[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 9]
[Senate]
[Pages 12443-12446]
[From the U.S. 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 
     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

[[Page 12444]]

     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 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

[[Page 12445]]

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 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

[[Page 12446]]

     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.

                          ____________________