I hope you’ll listen to this valuable discussion with three authors of a voluminous new report critically reviewing the conclusions of President Trump’s climate science “red team” report on clima,te science. (You can explore a rough transcript here.)
You’ll meet authors Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M, who co-writes the The Climate Brink on Substack; Bob Kopp, a longtime climate scientist at Rutgers who you may have gotten to know through my post on climate tipping points; and Pam McElwee, a professor of human ecology at Rutgers who’s also been a past guest on Sustain What talking about biodiversity loss and indigenous land management.
Also on hand was Matt Burgess, a University of Wyoming professor focused on the environmental and social implications of various economic pathways. He’s written a lot about the Trump climate report.
Insert, 9 am ET Sept. 3 - Burgess has a Guided Civic Revival post up on the Dessler et al review and our conversation. He makes a vital point here:
I think the Trump administration shoulders the blame for the rushed timelines, though, because they could have just commissioned a National Climate Assessment (as required by law), and none of this would have happened. They still can. We can still have a National Climate Assessment! (I know. I’m a broken record on this.)
Also read the latest post by Judith Curry, one of the authors of the Trump administration’s climate science critique. Here’s her self-described bottom line:
Bottom line: interesting report, laudable effort. We will be going through this report in much more detail. But in my initial assessment, the Dessler et al. report didn’t land any strong punches on the DOE Report, and I wouldn’t change any of the conclusions in the DOE Report in response. The combination of the DOE and Dessler report highlight areas of disagreement among climate scientists, and illustrates how weighting of different classes of evidence, addressing different topics, and different logical frameworks for linking evidence can lead to different conclusions. The existence of this kind of disagreement is essential information for policy makers, which hitherto has been hidden under the banner of “consensus” enforcement. - end insert
To me the most valuable aspect of this 85-plus-author review is clarifying that the report Secretary of Energy Chris Wright commissioned from his “Climate Working Group” is anything but a formal assessment.
The downside is that the review renews a boxing-match model of thinking about climate science as teams vying for a win/lose decision. Back in 2013, I wroried about this in the context of debates over attributing aspects of particular local extreme weather events to human-driven global climate change. Those trying to highlight uncertainty and build doubt, I wrote, were like Muhammad Ali leaning against the ropes, drawing an opponent into wasting energy - rope-a-dope. They tend to win.
At the same time, I completely understand why these hard-working researchers had to break away from summer vacations to respond. Listen and weigh in.
Unfortunately this is a long ugly slog of a fight.
Dessler’s post on the report is here:
My “curtain raiser” post here has links to both the Trump-commissioned report and the response:
Roger Pielke Jr., a longtime political scientist focused on the interface between climate science and policy (now affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute), has posted an initial review of this review of the Trump-commissioned review:
Do read Burgess’s full post, which includes many valuable reflections and references:
Thank you Dr. Ryan Maue, Dirty Moderate, Scott Killops, Leonard S Rodberglenrod, Lee, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.
