[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 130 (Tuesday, August 1, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4660-S4663]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
CLIMATE CHANGE
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, what I would like to speak about is a
new form of fossil fuel-funded climate denial spin that has just
entered the climate debate. They are always up to something, and here
is their latest. The Trump administration's two great scientists, Scott
Pruitt and Rick Perry, the Frick and Frack of climate denial, have
called for a science showdown, where climate denial and climate science
can have it out for once and for all--red team versus blue team.
``Fossil fuel man'' Pruitt has even called for the showdown to be peer
reviewed. Well, what is comical about that is that climate science has
been peer reviewed all along. That is how it gets to be science--by
going through and surviving the process of peer review by other
scientists.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record
a letter to Administrator Pruitt from a wide range of scientific
organizations pointing out to him this very fact, that climate science
is called climate science because it has been through scientific peer
review.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
July 31, 2017.
Hon. Scott Pruitt,
Administrator, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,
Washington, DC.
Dear Administrator Pruitt: As leaders of professional
scientific societies with our collective membership of
hundreds of thousands of scientists, we are writing in
response to reports that you are working to develop a ``red
team/blue team'' process that challenges climate science.
We write to remind you of the ongoing research, testing,
evaluations, and debates that happen on a regular basis in
every scientific discipline. The peer review process itself
is a constant means of scientists putting forth research
results, getting challenged, and revising them based on
evidence. Indeed, science is a multi-dimensional, competitive
``red team/blue team'' process whereby scientists and
scientific teams are constantly challenging one another's
findings for robustness. The current scientific understanding
of climate change is based on decades of such work, along
with overarching, carefully evaluated assessments within the
United States and internationally.
As a reflection of that work, 31 scientific societies last
year released a letter, updated from 2009, to reflect the
current scientific consensus on climate change. We urge you
to give its text consideration, along with America's Climate
Choices, the work of our premier United States scientific
body, the National Academy of Sciences.
Of course, climate science, like all sciences, is an ever-
changing discipline: our knowledge is always advancing.
Robust discussion about data interpretation, methodology, and
findings are part of daily scientific discourse. That is how
science progresses. However, the integrity of the scientific
process cannot thrive when policymakers--regardless of party
affiliation--use policy disagreements as a pretext to
challenge scientific conclusions.
Given your interest in the state of climate science, we
would welcome the opportunity to meet with you to better
understand your perspective and rationale for the proposed
activity; and to discuss climate science, including which
areas are at the frontiers of scientific knowledge and which
are well-established because of thousands of studies from
multiple lines of evidence.
We look forward to hearing from you, and your office may
contact Lexi Shultz, Kasey White, or Joanne Carney to
coordinate a meeting.
Sincerely,
Rush D. Holt, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer, American
Association for the Advancement of Sciences; Robert
Gropp, Ph.D., Co-Executive Director, American institute
of Biological Sciences; Chris McEntee, Executive
Director and CEO, American Geophysical Union; Ellen
Bergfeld, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer, American
Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America,
Soil Science Society of America; Brian Crother, Ph.D.,
President Elect, American Society of Ichthyologists and
Herpetologists; Crispin B. Taylor, Ph.D., Chief
Executive Officer, American Society of Plant
Biologists; Barry D. Nussbaum, Ph.D., President,
American Statistical Association; Olin E. Rhodes, Jr.,
Ph.D., President, Association of Ecosystem Research
Centers.
Linda Duguay, Ph.D., President, Association for the
Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography; Robin L.
Chazdon, Ph.D., Executive Director, Association for
Tropical Biology and Conservation; Katherine S.
McCarter, Executive Director, Ecological Society of
America; David Gammel, Executive Director,
Entomological Society of America; Vicki McConnell,
Ph.D., Executive Director, Geological Society of
America; Paul Foster, Ph.D., President, Organization of
Biological Field Stations; Raymond Mejia, Society for
Mathematical Biology; Luke Harmon, Ph.D., President,
Society of Systematic Biologists.
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Climate denial, on the other hand, avoids peer review
as if it were Kryptonite, so this call for peer review of the contest
between climate science and climate denial is almost comical, except
for the evil intent behind it and, of course, the stakes. How very
risky and dangerous continuing to get this climate issue wrong is for
our country.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record
an op-ed written by John Holdren, until recently the President's
climate adviser, called ``The perversity of `red-teaming' climate
science.''
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From bostonglobe.com, July 25, 2017]
The Perversity of `Red-Teaming' Climate Science
(By John P. Holdren)
EPA administrator Scott Pruitt is reportedly giving serious
consideration to investing the taxpayers' money in a ``red
team-blue team'' effort to determine whether current
scientific understandings about climate change are actually
right. The idea is that a ``red team'' made up of officials
from government agencies with responsibilities related to
climate would try to poke holes in mainstream climate
science, while a similarly constituted ``blue team'' would
have the task of defending the mainstream consensus against
this critique. Supposedly, this process would shed new light
on what is known and what is not about human influence on the
global climate. But the argument that such a process would be
helpful is some combination of naive and disingenuous.
All of science works through the continuous application of
the skeptical scrutiny of key findings by essentially
everybody working in a given field. This happens in part
[[Page S4661]]
through the peer-review process that findings must survive
before being published in a scientific journal. It happens
far more widely through the scrutiny of the wider community
of experts in any given field once the findings have been
published. That scrutiny is intense, not least because
scientists make their reputations in substantial part by
providing corrections and refinements to the published
findings of others. This is the essence of the cumulative and
self-correcting nature of the scientific enterprise as a
whole.
Precisely because climate science has policy implications
that appear to challenge the status quo in global energy
supply, moreover, the degree of professional skeptical
scrutiny to which key climate-science findings have been
subjected has far exceeded even the already pervasive and
rigorous norm. Climate science has been repeatedly ``red-
teamed,'' both by groups of avowed contrarians sponsored by
right-wing groups and by the most qualified parts of the
world's scientific community. The right wing's ``red team''
efforts have consistently been characterized by brazen
cherry-picking, misrepresentation of the findings of others,
recycling of long-discredited hypotheses, and invention of
new ones destined to be discredited. Almost none of this
material has survived peer review to be published in the
respectable professional literature.
Of course, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
itself, which works under the auspices of the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change, can be regarded as a ``red
team-blue team'' operation, in which every conclusion must
pass muster with a huge team of expert authors and reviewers
from a wide variety of disciplines and nations (including
from Saudi Arabia and other major oil producers inclined to
be skeptical). The IPCC has produced five massive assessments
of climate science (in 1990, 1995, 2001, 2007, and 2013-14),
each more emphatic than the last in its conclusions that
human-produced greenhouses gases are changing global climate
with ongoing and growing impacts on human well-being.
Climate-change science has likewise been reviewed regularly
by committees of the US National Academy of Sciences, the
United Kingdom's Royal Society, the World Meteorological
Organization, the American Geophysical Union, and many other
reputable bodies, all of which have contributed to and
confirmed the overwhelming consensus of knowledgeable
scientists on the five key points that really matter for
policy: (1) The Earth's climate is changing in ways not
explainable by the known natural influences; (2) the dominant
cause is the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
that has resulted from burning coal, oil, and natural gas,
and from land-use change; (3) significant harm to humans and
ecosystems from these changes is already occurring; (4) the
harm will continue to grow for decades because of inertia in
the climate system and society's energy system; and (5) the
future harm will be much smaller if the world's nations take
concerted, aggressive evasive action than if they do not.
What, then, could explain the interest in a new ``red team-
blue team'' effort on climate science organized by the
federal government? Some proponents may believe, naively,
that such a rag-tag process could unearth flaws in mainstream
climate science that the rigorous, decades-long scrutiny of
the global climate-science community, through multiple layers
of formal and informal expert peer review, has somehow
missed. But I suspect that most of the advocates of the
scheme are disingenuous, aiming to get hand-picked non-
experts from federal agencies to dispute the key findings of
mainstream climate science and then assert that the verdict
of this kangaroo court has equal standing with the findings
of the most competent bodies in the national and
international scientific communities. The purpose of that, of
course, would be to create a sense of continuing uncertainty
about the science of climate change, as an underpinning of
the Trump administration's case for not addressing it. Sad.
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, let's go back to the basics here. The
basic fact is that the scientific truth of climate change threatens the
business model of enormous industries that spew carbon dioxide, and it
challenges the ideology of rightwing fanatics who spew hatred of
government. That is what the background is to all of this, and there
has been a scheme for years to protect the industry's business model
and the ideology of its associated cohort of fanatics. That scheme from
the industry and the rightwing fanatics has been to attack climate
science. They have been at it for years.
If you are a huge polluting industry or a rightwing fanatic, how do
you go about attacking science? Well, you can't win a real attack on
the science, precisely because the polluter nonsense could not make it
through peer review. Peer review is the most basic test to enter
scientific debate, but they fail at peer review because their argument
is bogus, phony, and it is a front. So the scheme has always been to
avoid peer review because it is a test they would fail.
If you are going to fail the peer review test, what do you do?
Instead of a direct attack through peer review journals, they attack
science from the side. They create a phony parallel science, a
simulacrum of science that doesn't have to face peer review. Their
phony science doesn't even have to be true. In fact, they don't care
whether it is true; indeed, I contend that some of them know it is not
true and are engaged in deliberate, knowing fraud. But, in any event,
getting to the truth is not the point of this phony parallel science.
The goal is political, not scientific.
What they want is for government--us--to let them keep polluting.
Polluting with their product makes them big, big money, and they don't
want to stop. So the goal is not to enter the scientific debate on
scientific terms. This is no quest for truth; this is a quest to
influence public opinion. So the polluter nonsense doesn't have to be
true; it just has to sound legitimate enough to influence an uninformed
public. The goal is to fool the public and mess with politics. That is
how they keep the political pressure off having to clean up their act.
Their battlefield is the public mind, and their goal is to pollute the
public mind with false doubts about the real science.
The climate denial apparatus that Pruitt and Perry serve just needs
to create the illusion that there is still scientific doubt, and it
just has to create that illusion in the minds of a nonscientific
audience--the average voter, people who don't know any better and
shouldn't be expected to. To do this, they have set up an elaborate con
game to help them foment this illusion that there is a real contest
here.
Their first trick, of course, is to hide the hand of the funders who
back this scheme behind innocent or respectable-sounding names. If
people saw the hand of ExxonMobil or Koch Industries behind this
scheme, well, the jig would be up, so they have to back front groups--
dozens, indeed, of front groups. The front groups take nice, cozy words
like ``heritage'' and ``heartland'' and ``prosperity,'' and they stick
them on the front of the front group.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record
an article entitled ``EPA is asking a climate denier think tank for
help recruiting its `red team' '' in this effort at the conclusion of
my remarks.
This article points out that they are actually recruiting one of
these phony front groups, the Heartland Institute, comparing climate
scientists to the Unabomber, so you know that is going to be a fair
contest between climate science and climate deniers when the group
involved is a fossil-funded group that has compared climate scientists
to the Unabomber. Of course you want them in the debate, don't you? It
is laughable, except for the fact that it is really not.
The other thing these groups do is they go down the shelves of
American history and they grab the names of heroes and they slap these
great names onto other phony front groups. Even the great GEN George C.
Marshall has had his name slapped on a front group.
I am a big fan of General Marshall. He is a hero of mine. Winston
Churchill called him ``the organizer of victory'' in World War II. The
Marshall plan saved Europe after that war. He won a Nobel Prize,
deservedly. But in General Marshall's life of dedicated service to our
country, he had his share of sorrows, and one of those sorrows was that
he had no children. So today, there are no living children or
grandchildren to defend his name. Any rascal can put General Marshall's
name on a bogus enterprise, and these rascals did. It is beyond low.
So that is the first trick: Hide the polluters' hand behind an
innocent or respectable-sounding name.
The second trick is camouflage. They ape real science by setting up
groups with names that sound like scientific organizations. So when the
United Nations convenes the real Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, they put up a Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate
Change.
They ape scientific activities. If scientific organizations have
conferences, they have conferences. If scientific organizations have
colloquiums, they have colloquiums. If scientific organizations publish
findings, they publish findings. The difference is, it is all phony.
None of it is peer reviewed. It is not real science; it is a masquerade
designed to give the appearance of science without any of the rigor of
peer
[[Page S4662]]
review and the other attributes of real science.
They even ape the publications of real science. I don't have the
chart with me, but there is a publication by the legitimate U.S. Global
Change Research Program that is entitled ``Global Climate Change
Impacts in the United States.'' That is for real. It is real science.
Then there is a look-alike publication called ``Addendum: Global
Climate Change Impacts in the United States,'' which was cooked up by
the Koch brothers-backed CATO Institute--same print, same text, same
color. It virtually is a masquerade of the real item.
The first thing is to hide industry's hand behind the front group,
and the second is to mask propaganda activities in camouflage that
resembles actual scientific activity without having to pass any tests
of scientific activity.
The last thing is to run the operation like a marketing campaign,
since, well, that is what it is. You wouldn't market soap in peer-
reviewed scientific journals, would you? First of all, the journals
wouldn't publish it. Secondly, that is not your audience anyway. It is
the same here. It doesn't do these scoundrels any good to be publishing
in peer-reviewed scientific journals, even if they could get their
nonsense published there. The people who read scientific journals know
better. That is not their audience, and they know that they will lose
in front of a scientific audience. They would shrivel up like the
Wicked Witch. So they want to go right to the public with Madison
Avenue-quality salesmanship and glossy messaging, marketing their
dressed-up climate denial nonsense like you would market a new soap or
spaghetti sauce. Go straight to TV, straight to talk radio, straight
into the political debate.
The notion that the climate denial crowd now wants a scientific
showdown--some ``high noon'' for climate denial--is ridiculous. First,
they do not. We know they do not. They have been dodging away from peer
review for years. They want peer review like the Wicked Witch wanted
water.
So what are they up to?
Their gambit is yet another climate denial rhetorical trick to
misdirect people to the thought that maybe climate science has not been
peer reviewed either.
Climate science is nothing but peer reviewed--that is how it gets to
be science--but this bit of trickery sets up in the unknowing person's
mind the thought that climate science might not be peer reviewed. If
our Frick and Frack of climate denial, Pruitt and Perry, had said
outright that climate science is not peer reviewed, that would be a
flat lie, and they would be caught out. Instead, they performed this
rhetorical bank shot just to lay that suggestion out there, knowing
perfectly well that it is false. It is a little like the old ``when did
you stop beating your wife?'' trick. It lays out a false predicate by
insinuation where the fact, itself, could not be properly asserted.
The purpose here, like the purpose of all climate denial schemes, is
to buy more time for the polluters. Think how long this imaginary
process of preparing for climate denial ``high noon'' will take. Oh,
they could spin this out for years.
One thing you can bet is that game day will never come, but in the
meantime, they have the craftily embedded lie out there that climate
denial and climate science stand on an equal footing and just await
peer review to decide between them, and now that lie can just hang out
there, leaking its poison into the public debate.
I have to ask: Who thinks this stuff up? They have made a new art
form out of propaganda. Think what a schemer you have to be to think
this stuff up. That is the kind of people we are dealing with here, and
in this bizarro world, Frick and Frack hold high office.
The problem is that there actually is a judge here. A real ``high
noon'' will actually come. As the old saying goes, time will tell. When
it comes to climate change, the laws of physics and chemistry and
biology are at work. The things that CO2 concentrations do
in the atmosphere are going to happen no matter what we say or believe
about them. The laws of physics do not depend on political beliefs. The
chemistry of what happens when seawater is exposed to more and more
CO2 is going to happen, and it will follow the laws of
chemistry, not our opinions or beliefs.
What we humans say or what we believe or what we have been conned
into believing by the climate denial scheme will not matter at all. Our
views--our opinions--are not part of the equation. Fill one room with
climate deniers and fill another room with climate scientists, and the
same chemistry experiment will have the same results in both rooms.
Chemistry does not care about our opinions.
The way trees and animals and fish and insects and viruses and
bacteria react to new temperatures and new levels of acidity and new
environments we have no say in. The fossil fuel industry can cow
westerners into silence or even con them into believing the industry's
climate denial nonsense, and the bark beetle will not care. It will not
even know that the con game is being run. The bark beetle will just
keep eating its way up the warming latitudes and altitudes and killing
pine forests by the hundreds of square miles.
What science does for us is give us the ability, as humans, to
understand the laws of science so that we can predict what will and
will not happen. Science provides mankind with headlights so that we
can look ahead and see what the future portends, but turning off those
headlights by denying the science or trying to distract the driver so
that we are not even looking out the windshield will not change what is
ahead. Whatever is coming at us is still coming at us. We just will not
see it in time to steer around it in order to minimize the collision or
slow down and soften the impact. We will not have time because we will
have given that time to the polluters. Time is what they want--more
time for the polluters to make big money.
All of this lying, all of this science denial is actually, truly, an
evil thing, and the cleverer it gets with these bank shot, faux ``high
noon'' showdown, tricky lies, actually, the more evil it is. The people
who are behind this are doing a very grievous wrong. They are
dishonorable, dishonest, and disgraceful. Time will tell us just how
wicked they are.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From ThinkProgress, July 25, 2017]
EPA Is Asking a Climate Denier Think Tank for Help Recruiting Its `Red
Team'
(By Erin Auel)
The Environmental Protection Agency has asked the Heartland
Institute, a D.C.-based rightwing think tank that denies the
human causes of climate change, to help identify scientists
to join the agency's so-called red team-blue team effort to
``debate'' the science of climate change, according to the
Washington Examiner.
The move is part of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's
efforts to undercut established climate science within the
agency. In an interview with Reuters earlier this month,
Pruitt suggested the possibility of creating a red team to
provide ``a robust discussion'' on climate science and
determine whether humans ``are contributing to [warming].''
The Heartland Institute offers a model of what the EPA red
team might look like. Their contrarian Nongovernmental
International Panel on Climate Change--often referred to as a
red team--publishes regular volumes of a report called
``Climate Change Reconsidered.''
Heartland communications director Jim Lakely told the
Washington Examiner the red team exercises to critique
climate science are necessary ``to critically examine what
has become alarmist dogma rather than a sober evaluation of
climate science for many years.'' But, as many scientists and
experts have noted, the peer review process for scientific
publications already requires and facilitates rigorous
examination.
For years, the Heartland Institute has spread
misinformation about climate change and attacked the
credibility of climate scientists. In 2012, the group
launched a billboard campaign with the photographs of Ted
Kaczynski (the Unabomber), Charles Manson, and Osama bin
Laden, saying those men ``still believe in global warming.''
Heartland's website at the time declared ``the most prominent
advocates of global warming aren't scientists. They are
murderers, tyrants, and madmen.''
More recently, the group announced plans to send a report
titled ``Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming'' to
every K-12 teacher and college professor in America. The
report incorrectly denies humans' contributions to rising
global temperatures.
Pruitt has adopted much of the misinformation that
Heartland promotes. Since being confirmed, Pruitt has
continued to question the science behind climate change and
repeated climate denier talking points claiming that humans
are not the main contributors to a warming planet.
And Heartland experts have already had an active role in
Trump's administration. Dan
[[Page S4663]]
Simmons, currently an assistant to Energy Secretary Rick
Perry, is still listed as an author on Heartland's website.
Myron Ebell, a noted climate denier, led Trump's EPA
transition team and has written several pieces opposing
climate policy for Heartland.
Heartland has received funding from several fossil fuel
companies, though it no longer publicly discloses its
funders. In 2012, leaked documents from the group showed the
group received contributions from the Charles G. Koch
Charitable Foundation and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, among
others. It has also received funding from ExxonMobil to
support work to refute the human causes of climate change.
Last month, Heartland announced former Kansas congressman
Tim Huelskamp will become president of the organization.
During his political career, Huelskamp's top donor was Koch
Industries, and he received more than $250,000 in campaign
contributions from the oil and gas industry. Koch Industries
and the Koch family foundations have been one of the biggest
funders of organizations that deny humans' role in causing
climate change and oppose policies to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions.
It remains to be seen who will staff the EPA's red team.
NYU professor Steve Koonin, a scientist who formerly worked
with both BP and the Obama administration, is reportedly the
top contender. In 2014, Koonin wrote a Wall Street Journal
op-ed detailing the ways in which climate science is not
settled, which included the extent to which humans are
causing climate change, a now-frequent talking point among
Trump administration officials.
In April, Koonin published another op-ed in the Wall Street
Journal, suggesting that a Red Team/Blue Team would be ``a
step toward resolving . . . differing perceptions of climate
science.''
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The majority leader.
____________________