Sunday (12/17/2017) Trump administration drops global warming as national security threat, will form Red Team to challenge climate alarmists

 

The Progressive press is denouncing the Trump administration’s (1) elimination of global warming from a list of national security threats and (2)  it’s recruiting a Red Team to debate the claims of climate alarmists.

“A red team…is an independent group that challenges an organization to improve its effectiveness by assuming an adversarial role or point of view. It is particularly effective in organizations with strong cultures and fixed ways of approaching problems,” Wikipedia explains.

Up to now, Progressive politicians and their press supporters have sought to completely suppress criticism of their claim that  carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels will create a climate catastrophe by the end of the 21st century. Critics of the Progressive view are castigated as “denialists” — to associate them with Holocaust deniers — and denied university posts and peer review in many scientific publications. The Progressives, who dominate the Democratic Party and have some support among “moderate” Republicans, hope to use their dubious scientific claims to seize control of the energy sector of the economy, which is even larger and more important than the health sector seized through the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).

The Progressives’ strategy to brainwash the population that catastrophic global warming is being caused by humans burning fossil fuel is to attribute every unpleasant phenomenon to global warming. California governor has decided that his state’s forest fires are caused by global warming. And of course there are always the polar bears.

Another Progressive tactic to oppose Red Teams — and more generally, the open debate that is essential to scientific progress — is through legal suits accusing scientific critics of defamation. The recourse to such lawsuits exposes as fraudulent the climate alarmists’ claims that Red Teams aren’t necessary because scientific papers are peer-reviewed.

Sam Altman, an important Silicon Valley startup sponsor, says that the toxic Bay Area Progressive culture  — he uses the more polite term, “politically correct” — is hurting innovation.

His point could be generalized to universities in general. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has issued a report claiming that President Trump is undermining the natural sciences. Predictably, a major part of the AAUP’s indictment of President Trump as anti-science is his rejection of global warming alarmism — as though that were a settled issue and that anyone disagreeing with the Progressives is anti-science. Even more astonishing is the fact that one of the five authors of the AAUP report is Michael Mann, notorious for his hockey stick graph of  the 20th century temperature record, obtained by questionable massaging of the raw data. And even more astonishing is the fact that it was Mann who first began the science-subverting tactic of suing one’s critics rather than debating them.

Instead of jumping on the anti-Trump bandwagon on behalf of its constituency — a largely Progressive professoriate — the AAUP would have done better to turn its eyes inward on the perverse incentives that undermine original scholarly research — such as basing scientific reputation, funding, and tenure decisions on citation counts and avoiding criticism of one’s peers out of fear of retaliation.

Click here to go to yesterday’s Founders Broadsheet (“US losing technology superiority, could lose next war”)