Climate catastrophe article meets red team–blue team stunt

For defenders of peer-reviewed climate science, two high-visibility challenges are converging: New York magazine’s sensationalizing of global warming’s consequences and the Trump administration’s planned attempt to subvert scientists’ climate consensus through politicized “red team–blue team” second-guessing. Under the media spotlight, the challenges confront scientists and citizens alike.

Consider an 11 July commentary by the Manhattan Institute’s Oren Cass in the highbrow conservative publication City Journal. It opens by reporting that 39% of Americans see at least 50-50 odds that global warming will make humans extinct. It points out that this unsupportably extreme view is actually more widely held than is the belief that climate change either is “caused mostly by natural changes” (30%) or “isn’t happening” at all (6%).

Still within the first paragraph, Cass targets David Wallace-Wells’s New York cover story “The uninhabitable Earth,” which has the subhead “Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak—sooner than you think.” Cass condemns the 7000-word piece as “disconnected from reality.” Even the “strident” climate scientist Michael Mann, as Cass puts it, judges that Wallace-Wells “fails to produce” adequate evidence.

Cass’s commentary proposes that “scientists and journalists genuinely committed to providing the public with an accurate picture, rather than just the picture most conducive to a preferred policy agenda, have lots of work to do.” That’s an implicit endorsement of the radical measure that Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt is planning.

Debating settled science

Pruitt professes to detect “tremendous disagreement” about carbon dioxide and believes it’s not “a primary contributor” to global warming. E&E News reported that he’s leading a formal initiative to “challenge mainstream climate science.” E&E quoted an unnamed Trump administration official: The “best” in climate-related fields will be recruited to “provide back-and-forth critique of specific new reports.” The article also noted scientists’ concern that this red team–blue team concept “could politicize” research, falsely balancing peer-reviewed science with climate scoffers’ opinions.

The New York Times elaborated on that concern in the article “EPA to give dissenters a voice on climate, no matter the consensus.” It said that climate scientists see Pruitt’s project as a “mockery.” It quoted atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science: “Scientists are already spending most of their time trying to poke holes in what other scientists are saying. The whole red team–blue team concept misunderstands what science is all about.”

That argument was made more bluntly in a Washington Post commentary by atmospheric scientists Benjamin Santer of the National Academy of Sciences and Kerry Emanuel of MIT, along with Naomi Oreskes, the Harvard University science historian. They charged that calls for special teams are “dangerous attempts to elevate the status of minority opinions, and to undercut the legitimacy, objectivity and transparency of existing climate science.”

DeSmogBlog traces the climate-science special-teams idea back eight years to the Heartland Institute, which once produced a billboard showing mass murderer Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski with the caption, “I still believe in global warming. Do you?” Media Matters has outlined how this “scheme to discredit climate science spread from conservative media to the EPA chief.”

A commentator at Mashable quipped about the scheme, “if you don’t like the conclusions coming out of the scientific community, just rig the system.” Slate charged that Pruitt seeks to “sow doubts.” ThinkProgress charged that he “wants to hijack the peer-review process.” In a posting addressing both the Wallace-Wells article and Pruitt’s likely-to-be-televised debates, Guardian climate blogger Graham Readfearn declared, “Pruitt’s respect for climate science would see it reduced to a bastard TV love child of Jerry Springer and Judge Judy.”

On the right, commentaries at the Washington Examiner and the Daily Caller cheered for the scheme. At the Federalist, a commentator charged that scientists’ actual objection is “the risk to their political power.”

The Times reported climate scientist Judith Curry’s view that red team–blue team is needed because dissenting voices are “largely ignored.” It also noted that “many scientists” dispute her, asserting that voices naturally get marginalized when their arguments fail.

Assuming the worst

Curry disagrees extensively with physicist and climate blogger Joe Romm. But in her own blog post about Wallace-Wells’s sensationalism, she quotes what she calls Romm’s “perfect” statement of the issue: “What is a plausible worst-case scenario for climate change this century?” That question illuminates the convergence: magazine article hyping climate catastrophe meets political stunt threatening climate consensus.

Does the consensus answer Romm’s perfect question? Will Pruitt’s red team–blue team stunt engage it?

The question got momentum from Wallace-Wells, whose annotated follow-up version said the original piece had “spawned a fleet of commentary across newspapers, magazines, blogs, and Twitter.” The article warns of doomsday, death from excessive heat, the end of food, climate plagues, unbreathable air, perpetual war, permanent economic collapse, and poisoned oceans. It begins, “It is, I promise, worse than you think.” It announces this scientific statement: “Absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.” In an annotation to justify the statement, it invokes a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper and conversations with experts.

At Quartz, the Wallace-Wells article inspired the headline “Is it unethical to have kids in the era of climate change?” But observers at the Atlantic , the Washington Post , Ars Technica , and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists found the article counterproductively overstated. Mann summarized that view: “The warming of the globe is progressing as models predicted. And that is plenty bad enough.” Climate Feedback, which calls itself a nonpartisan nonprofit helping readers discern trustworthy science news, consulted 16 climate scientists. Overall they rated the article’s credibility “low.”

On the political right, a piece at Breitbart—formerly headed by Trump adviser Steve Bannon—charged that Wallace-Wells attempted to “force-feed” an apocalyptic “worldview onto the non-elite.” Breitbart’s anti-climate-consensus crusader James Delingpole mocked Wallace-Wells for having “broken the world record for the scariest, most catastrophic, hysterical exercise in extravagant climate doom-mongering in the history of the universe.” Reason.com dismissed the piece as worn-out apocalypticism. Fox News listed it first among the week’s worst media moments.

At ThinkProgress, though, Romm commended Wallace-Wells for trying “to spell out just how bad things could get.” He quoted Elizabeth Kolbert from 12 years ago in the New Yorker : “It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we’re now in the process of doing.” Slate science editor Susan Matthews argued that Wallace-Wells’s “horror story” wasn’t scary enough. At Vox, David Roberts agreed. It’s “just weird,” he wrote , “for journalists and analysts to worry about overly alarming people regarding the biggest, scariest problem humanity has ever faced.”

Looking ahead

So what will Pruitt’s stunt actually engage? Reuters explained that the EPA “is in the early stages of launching a debate about climate change that could air on television—challenging scientists to prove the widespread view that global warming is a serious threat, the head of the agency said.” Pruitt told Reuters that “lots of questions … have not been asked and answered,” citing “how much we contribute” to climate change, how we measure it “with precision,” whether we are “on an unsustainable path,” and whether it’s “causing an existential threat.”

In criticizing Pruitt’s plan, Santer, Emanuel, and Oreskes stated that “there is strong scientific consensus that planetary-scale warming is now unambiguous, and that human activities are the dominant contribution to this warming.” Will Pruitt confront that? At Reason.com, science correspondent Ronald Bailey foresees , besides science, wonkishness—"climate science and policy experts” seeking “to challenge the assumptions, data, and policy proposals that constitute the climate consensus.”

How much warming will emissions cause? A few days before Wallace-Wells’s New York article appeared, a Washington Post piece called that question fundamental, difficult, and increasingly controversial—and cited a new peer-reviewed paper in Science Advances that reportedly “joins a growing body of literature” suggesting that the scientists’ climate models are “on track.” Bloomberg headlined its report about that paper “Global warming might be speeding up.” The Guardian‘s article about the paper went further, announcing “Hopes that the world’s huge carbon emissions might not drive temperatures up to dangerous levels have been dashed by new research.” In a posting that opposed red team–blue team, rejected “timeworn arguments” against the consensus, and affirmed the authority and validity of peer review, Inside Climate News pointed to the Science Advances paper and to another in an American Meteorological Society journal.

Katharine Hayhoe, the gently optimistic and increasingly consulted director of Texas Tech’s Climate Science Center, recently advised that the “time to act is now—but not out of fear, with panicked, knee-jerk reactions that burn us out. We need to act based on measured hope and confidence that the science is right, the impacts are serious, and there are solutions to the gravest threats climate change poses if we choose them now.”

We’ll also need to rise above hypersensationalizing and gimmicky stunts calculated to undermine the special authority of science.

Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today‘s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.