Columnist Veronique de Rugy says that a report compiled by a group of five climate-change skeptics gathered by Trump’s Department of Energy shows that alternative views to the consensus on global warming deserve to be debated, not silenced.
This is true of most things in this world, of the simple, of the complex. It is also not an overreach to say that some demonstrably provable things can be debated at our peril. To enter into the rhetorical fray with a Holocaust-denier, with those who say that American chattel slavery for 240 years had its bad parts and its good parts, with a Federal Reserve conspiracy theorist — these are not subjects worthy of constructive debate.
Climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels is not only very real, as has been recognized for over a century by objective scientists — it’s a present danger to human life on Earth. It can be tempered, if we act effectively. It can’t be argued away.
I took at look, as de Rugy did not, at the five members of the 2025 Climate Working Group.
John Christy is the Alabama state climatologist. Judith Curry is a professor emerita at Georgia Tech. Roy Spencer is a meteorologist at the University of Alabama, Are you getting a geographical notion here?
OK, Ross McKitrick is a professor of environmental economics from Canada, so northerners are allowed in. And the fifth is a Southern Californian who caused a real stir when he resigned as provost at Caltech in 2004 to take a job as chief scientist at … British Petroleum. Steve Koonin is now at Stanford’s right-wing Hoover Institution, where for some unfathomable reason he allows his title to be Edward Teller senior fellow. Teller, the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” was the inspiration for Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Brilliant; bit unhinged. But guess what: he was an early warner about the dangers of climate change. In 1959 he told a symposium of the American Petroleum Institute what they didn’t want to hear: so much carbon dioxide “in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect.”
Indeed it does, as we have learned these hot 65 years later.
“This little report is basically designed to suppress science, not to enhance it or encourage it,” says Joellen Russell, an oceanographer at the University of Arizona. “It’s awful,” reports Nature, the premier peer-reviewed scientific journal in the world, published weekly since 1869.
“I’m gobsmacked,” says Benjamin Santer, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia. “It’s a revision of science and a revision of history. We have to respond.”
And respond they will. This report was written at the behest of Trump, who calls climate change “a hoax,” and of his energy secretary, Chris Wright, a former oil and gas executive. It’s an attempt to put on hold the a 2007 Supreme Court ruling, and a subsequent 2009 EPA finding, that Teller’s greenhouse gases “may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health and welfare.”
That was back when normies George W. Bush and Barack Obama were in the White House, doing normie things, such as accepting scientific recommendations from the mainstream of researchers. It’s funny — when you mention the fact that 97% of scientists believe in the reality of human-caused and possibly catastrophic climate change and global warming, those with a vested interest in climate denial leap into the analysis of how that figure was derived. But even those with a bias against the facts because of how they earn their livings find it impossible to go below 80% of scientists.
Right after the Trump inauguration in January, Koonin, unprompted, wrote an email to the office of the EPA administrator: “I was told (through a mutual friend of mine and the Administrator’s) that I should contact you to set up a meeting with Mr. Zeldin. The subject is to offer technical assistance from me and colleagues in the review of the Endangerment Finding.” He included an attachment, The New York Times reports, with a claim widely rejected by mainstream scientists that “there is no basis to conclude that human emissions enhance natural ‘greenhouse’ warming in any amount.”
Edward Teller would disagree.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.
