In a concerted move to sow doubt, the Trump administration is orchestrating public debates and report rewrites to discredit established federal climate science.

One author of a recent Department of Energy report that assailed established climate science said the 141-page document is only the beginning — and that the Trump administration plans to do more to undercut research that shows humanity’s use of fossil fuels is warming the planet and endangering its inhabitants.

Steve Koonin, one of the report’s five main contributors, told POLITICO’s E&E News last week that the document likely is a precursor to a sustained assault on mainstream global warming research. Under discussion are plans to hold a public debate about climate science, write a line-by-line rebuttal of the National Climate Assessment and ready a counterattack against climate scientists critical of last month’s Energy Department report.

A key next step, Koonin said, is to expand the Trump administration’s team of climate contrarians beyond the five scientists who wrote the initial report. The document already has attracted hundreds of responses through the Federal Register, and Koonin said they need the reinforcements to push back against the criticism.

“It can’t be five against the world,” said Koonin, a former chief scientist for BP. “We will have to enlist other scientists.”

But that may be easier said than done — as there is only a small pool of credentialed researchers who back the claims of the DOE report.

The document, for example, questions the link between climate change and humanity’s output of carbon dioxide. And it suggests that “CO2-induced warming might be less damaging economically than commonly believed.”

The claims run counter to the findings of tens of thousands of scientists from around the world who have spent decades studying climate change. The overwhelming consensus from these researchers is that the modern world’s burning of oil, gas and coal is pumping planet-warming gases such as carbon dioxide into atmosphere, creating a greenhouse effect. And with a hotter planet comes a cascade of consequences, from rising sea levels to more intense hurricanes and wildfires.

Numerous researchers cited in the DOE report said their work had been cherry-picked and presented in a misleading way — and that it recycled arguments that had long been debunked.

“If you are a sophisticated academic — which I would put all of them in that category — you know how to basically torture the data long enough so it’ll tell you what you want to hear,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University who is leading an academic response to the DOE report.

But Koonin, a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, said that kind of pushback was expected — and in fact plays into a long-running plan to conduct a “red team vs. blue team” exercise for climate science.

The term is a nod to a type of military planning that uses adversarial reviews to identify potential weaknesses. The report is, in effect, the red team’s opening move and Koonin said the criticism will start to make up a blue-team response.

“What we do is a more accurate depiction of climate science for the general public,” he said.

Koonin was preparing a similar effort during the first Trump administration, but it was blocked by White House aides preparing for the 2020 election. At that time, Trump had personally considered a televised prime-time climate debate.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who recruited Koonin and the other four researchers to write the DOE report, told CNN last week that he wants to “update” the National Climate Assessment but did not provide any details. He also endorsed the idea of climate debates.

“We’ll probably have public events here in D.C. this fall,” Wright said. “We want to have an honest dialogue with the American people about climate change.”

Koonin said he expects to carefully scrutinize and challenge every paragraph of the National Climate Assessment, a long-running report mandated by Congress that identifies the threats that global warming poses to the United States.

Judith Curry, one of the other five authors of the DOE report, said she wants a debate — but also wants the chance to recast the National Climate Assessment and other government science reports by emphasizing uncertainty. She envisions a release of a new report infused with disagreements and disputes.

“A public debate is one approach, but I would like to see a broadening of the tent for the ‘official’ assessments to include disagreement, debate, uncertainty,” she wrote in an email.

Curry is a former climatologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In addition to Curry and Koonin, the report’s five authors include Canadian environmental economist Ross McKitrick, as well as John Christy and Roy Spencer, atmospheric scientists at the University of Alabama, Huntsville.

A DOE spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

2014: Red team, blue team

If there is a climate debate, Koonin said he wants to structure it much like a 2014 event at New York University that pitted a team of climate scientists against some of the DOE report authors, including Curry and Christy.

It was a daylong effort organized by Koonin, in which the two teams presented their case to a panel of distinguished physicists from the American Physical Society. For the upcoming debate he now envisions, Koonin said both sides would exchange research notes and talking points ahead of time.

“Healthy debate, challenge response is just the way you do science, and that has been sorely absent from this business for far too long,” Koonin said. “If you can show that it’s wrong, we’ll change it.”

Exaggerating uncertainty in science while downplaying broad-based findings long has been a strategy of conservative groups and lawmakers opposed to fossil fuel regulations, scientists say. The current Trump administration has made it a priority to slash climate regulations and boost U.S. production of fossil fuels.

Ben Santer, a climate scientist who worked at DOE for 30 years before retiring in 2021, participated in Koonin’s 2014 debate at New York University — and he remembers it differently.

He said the red team failed to make a compelling case to the panel of physicists, who ultimately rejected their argument and did not issue a statement that questioned climate science findings. The red team has refused to acknowledge any weakness to their arguments, which have long been rejected by the vast majority of climate scientists, he said.

After the debate, Koonin resigned from the effort he organized and soon after dismissed the field of climate science in the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page for being “not yet mature enough to usefully answer the difficult and important questions being asked of it,” Santer noted.

In response, Koonin acknowledged that he resigned but disputed the notion that the red team “lost” and said a transcript of the event shows a strong response by the red team.

Santer also pointed out that debate — and the weighing of disparate hypotheses — long has been an essential part of science. He said the scientific community for years has accounted for the arguments of Koonin’s team.

“The notion that they have not been part of the community and have not had the opportunity to convince others of the correctness of their arguments is just plain wrong,” Santer said. “The bottom line is, they haven’t succeeded in defending the arguments that they now present in the DOE report.”

The report is not a genuine effort to gain a new understanding, he said, but rather “provide political cover for rescinding the endangerment finding.”

The report was released the same day the Trump administration announced it was trying to overturn the finding, which gives EPA the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Santer said the claims by Koonin and Energy Secretary Wright that the small group of fringe researchers had been silenced by the larger scientific community were not true.

Their arguments have been explored and debunked already, he said, by years of good science.

“These are questions,” he said, “that we’ve been adjudicating for decades in thousands of peer-reviewed publications.”

https://www.eenews.net/articles/trump-team-readies-more-attacks-on-mainstream-climate-science/