwork, mediocre intellects who see this as their way to advance their own career,” he said.
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