German investigative reporter team uncovers large peer review scandal

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that also uncovered the Paradise Paper and Panama Papers investigated the world of predatory scientific journals and conferences. Most of the investigation was done by German journalists, where it has become a major news story that made the evening news.

The problem is much larger than I thought. In Germany it involves about five thousand scientists, about one percent sometimes use these predatory services. That is embarrassing and a waste of money.

While the investigators seem to understand scientific publishing well, it seems they do not understand science and the role of peer review in it. One piece of evidence is the preview picture of the documentary at the top of this article. It shows how the two reporters dressed up to present some nonsense at a fake conference. Presumably dressed up how they think scientists look like. Never seen such weird people at a real conference.

They may naturally claim they dressed like that to make it even more fake. But they also claim that no one in the audience noticed their presentation was fake, I guess they think so because they got a polite applause. That is not a good argument, everyone gets an applause, no matter how bad a presentation was.


A figure from the article that was published in the proceeding of the above fake conference with the title "Highly-Available, Collaborative, Trainable Communication - A Policy-Neutral approach". Clearly no one had a look at it before publishing. It got a "Best Presentation Award".

The stronger evidence that the reporters do not understand the way science works are the highly exaggerated conclusions they draw, which may lead to bad solutions. At the end of the above documentary (in German) the reporter asks: "Was wenn man keinen mehr glauben kann?", "What if you can no longer believe anyone?". Maybe the journalists forgot the ask the interviewed scientists to assess the bigger picture, which is what I will do in this post. There is no reason to doubt our scientific understand of the world because of this.

As an aside, the journalists of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists are the good guys, but (Anglo-American) journalism that rejects objectivity is the bigger problem for the question what we can believe in than science.

Fortunately most of the reporting makes clear that the main driving force behind the problem is the publish-or-perish system that politicians and the scientific establishment have set up to micro-manage scientists. If you reward scientists for writing papers rather than doing science, they will write more papers, in the worst case in predatory journals.

Those in power will likely prefer to make the micromanagement more invasive and prescribe where scientists are allowed to publish. The near monopolistic legacy publishers, who are the only ones really benefiting from this dysfunctional system, will likely lobby in this direction.

Peer review

Many outside of science have unrealistic expectations of peer review and of peer reviewed studies. Peer review is just a filter that improves the average quality of the articles. Science does not deal in certainty (that is religion) and peer reviewed studies certainly do not offer certainty. The claims of single studies (and single scientists) may be better than a random blog post, but reliable scientific understanding should be based on all studies, preferably a few years old, and interpreted by many scientists.

This goes much against the mores of the news business, who focus on single studies that are just out, may add some personal interest by portraying single heroic scientists. The news likes spectacular studies that challenge our current understand and are thus the most likely studies to be wrong. If this mess the public sees were science we would not have much scientific progress.

As a consumer of science reporting I would much prefer to read overviews of how the understanding in a certain scientific community is and possibly how it has changed over the last years. It does not have to be recent to be new to me. There is so much I do not know.

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the biggest threat to the proper public understanding of science is ... the lie we tell the public (and ourselves) that journal peer review works to separate valid and invalid science
Michael Eisen

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Peer review is nothing more than that (typically) two independent scientists read the study, give their feedback on things that could be improved and advice the editor on whether the study is sufficiently interesting for the journal in question. Review is not there to detect fraud. Reviewers do not redo all experiments, do not repeat all calculations, do not know every related study that could shine a different light on the results. They just think that other scientists would be interested in reading the article. The main part of the checking, processing of the new information and weaving it into the scientific literature is performed after publication when scientists (try to) build on the work.

The documentary starts with someone with cancer who is conned into a treatment by a scrupulous producer pointing to their peer reviewed studies, partially published in predatory journals. They also criticize that articles from predatory journals were available in a database of a regulatory agency.

However, the treatment in question was not approved and the agency pointed out that they had not used these articles in their assessments. For these assessments scientists come together and discuss the entire literature and how convincing the evidence is in various aspects. These scientists know which journals are reliable, they read the studies and try to understand the situation. One of the interviewed scientists looked at one of the studies on this cancer treatment in a predatory journal and found several reasons why the journal should not have accepted it in the present form.

Also politicians would often like every scientific study to be so perfect that you do not need any expertise to interpret it and can directly use it for regulation. That is not how science works and also not what science was designed for. Science is not an enormous heap of solid facts. Science is a process where scientists gradually understand reality a little better.

Trying to get to the "ideal" of flawless and final studies would make do science much harder. Every scientists would have to be as smart and knowledgeable as the entire community working on something for years. Writing and reviewing scientific article would be so hard that scientific progress would come to a screeching halt. Especially new ideas would have no chance any more.

Conned scientists

Like most scientists I get multiple spam mails a day for fake scientific journals and conferences. Most of them have the quality of Nigerian Prince Spam. People say this kind of spam still exists because the spammers only want really stupid people to respond as they are the easiest to con.

Thus I had expected that people who take up such offers know what they are doing. Part of becoming a scientist is learning the publishing landscape of your field. But Open Access publishing reporter Richard Poynder mentioned several cases of scientists being honestly deceived, who tried to reverse their error when they noticed what happened.

The first researcher who contacted me realised something had gone wrong when the manuscript that he and his co-authors had submitted was returned to them with no peer review reports attached and no suggested changes. There was, however, a note to say that it had been accepted, and could they please pay the attached invoice. They later learned that the paper had already been published.

Quickly realising what had happened, and desperate to recover the situation, the authors agreed to pay the publisher the journal’s full [Author Processing Charges] (over $2,000) – not for publishing their paper, but for taking it down.

Apparently there are also predatory journals with names that are very similar to legitimate ones and a 1% error rate easily happens. I guess assessing the quality of journals can be harder in large fields and in case of interdisciplinary fields. If the first author selects a predatory journal, the co-authors may not have the overview of the journals in the other field to notice the problem.

We need to find a way help scientists who were honestly fooled and make it possible that the authors can retract their articles themselves. Otherwise they can be held hostage by the predatory publishers, which also funds the organised deception.

If the title of the real article is the same as the one of the predatory article it would be hard to put both on your CV or article list. Real publishers could be a bit more lenient there. A retraction notice of the predatory version in the acknowledgements of the real version should be "shameful" enough that people do not game the system, first publish predatory and then look for a real publisher.

Predators

If there is evidence that scientists purposefully publish in predatory journals or visit fake conferences that should naturally have consequences. That is wasting public money. One institute had 29 publications over a time span of ten years. There is likely a problem there.

It should also have consequences when scientists are in the editorial boards of such predatory journals. It may look nice on their CV to be editor, but editors should notice that they are not involved in the peer review or that it is done badly. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that they are aware that they are helping these shady companies. Sometimes these companies put scientists on their editorial boards without asking them. In that case you can expect a scientist to at least state on their homepage that they did not consent.

It is good to see that prosecutors are trying to take down some of these fake publishers. I wish them luck, although I expect this to be hard because it will be difficult to define how good peer review should work. Someone managed to get a paper published with the title "Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List". That would be a clear example of a fail and probably a case of one strike and you are out. At least scientifically, no idea about juridically. With more subtle cases you probably need to demonstrate that this happens more often. Climate "sceptics" occasionally manage to publish enormously bad articles in real scientific journals. That does not immediately make them predatory journals.

Changing publishing

In the past scientific articles were mostly published in paper journals to which academic libraries had subscriptions. This made it hard for the public and many scientists to read scientific articles, especially for scientists from the global South, but I also cannot read articles in one of the journals I publish in regularly myself.

Nowadays this system is no longer necessary as journals can be published online. Furthermore, the legacy system is made for monopolies: a reader needs a specific article and an author needs a journal that most scientists subscribe to. As society replaces morality with money and as the publishing industry is concentrating and clearly prioritizes profits over being a good member of the scientific community subscription prices have gone up and service has gone down. As an example of the former, Elsevier has a profit margin of 30 to 50 percent. As an example of the latter, in one journal I unfortunately publish in the manuscript submission system is so complicated that you have to reserve almost a full working day to submit a manuscript.

The hope of the last decade was that a new publishing model would break open the monopoly: open access publishing. In this model articles are free to read and in most cases the authors fund the journals. This reduces the monopoly power of the journals. Readers can read the articles they need and authors can be sure their colleagues can read the article. However, scientists want to publish in journals with a good reputation, which takes years if not decades to build up and still produces a quite strong monopoly situation.

This has resulted in publishing fees of several thousands of Euro for the most prestigious open access journals. In this way these journals are open to read, but no longer open to publish for many researchers. These journals drain a lot of resources that could have been used for research; likely more than the predatory publishers ever will. My guess would be that the current publishing system is 50 to 90 percent too expensive; the predatory journals have less than 1 percent of the market.

The legacy publishers defend their profits and bad service with horror stories about predatory open access journals. They prefer to ignore all the high quality open access journals. This investigative story unfortunately feeds this narrative.

Bad solutions

The Austrian national science foundation (FWF) has found a way to make the situation worse. They want make sure that the scientists they fund will only publish in a list of known good quality open access journals, for example in the Directory of Open Access Journals. That sounds good, but if all science foundations would adopt this policy it would become nearly impossible to start new scientific journals and the monopolies would get stronger again.

[UPDATE The German Alliance of Scientific Organizations fortunately states that journal selection is part of the freedom of science. They furthermore state that the quality of a study does not depend on where it is published and want to help scientists with training and information persons. They see a key role for the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).]

I just send a nice manuscript to a new journal, which has no real reputation yet. Its topics fits very well to my work, so I am happy my colleagues started this journal. I did my due diligence, know several people on the editorial board as excellent researchers and even looked through a few published articles. The same publisher has many good journals and journal is by now also listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The DOAJ was actually very quick and already listed this journal after only publishing 11 articles. But getting those first 11 would be hard if the FWF policy wins out.

The opposite model is to create a black list. This has less problems, but it is quite hard to determine which journals are predatory. There used to be a list of predatory journals by Jeffrey Beall, but he had to stop because of legal threads to his university by the predatory publishers. There were complaints that this list discriminated against journals from developing countries. True or not, this illustrates how hard it is to maintain such a list. There is now, oh irony, a pay-walled version of such a list with predatory journals. The subscriptions should probably pay for the legal risks.

Changing publishing

A good solution would be to review the articles after publication. This would allow researchers to update their assessments when evidence from newer studies come in and we understand the older studies better. PubPeer is a system to do this post-publication peer review, but it mostly has reviews for flawed papers and thus does not give a good overview over the scientific literature.

F1000 Prime is an open access journal with post publication review. I know of two more complete post-publication review systems: The Self-Journals of Science and recently Peeriodicals. Here every scientist can start a journal, collect the articles that are worthwhile and write something about them. The more scientists endorse an article, the more influential it is. In these systems I miss reviews of article are not that important, but are valid and they may still be informative for some. Furthermore, I would expect that the review would need to be organized more formally to be seen as worthy successors of the current quality control system.

That is what I am trying to build up at the moment and I have started a first such "grassroots journal" for my own field to show how the system would work. I expect that the system will be superior because these "grassroots journals" do not publish the articles themselves, only review them, and thus can assess all articles in one field at one place, while traditionally articles are spread over many journals. The quality of the reviews will be better because it uses a post-publication review model. The reviews are more helpful to the readers because they are published themselves and quantify in more detail what is good about an article. As such it performs the role of a supervisor in finding one's way in the scientific literature.

You get a similar effect from the always up-to-date review paper on sea surface temperature proposed and executed by my colleagues John Kennedy. This makes it easy for others to contribute, while having versioning and attribution. There is naturally less detail per article that is reviewed.

Changing the system

But also a better reviewing system cannot undo the damage of the fake competitive system currently used to fund scientific research.

Volker Epping, president of the University of Hannover, stated: "The pressure to publish is enormous. Problems are inherent to the system." I would even argue: Given the way the system is designed, it is a testament of the dedication of the scientists that it still works so well.

It is called "competitive", but researchers are competing to get their colleagues to approve the funding their research. There is no real competition because there is no real market. If you did a good job, there are no customers that reward you for this. In the best case the rewards come as new funding decided by people who have no skin in the game. People who have no incentive to make good funding decisions. Given that situation, it is amazing that scientists still spend time in making good peer reviews of research proposals and show dedication comparing them with each other to decide what to fund.

My proposal would be to return to the good old days. Give the funding to the universities, which give it to the professors, which allocate it to what they, as the most informed experts, think is interesting research, which furthers their reputation. Professors have skin in the game, their reputation is on the line, and they will invest the limited funds where they expect to get most benefits. In the current system there is no incentive to set priorities, submitting more research proposals has no downsides for them beyond the time it takes to write them. One of the downsides of this model for science is that the best researchers are not doing research, but are writing research proposals.

A compromise could be to limit the number of projects a science foundation funds per laboratory. The Swiss Science Foundation uses this model.

The old and hopefully future system also allows for awarding permanent positions to good researchers. Now most researchers are on short-term contracts because the project funding does not provide stable funding. With these better labour conditions one could attract much better researchers for the same salary.

Because project science requires so many peer reviews (of research proposals and of a bloated number of articles) a lot of time is wasted. (This waste is again much bigger than that of the predatory publishers.) This invites the reviewers to use short-cuts and not assess how good a scientist is and instead assess how many articles they write and how high the prestige is of the journals the articles appear in (bibliometric measures). Officially this system is illegal in Germany, the ethics rules of the German Science Foundation forbid judging researchers and small groups on their bibliometric measures, but it still happens.

My expectation is that without the publish-or-perish system scientific progress would go much faster and we certainly would not have the German public being shocked to learn about predatory publishers.

I hope the affair will inspire journalists to inform the public better on how science works and what peer review is and is not.

Related reading

Investigation of predatory publishing

English summary by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ): New international investigation tackles ‘fake science’ and its poisonous effects.

A critical comment in English on the affair: Beyond #FakeScience: How to Overcome Shallow Certainty in Scholarly Communication. With many (mostly German) links to news sources.

The newspaper Indian Express (the Indian partner of the ICIJ): Inside India’s fake research paper shops: pay, publish, profit. Despite UGC blacklist, hundreds of ‘predatory journals’ thrive, cast shadow on quality of faculty and research nationwide.

Comment on the investigation: Predatory Open Access Journals: Is Open Peer Review Any Help? I think it would help, but there are also commercial firms where you can buy peer reviews (next to copy editing, statistical analysis and writing complete articles and theses).

The Bern university library feels criteria for black lists are not transparent and making them puts much power into the hands of a commercial company: On the topic of #predatoryjournals - are there black lists and how reliable are they? In German: Zum Thema #predatoryjournals – gibt es schwarze Listen und wie verlässlich sind sie?

Investigation of scientists of the City University of New York publishing in predatory journals.

Overview of the investigation by the ICIJ in German: Overview of the investigative project in German.

Q&A of ICIJ in German: #FakeScience - Fragen und Antworten.

Why so many researchers use dubious ways to publish (in German). Warum so viele Forscher auf unseriösem Weg publizieren. Volker Epping, president of the University of Hannover: "The pressure to publish is enormous. Problems are inherent to the system." I would even argue: Given the way the system is designed, it is a testament of the dedication of the scientists that it still works so well.

Video of a comment on the affair by Svea-Eckert in German. Like other jouralists, I think she is wrong about the implications.

Peer review

The first grassroots scientific journal, which I hope will inspire the post-publication review system of the future.

An always up-to-date review paper by John Kennedy, Elizabeth Kent on GitHub: A review of uncertainty in in situ measurements and data sets of sea-surface temperature. You can use bug reports and pull requests to add to the text.

Separation of feedback, publishing and assessment of scientific studies.

Separation of review powers into feedback and importance assessment could radically improve peer review. Grassroots scientific journals.

Publish or perish is illegal in Germany, for good reason. German science has another tradition, trusting scientists more and focusing on quality. This is expressed in the safeguards for good scientific practice of the German Science Foundation (DFG). It explicitly forbids the use of quantitative assessments of articles.

The value of peer review for science and the press. Is it okay to seek publicity for a work that is not peer reviewed? Should a journalist only write about peer-reviewed studies? Is peer review gate keeping? Is peer review necessary?

Peer review helps fringe ideas gain credibility.

Three cheers for gatekeeping.

Did Isaac Newton Need Peer Review? Scholarly Journals Swear By This Practice of Expert Evaluation. But It’s a New Phenomenon That Isn’t the Only Way To Establish the Facts.

Think. Check. Submit. How to recognise predatory publishers before you submit your work.

The Trump administration proposes a new scientific method just for climate studies

What could possibly go wrong?

[[Scott Pruitt]] is the former Oklahoma Attorney General who copied and pasted letters for pro-pollution lobbyists onto his letter head. Much of his previous work was devoted to suing the EPA. Now he works for the big money donors as head of the EPA.  This Scott Pruitt is allegedly working on formulating a new scientific method to be used for studying climate change alone. E&E News just reported that this special scientific method will use "red team, blue team" exercises to conduct an "at-length evaluation of U.S. climate science."

Let's ignore that it makes no sense to speak of US climate science when it comes to the results. Climate science is the same in every country. There tends to be only one reality.

Previously [[Rick Perry]], head of the Department of Energy (DOE) who campaigned on closing the DOE before he knew what it does, had joined the group calling to replace the scientific method with a Red Team Blue Team exercise.



A Red Team is supposed to challenge the claims of the Blue Team. It is an idea from hierarchical organisations, like the military and multinationals, where challenging the orthodoxy is normally not appreciated and thus needs to be specially encouraged when management welcomes it.

Poking holes is our daily bread

It could naturally be that the climate "sceptics" do not know that challenging other studies is build in into everything scientists do; they do not give the impression to know science that well. In their Think Tanks and multinational corporations they are probably happy to bend the truth to get ahead. They may think that that is how science works and they may not able to accept that a typical scientist is intrinsically motivated to figure out how reality works.

People driven by greed are unable to comprehend any other motivation. Similarly, habitual liars assume everyone else lies just like they do.

— Joe Daniel (@Bikes4bacon) 1 July 2017

At every step of a study a scientist is aware that at the end it has to be written up very clearly to be criticised by peer reviewers before publication and by any expert in the field after publication. That people will build on the study and in doing so may find flaws. Scientific claims should be falsifiable, one should be able to show them wrong. The main benefit of this is that it forces scientists to very clearly describe the work and make it vulnerable to attack.

The first time new results are presented is normally in a working group seminar where the members of the Red Team are sitting around the table, ask specific questions during the talk and criticise the main ideas after the talk. These are scientists working with similar methods, but also ones who work on very different problems. All and especially the group leaders have an interest in defending the reputation of the group and making sure no nonsense spoils it.

The results are normally also presented at workshops, conferences and invited talks at other groups. At workshops leading experts will be there working on similar problems, but with a range of different methods and backgrounds. At conferences and invited talks there are in addition also many scientists from adjacent fields in the audience or scientists working with similar methods on other problems. A senior scientist will get blunt questions after the talk if anything is wrong with it. Younger scientists will get nicer questions in public and the blunt ones in private.

An important Red Team consists of your co-authors. Modern science is mostly done in teams. That is more efficient, reduces the chances of rookie errors and very easy due to the internet. The co-authors guarantee with their reputation for the quality of the study, especially for the part where they have expertise.

None of these steps are perfect and journalists should get away from their single-study fetish. But together these steps ensure that the quality of the scientific literature as a whole is high.

(It is actually good that none of these steps are perfect. Science works on the boundary of what is known, scientists that do not make errors are not pushing themselves enough. If peer review would only pass perfect articles that would be highly inefficient and not much would be published, it normally takes several people and studies until something is understood. It is helpful that the scientific literature is high quality, it does not need to be perfect.)

Andrew Revkin should know not to judge the quality of science by single papers or single scientists, that peer review does not need to be perfect and did not exist for most of the scientific era. But being a false balance kind of guy he regrettably uses "Peer review is often not as adversarial as intended" as argument to see merit in a Red Team exercise. While simultaneously acknowledging that "All signs point to political theater"

Red Team science

An optimistic person may think that the Red Team proposal of the Trump administration will follow the scientific method. We already had the BEST project of the conservative physics professor Richard Muller. BEST was a team of outside people have a look at the warming over land estimated from weather station observations. This project was funded in part by the Charles G. Koch Foundation. the Heartland Institute, hard core deniers funded by Koch Brother organisations.

The BEST project found that the previous scientific assessments of the warming were right.



The BEST project is also a reason not to be too optimistic about Pruitt's proposal. Before BEST published their results mitigation sceptics were very enthusiastic about their work and one of their main bloggers, Anthony Watts, claimed that their methods were so good and he would accept the outcome no matter the result. That changed when the result was in.

Judith Curry was part of BEST, but left before she would have had to connect her name with the results. Joseph Majkut of Niskanen Center, who wrote an optimistic Red Team article, claims there were people who changed their minds due to BEST, but did not give any examples yet.

It also looks as if BEST was punished for the result that was inconvenient for the funders. The funders are apparently no longer interest in studying the quality of climate observations. Berkeley Earth now mainly works on air pollution. While BEST did not even look at the largest part of the Earth yet: the oceans. The nice thing of being funded by national science foundations is that they care about the quality of the work, but not the outcomes.

If coal or oil corporations thought there was a minute possibility that climate science was wrong, they would fund their own research. Feel free to call that Red Team research. That they invest in PR instead shows how confident they are that the science is right. Initially Exxon did fund research, when it became clear climate change was a serious risk they switched to PR.

Joseph Majkut thinks that a well-executed Red Team exercise could convince people. In the light of the BEST project, the corporate funding priorities and the behaviour of mitigation sceptics in the climate "debate", I am sceptical. People who did not arrive at their position because of science will not change their position because of science.

Washington Republicans will change their mind when the bribes, aka campaign contributions, of the renewable energy sector are larger than those of the fossil fuel sector. Or when the influence of money is smaller than that of the people, like in the good old days.

Science lives on clarity

As a scientist, I would suggest just wait and see at this time. Let the Trump administration make a clear plan for this new scientific method. I am curious.

Let them tell us how they will select the members of the Red Team. Given that scientists are always critiquing each others work, I am curious how they plan to keep serious scientists out of their Red Team. I would be happy to join, there is still a lot of work to do on the quality of station data. Scientific articles typically end with suggestions for future research. That is the part I like writing the most.

Because the Trump administration is also trying to cut funding for (climate) science, I get the impression that scientists doing science is not what they want. I would love to see how they excuse keeping scientists like me out of the Red Team.

It would also be interesting to see how they will keep the alarmists out. Surely Peter Wadhams would like to defend his position that the Arctic will be ice free this year or the next. Surely Guy McPearson would like to explain why we are doomed and mainstream science, aka science, understates the problem in every imaginable way. I am sure Reddit Collapse of Civilization can suggest many more people with just as much scientific credibility as the people Scott Pruitt would like to invite. I hope they will apply to the Red Team.

That is just one question. Steven Koonin proposes in the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal that:

A commission would coordinate and moderate the process and then hold hearings to highlight points of agreement and disagreement, as well as steps that might resolve the latter

Does this commission select the topics? Who are these organisers? Who selects them? What are the criteria? After decades of an unproductive blog climate "debate" we already know that there is no evidence that will convince the unreasonable. Will the commission simply write that the Red Team and the Blue Team disagreed about everything? Or will they make an assessment whether it is reasonable for the Red Team to disagree with with evidence?

Clearly Scott Pruitt himself would be the worst possible choice to select the commission. Then the outcome would trivially be: the two teams disagree and Commission Coal Industry declares the Red Team as winner. We already have an NIPCC report with a collection of blog "science". There is no need for a second one.

The then right-wing government of The Netherlands made a similar exercise: Climate Dialogue. They had a somewhat balanced commission and a few interesting debates on, for instance, climate sensitivity, the tropical hotspot, long-term persistence and Arctic sea ice. It was discontinued when it failed to find incriminating evidence. Just like funding for BEST stopped and confirming the general theme of the USA climate "debate": scientists judge studies based on their quality, mitigation "sceptics" based on the outcome.

A somewhat similar initiative in the US was the Climate Change National Forum, where a journalist determined the debating topics by selecting newspaper articles. The homepage is still there, but no longer current. Maybe Pruitt has a few bucks.

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"This is yet another example of politicians engaging in unhelpful meddling in things they know nothing about."
Ken Caldeira

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How will Pruitt justify not asking the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), whose job these kind of assessments is, to organise the exercise. Surely the donors of Pruitt will not find the NAS acceptable, they already did an assessment and naturally found the answer that does not fit their economic interests. (Like the findings on climate change of every other scientific organisations from all over the world does not fit their corruption-fuelled profits.)

I guess they will also not ask the Science Division of the White House.

Climate scientist Ken Caldeira called on Scott Pruitt to clarify the hypothesis he wants to test. Given the Trumpian overconfidence, the continual Trumpian own-goals, the Trumpian China-hoax extremism, the Trumpian incompetence and Trump's irrational donors wanting to go after the endangerment finding, I would would not be surprised if they go after the question whether the greenhouse effect exists, whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas or whether the world is warming. Pruitt said he wanted a "discussion about CO2 [carbon dioxide]."

That would be a party. There are many real and difficult questions and sources of uncertainties in climate science (regional changes, changes in extremes, the role of clouds, impacts etc.), but these stupid greenhouse-CO2-warming questions that dominate the low-rated US public "debate" are not among them.

The mitigation sceptical groups are not even able to agree with themselves which of these stupid three questions is the actual problem. I would thus suggest that the climate "sceptics" use their new "scientific method" themselves first to make their chaotic mess of incompatible claims into something.

Red Team PR exercise

Donald Trump has already helped climate action in America enormously by cancelling the voluntary Paris climate agreement. Climate change is slow and global. Everyone hopes someone else will solve it some time and attends to more urgent personal problems. When the climate hoaxer president cancelled the Paris agreement the situation became more dangerous and Americans started paying attention. This surge is seen above in the Google searches for climate change in the USA. This surge was noticeable in Reddit where there was a huge demand for reliable information on climate science and climate action.

The Red Team exercise would give undue weight to a small group of fringe scientists. This is a general problem in America, where many Americans have the impression that extremist positions are still under debate because the fossil fuel industries bought many politicians who in turn say stupid things on cable TV and in opinion sections. These industries also place many ads and in return corporate media is happy to put "experts" on TV that represent their positions. Reality is that 97% of scientists and scientific studies agree that climate change is real and caused by us.

On the optimistic side, just like cancelling Paris made Americans discover that Washington is completely isolated on the world stage in their denial that climate change is a risk, the Red Team exercise could also lead to more American learning how broad the support in the scientific community for climate change is and how strong the evidence.



If the rules of the exercise are clearly unfair, scientists will easily be able to explain why they do not join and ask Pruitt why he thinks he needs such unfair rules. While scientists are generally trusted, the opposite is true for Washington and the big corporations behind Pruitt.

The political donors have set up a deception industry with politicians willing to lie for them, media dedicated to spreading misinformation or at least willing to let their politician deceive the public, they have "think tanks" and their own fake version of the IPCC report and a stable of terrible blogs. These usual suspects writing another piece of misinformation for the EPA will hardly add to the load.

The most tricky thing could be to make clear to the public that science is not resolved in debates. The EPA official E&E News talked to was thinking of a "back-and-forth critique" by government-recruited experts. In science that back and forth is done on paper, to make sure it is clearly formulated, with time to check the claims, read the cited articles and crunch the data. If it is just talk, it is easy to make false claims, which cannot be fact checked on the spot. Unfortunately history has shown that the Red Team will likely be willing to make false claims in public.

If the rules of he exercise are somewhat fair, science will win big time; we have the evidence on our side. At this time, where America pays attention to climate change, that could be a really good advertisement for science and the strength of the evidence that climate change is a huge risk that cannot be ignored.

Concluding, I am optimistic. Either they make the rules unfair. It seems likely they will try to make this exercise into political theatre. Then we can ask them in public why they make the rules so unfair. Don't they have confidence in their position that climate change is a hoax?

If they make the rules somewhat fair, science will win big time. Science will win so much, you will be tired of all the winning, you will be begging, please mister scientist no more winning, I cannot take it any more.

Let me close with John Oliver on Coal. Oliver was sued over this informative and funny piece by coal Barron Robert Murray who also stands behind Scott Pruitt and Trump.

Related reading

Red/Blue & Peer Review by the presidents of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) & the National Academy of Sciences: "Is this a one-off proposal targeting only climate science, or will it be applied to the scientific community’s research on vaccine safety, nuclear waste storage, or any of a number of important policies that should be informed by science?"

Are debatable scientific questions debatable?

Why doesn't Big Oil fund alternative climate research?

My previous post on the Red Cheeks Team.

Great piece by climate scientist Ken Caldeira: Red team, blue team.

Josh Voorhees in Slate: EPA Chief Scott Pruitt Wants to Enlist a “Red Team” to Sow Doubts About Climate Change.

Andrew Freedman in Mashable: EPA to actually hold 'red-team' climate debates, and scientists are livid.

Ars Technica: Playing fossil’s advocate — EPA intends to form “red team” to debate climate science. Agency head reported to desire “back-and-forth critique” of published research by Scott K. Johnson.

The pro-climate libertarian Niskanen Center: Can a Red Team Exercise Exorcise the Climate Debate? May I summarise this optimistic post as: if this new "Red Team" scientific method turns out to be the normal scientific method it would be useful.

Talking Points Memo: Pruitt Is Reportedly Starting An EPA Initiative To Challenge Climate Science.

Audobon's letter to Scott Pruitt: "The oil and gas industry manufactures a debate to avoid legal responsibility for their pollution and to eke out a few more years of profit and power."

Rebecca Leber in Mother Jones (May 2017): Leading Global Warming Deniers Just Told Us What They Want Trump to Do.

Scott Pruitt will likely not ask a court of law. Then they would lose again.

The Red Team method would still be a better scientific method than the authoritarian Soviet method proposed by a comment on a large mitigation sceptical blog, WUWT: Does anyone know if the [American Meteorological Society] gets any federal funding like the National Academy of Science does? ... People sometimes can change their tune when their health of their pocketbook is at stake. Do you really want to get your science from authoritarians abusing the power of the state to determine the truth?

Our wise and climate-cynical bunny thinks the Red Team exercise is a Team B exercise, which is the kind of exercise a Red Team should prevent.

Brad Plumer and Coral Davenport in the New York Times: E.P.A. to Give Dissenters a Voice on Climate, No Matter the Consensus.

Steven Koonin in the Opinion section of Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (April 2017): A ‘Red Team’ Exercise Would Strengthen Climate Science. (pay-walled)

Kelly Levin of the World Resources Institute: Pruitt’s “Red Team-Blue Team” Exercise a Bad Fit for EPA Climate Science.

Statement by Ken Kimmell, President, Union of Concerned Scientists: EPA to Launch Program Critiquing Climate Science


* Photo at the top of Scott Pruitt at CPAC 2017 by Gage Skidmore under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) license.

My unsolicited advice for a UK government

After my spectacular success as UK election pollster let my try my luck as UK political adviser. Offering outsider continental perspective from a citizen of a countries where coalition governments are normal.

The electoral results could not have been more complicated. The conservatives lost their majority. Against British custom collaboration is necessary.

Wikipedia: United Kingdom general election, 2017

Party	Leader	%	Seats	±
Conservative	Theresa May	42.4%	317	-13
Labour	Jeremy Corbyn	40.0%	262	+33
SNP	Nicola Sturgeon	3.0%	35	-19
Liberal Democrat	Tim Farron	7.4%	12	+3
DUP	Arlene Foster	0.9%	10	+2
Sinn Féin	Gerry Adams	0.8%	7	+3
Plaid Cymru	Leanne Wood	0.5%	4	+1
Green	Jonathan Bartley Caroline Lucas	1.6%	1	0

Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May has proposed to govern together with the [[Democratic Unionist Party]] (DUP), a small deeply conservative Northern Irish protestant party with ties to terrorists after decades of religious terrorism.

That coalition has a majority of only 2 seats.

Other possible Conservative coalitions would be with the Liberal Democrats, with the Scottish National Party and the taboo option with Labour. Reversely, the only realistic coalition for Labour would be with the conservatives.

A Tory-DUP coalition is highly problematic. The DUP will have to get something in return for their collaboration. Typically a small coalition partner needs to get a lot more than their vote share to make it worthwhile and to survive the next election. Given how extreme they are, a majority of only 2 seats will often mean that more moderate conservatives will not be willing to give them what they bargained for and need.

The UK government is, furthermore, supposed to be neutral in Northern Irish problems. I have the impression that the UK does not fully realise that also in the Brexit negotiations Northern Ireland will be an extremely difficult problem. If the UK really wants a hard border this would cut Northern Ireland off from the rest of Ireland, which will cause economic problems for everyone and will make it harder to visit family and friends (for Catholics).

The DUP would at least make sure this problem is not ignored until it is too late, but their role would be far from neutral.


h/t Simon Noone‏

The two seat majority will likely dissipate quite quickly in future special elections. That could lead to another election in the middle of the Brexit negotiations.

The Brexit clock is ticking and the UK will have to make decades worth of political decisions in about one year time. I do not see that happening with a two-seat majority. It would have been a herculean task with a large majority and a capable prime minister.

More logical coalition parties for the Conservatives would be the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party. However, they both do not want to be add-ons to a dominant Conservative party, especially after the bad experiences the Liberal Democrats had in their recent coalition with the Conservatives. Still given the situation I feel these parties should give this option more thought (after the disposal of May).

For the UK it would be highly unorthodox, but I see a coalition of the Conservatives and labour as the best option. Possibly together with the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party. In Germany and The Netherlands we have such coalitions of conservatives and social democrats more often, although only as coalition of last resort. In Switzerland the government is always made up of all parties governing in partnership.

Not being used to coalition governments the UK is lacking a culture of adult behaviour and professional political debate, especially between the Tories and Labour. Maybe a neutral Prime Minister (of the Liberal Democrats) could help to hold a grand coalition together. I realise that that makes the coalition even more unorthodox. But these are also not normal times.

This would be nothing for a non-communicative prime minister with brittle personality and a penchant for kabuki theatre. Also Boris Johnson would also be an utter catastrophe, I hope this does not need explaining, but he may be a useful tool for regicide.

The kind of personality able to lead a grand coalition would also be the best personality for the Brexit negotiations with the EU. Many in the UK seem to see the EU as the enemy who is now laughing at UK's misery. On Twitter someone asked for a German word for the current predicament. Most offered was "Schadenfreude". I would say "Mitleid" (sympathy), "Verunsicherung" (confusion) and "Beunruhigung" (worry).

The UK gutter press like to cite anonymous antagonistic EU assholes. Anyone on twitter will be able to confirm that anonymous assholes are never short in supply. But that a few percent of humanity does not deserve that title does not change geography: Europe and the UK will always be neighbours. People in England seem to often forget that we are even neighbours with a land border.

The EU is interested in friendly relations with its neighbours. A concept that may be difficult to comprehend for (formerly) fascist rags. We are grateful for Monty Python, British expertise on the weather, and for the liberation from fascist occupation. A Russian liberation would have been much less pleasant. Just like young Brits got to know other Europeans as mostly nice people with shared values, European appreciate the UK. One day these young people may want to join their EU friends again.

No deal or a bad deal is damaging for the UK, but thus also unfavourable for the EU. A no-deal Brexit in no way fits to the nearly 50/50 outcome of the referendum.

Thus negotiations based on a common appreciation of long-term friendly relations would give the best results for all. There are so many topics that need to be negotiated that kabuki theatre on Gibraltar or holding EU citizens in the UK hostage are an enormous distraction. Next to EU negotiations the UK will have to negotiate trade relations with dozens of countries and trading blocks. The UK will have to build up institutions on the EU borders and institutions for the safety of drugs, chemical consumer product, banking products, etc.

Before the Brexit referendum we had ludicrous have-your-cake.and-eat-it propaganda. We are now nine months after the referendum and it is about time to have a public discussion what Brexit means. It is unfortunately only a slight exaggeration that this discussion was limited to Brexit is Brexit.  It is not.

It beats me why the UK also wants to leave [[Euratom]], which is not part of the EU. If necessary that could have been done later. They do not only work on nuclear power, but also nuclear medicine. Does the UK want the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, [[ECMWF]], to stay in Reading? It is not officially part of the EU, but has many of the same member states.

Does the UK want to keep student exchanges with the continent, [[Erasmus]]? Does the UK want to stay part of the European research community? If yes how? There are programmes for applied joint European research, [[Horizon 2020]], for fundamental science, [[ERC]], and for scientific coordination, [[COST]]. The UK could pay into those programs. Switzerland pays their researchers directly if they are part of it and in case of COST even gives them some bonus funding for additional research to stimulate participation.

Those are just the examples from my field, science. Similar hard choices will have to be made on so many topics. Personally I would suggest to change as little as possible and (initially) contribute to EU programmes. Just the minimal Brexit program, rights of EU citizens currently in the UK and UK citizens currently in the EU (residence, work, healthcare, benefits, pensions, voting rights), trade and borders (seas, fishing, exploration, Northern Ireland, Gibraltar), are though to get done in about a year. Loosening the ties on all the other topics can be done later.

That requires a friendly and communicative leader and government. Clearly Theresa may should go and Boris Johnson is not an alternative. A grand coalition may be the best way to get a concrete national debate going and to have fruitful negotiations.

[UPDATE. Oh my. When even a reasonable guy like John Oliver buys into the argument that the EU will be extra hard on the UK to scare others from leaving. Because everyone wants to be member of a union that has no upsides, but will beat you up when you leave and diligently works on making it worse to leave yourself.

The EU exists because it has benefits for its members. The UK may not be able to see this after decades of propaganda, but the other EU states surely do. Leaving the EU will mean losing these benefits. No need for additional punishments. Except if you think it is a malicious punishment not to be in applied research program Horizon 2020 when not paying for it or expecting the discounts of a customer loyalty card without having a card.

Otherwise an excellent video with a guest appearance by Lord Buckethead.


]

Related reading

Political support grows for cross-party approach to Brexit negotiations. Theresa May under pressure from across political spectrum to build plural coalition – including Jeremy Corbyn – before EU talks.

Der Spiegel looks at the years ahead: A Wave of Anger Crashes over Britain - Brexit Is Dead.

New York Review of Books: Britain: The End of a Fantasy

Desmog UK: Let's Take A Closer Look at the DUP's Climate Science Denial

Red Cheeks Team

The idea has been simmering a few years, but now that their president is in office, the mitigation sceptical movement is increasingly pushing the idea of a "Red Team". In the last "hearing" of Lamar Smith in US House of Representatives, John Christy and Judith Curry repeated the claim that climate science needs a "Red Team". Roger Pielke Sr. contributes some tweets. In Murdoch's Wall Street Journal also Steven Koonin made this call on the opinion pages (pay-walled). This is the part of the newspaper the journalists of the news section are embarrassed by.

The [[Red Team]] should aim to destroy the results of climate science. This idea comes from the military and corporations. Monolithic strongly hierarchical organisations where dissent is normally not appreciated and there is thus a need to break this culture by explicitly ordering a group to show that plans may not work out. Many mitigation sceptics work in such organisations and this seems to guide their erroneous thinking of how science works.

Red Teams galore

Science is organised in thousands of Red Teams already. Every national weather service is independent. Some countries even have multiple ones. That makes about 200 Red Teams. I do not know of any weather service that does not find it is warming.

If you are a conspiracy theorist, thinking they are making up the warming, these 200 Red Teams would have to coordinate intensively to make sure that the weather variability is smoothly correlated from one country to its neighbours, that the climate modes (El Nino, North Atlantic Oscillation, etc.) look similar in a region, including [[teleconnections]] to other continents, including modes and teleconnections not known at the time, and make sure that the spatial pattern of the long-term warming fits to the physics and all the other observed variables.

Proof of how devious climatologists are is that no communications were intercepted showing this biggest coordination project in human history. Scientists may be too stupid to fool WUWT, but they are at least smarter than the NSA and HCSQ.



In Germany alone there are easily over a hundred university groups and research institutes (partially) working on climate and climate change. There are close collaborations with related fields, from statistics and physics to geography and economics. Also counting these there could be hundreds of Red Teams in a medium-sized country like Germany already.

Scientific progress

Every single of these groups would love to be the one to show there is a problem that needs attention. That is why scientists become scientist. No one has ever gotten funding saying: my field has solved all problems, but I would like to keep on doing what I have always done.



Many of these groups only partially work on climate change. Meteorology is a much larger field than climatology; Meteorology is directly needed to save lives and avoid economic damages, while climatology "only" produces politically inconvenient results about the future.

Thus for many of these groups it would be no problem whatsoever if they showed evidence for the most extreme case that the world is not warming or humans are not responsible. On the contrary, that would be an enormous boost to their reputations and they can use that social capital to work on related problems.

Explicit Red Teams are for organisation working like planning economies. Science is a free market system.

Climate “sceptics” sometimes give the impression that they think that a single study will vindicate their political battle and settle it once and for all. Reality is that there are many different lines of evidence that it should be warming, that it is warming (see graph below), and that we are creating the increase in atmospheric CO2 (see also additional arguments by Richard Alley) and the warming.

A challenge to one of these lines of evidence will have to refute a lot of evidence and this will normally take years. It would not be enough to disproof one line of evidence, but all of them should fall. Not only the instrumental temperature record would need to be wrong, but the melting of glaciers, the sea level rise, the start of spring, the decrease in Arctic sea ice and so on.

If I had the winning idea that something is fundamentally flawed, it would take decades of research until we again have a consensus on how the climate is (not) changing, just like our current understanding of climate change took decades to centuries to develop.

Science or PR?

John Christy:

One way to aid congress in understanding more of the climate issue than what is produced by biased “official” panels of the climate establishment is to organize and fund credible “Red Teams” that look at issues such as natural variability, the failure of climate models and the huge benefits to society from affordable energy, carbon-based and otherwise. I would expect such a team would offer to congress some very different conclusions regarding the human impacts on climate.

The benefits from affordable energy do not change the human impacts on climate. That kind of sloppy thinking hints at the Red Team being intended as a PR shop.

As an aside, the benefits of energy are naturally large and the energy sector used to be substantial, but it is nowadays just a few percent of the economy. Even if another energy source would be a lot more expensive that would nowadays hardly change the economy.

The idea that climatology does not study natural variability is ludicrous. I used to think I was not a climatologist because I had never computed an empirical orthogonal function ([[EOF]]) to study the North Atlantic Oscillation. The biggest group in the World Climate Research Program is CliVar, studying, hold it: Climate variability. What the mitigation sceptical movement knows about natural variability, from El Nino to the QBO, they know from the scientific community.

The "failure of climate models" presupposes models failed. If we assume they failed and cannot be used to assess the quagmire we are in, the uncertainties would be even larger. We would still have a lot of physics and observations of the (deep) past to make clear that climate change is real. Uncertainties can go both ways and mean higher risks. This should thus be a topic the Red Team should avoid.

The suggestion to only study the "failure of climate models" is a strange way of doing science. Normal science would be to study what the main discrepancies between models and observations are, try to understand what the causes are and then try to fix this. Sounds like Christy is more interested in the first step than in understanding and fixing.

This fits to his approach to his UAH tropospheric temperature dataset. Already in the 1990s when the UAH dataset still showed cooling and contained major errors (did not take the change of the orbit of the satellites into account, had a minus wrong in the software, etc.) he blamed models for the differences without first trying to understand the reasons.

Chinese calligraphy with water on a stone floor. Do not dig in, but let your position flow with the evidence.

The main reason for the discrepancy is that there is an amplification of temperature changes in the tropical upper troposphere. The stronger long-term warming this causes in models is called the "tropical hotspot". Christy's UAH temperature trends do not show it. It is seen in the stronger response to El Nino in the tropospheric temperatures, both in models and in observations. The hotspot is observed in the radiosonde winds and in a recent carefully homogenized radiosonde temperature dataset.

Christy seems to be happy with claiming that the models failed. I would not ignore the possibility that there are remaining errors in the UAH estimates, especially after all the errors that have already been found. Had I been Christy I would have tried to make my claim that the models are the problem stronger by trying to understand the reasons. Which processes are wrong in the models that produce this hotspot, but should not? That would then need to be something that does produce the hotspot signs in the winds and also shows the amplification for El Nino on shorter time scales. That sounds hard to me, but Christy had a few decades to study it.

A similar audit Red Team gave us the Berkeley Earth initiative, funded by the Heartland Institute funded by the Koch Brothers. Judith Curry was part of that, but got out before the politically inconvenient result was published. Anthony Watts, the host of the mitigation sceptical blog WUWT, claimed he would accept the results no matter what. That vow lasted until Berkeley Earth found the same result as any other global temperature dataset. Call me sceptical that this Red Team hullabaloo will have any impact on the US climate "debate".



I am sure it is a coincidence that the terms Red Team and Blue Team fit to the political configuration of country were the climate "debate" takes place, the United States of America. A country were the elite stays in power by pitting the Red Team and the Blue Team against each other. The main reason to support the Red Team is to at least not be the Blue Team. In Georgia the Republicans courted voters with the slogan: Make a liberal cry. Just the thing the coal and oil oligarchs would love to promote in the US climate "debate". Just the thing science should not want to replicate.



Scientists are humans, one of the main biases a scientists needs to fight against is not dig in and defend your own old studies, claims, methods or datasets. I respect scientists that developed good homogenisation methods and talk about their downsides and the strengths of other methods. I respect that because it is hard and promotes scientific progress. To force a scientist to take the Red or Blue position strengthens defensiveness and thus hurts progress. It is political thinking. In science the evidence determines your position. It is the end, not the start.

At least John Christy seems to mostly think of doing research, Judith Curry and Steven Koonin want to make jet another audit or report. This would an alternative IPCC report, following the example of the NIPCC report, the Nonsense IPCC, an embarrassing regurgitation of zombie WUWT myths authored by tobacco stooge Fred Singer. The NIPCC report is clearly PR. If the Red Team advocates think they have a scientific case, one would expect them to seek funding for science that would convince scientists, rather than bypassing the scientific literature and going straight to the public.

Red and Blue Team framing not only contributes to the politicization of science, it also promotes the false-balance media narrative of two equal groups. Judith Curry, John Christy and Steven Koonin should be debating Peter Wadhams, Guy McPherson and Reddit Collapse.

An important political strategy of the mitigation sceptical movement is to pretend that the science is not in yet. That is why they keep on claiming there is no scientific consensus, provoking consensus studies that find that nearly all scientists and articles agree on the basics. (And then complain that consensus exists.)

Once people understand that scientists agree there is a problem, they want solutions. Some extremists in the mitigation sceptical movement may claim that solar and wind energy spell the end of civilization, but that is a hard sell. Sun and wind have enormous and bipartisan support in the USA.



The 97% of climate scientists who agree on the basics include many conservative scientists. That there is a problem is not a partisan issue. How to solve it, that is politics. The Paris climate agreement was signed by nearly 200 countries and thus many conservative governments. They accept that climate change is a real problem. European conservative parties may be less active, but do not deny there is a problem.

In Europe only Trumpian racist parties deny there is a problem. That the climate "debate" is mostly an American problem shows that the problem is not conservative versus liberal, that it is not a lack of scientific evidence, it is not a problem of the communication of science. The problem is the corrupting influence of money in US politics and media. A Red Team will not solve this.

---

There is PLENTY of ROOM within the climate science to hold extreme views, both about the science and policy. However, there is no room for the lunacies of unicorns, for sun nuts, for folks who don't get chaos, for radiative physics deniers
Steve Mosher

---

Details please

ATTP asks very good questions on how this exercise should be organised. "Who would make up the team/teams?" Who are the organisers, the arbiters? Who selects them? What are the criteria? How do they want to prevent normal scientists from joining the Red Team? Scientists normally determine themselves what they work on. Should they be forced to waste their time on this? "How would this work be funded?" Is special funding needed because Red Team ideas do not have sufficient merit to be funded normally? "How would the programme be assessed?"

With all those Red Teams in science, I am curious how the Red Team advocates want to make sure their Red Team will be on their political side and stay there. Writing explicitly into the funding conditions that the applicant has to have a history of deceiving the public in the media and producing bullshit blog posts would probably be too much honesty.

Who would be in the Red Teams? Will they fund conspiracy theorists like Tim Ball and Christopher Monckton and corporate smoking shills like Fred Singer and Steven Milloy? That honesty would be a great sight.

Funding

The tension is clear when John Christy writes:

Decisions regarding funding for “Red Teams” should not be placed in the hands of the current “establishment” but in panels populated by credentialed scientists who have experience in examining these issues.

The people with experience and credentials are the "establishment" in science.

The mitigation sceptical movement could maybe organise a Red Team Blue Team exercise themselves and in that way figure out what their position is beyond the only thing they agree on: that climate science is wrong. That way they can demonstrate how enormously valuable this new scientific method is and it would have the added benefit that they waste their own time. I am curious whether they can come to an agreement about whether the Earth is warming or cooling and whether the greenhouse exists and CO2 can produce warming.

I look forward to a detailed proposal for Red Team research and would expect that it will demonstrate how ludicrous the idea is.

There is no real need for government funding of Red Teams whatsoever. Every large oil and coal corporation has a huge incentive to show climate science wrong. If they thought that there was a chance of one in a million that climate science was wrong, they would pour millions into studying that rather than in PR misinformation campaigns by networks of thoughtless tanks.

If John Christy was making the case that science funding should not only be based on scientific merit, but that part of the funding should also be based on what is politically important he may have a case. Already a considerable part of the funding goes to studies that inform (local) governments and companies on how to adapt to climate change. This is mostly a service to society and scientifically less inspiring. If it weren’t so hard to do, this would be a task for engineering firms.

Similarly, it would be politically important to study the tropospheric temperature trend in more detail for its importance in the American climate “debate”. It has nearly no scientific value because the tropospheric temperature series is so short and buggy. Each update there are huge changes in the trend estimates and the two available series show large differences, although they both try to take into account the currently known problems of the raw data. There is also no societal need for this dataset; no one lives in the tropical troposphere. Consequently only a few people at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and at Remote Sensing system work on these datasets once in a while. Occasionally there is some help in finding the problems with this data from external scientists.

More independent research in this field, leading to the development of new high quality tropospheric temperature datasets would be politically valuable. Maybe that should also be a funding consideration.

Related reading

The Trump administration wants to bail out failed contrarian climate scientists. A climate “red team” is just a polite way to describe bailing out scientific losers.

How a scheme to discredit climate science spread from conservative media to the EPA chief. Scott Pruitt has embraced the “red team/blue team” idea that got exposure from Daily Caller and WSJ.

And Then There's Physics: Red Team vs Blue Team

Stoat on Red teams: The East is Red

Benjamin Santer, Kerry Emanuel and Naomi Oreskes in the Washington Post: Attention Scott Pruitt: Red teams and blue teams are no way to conduct climate science

The killer Rabbet: The Squeegee Kid Returns or Steve Koonin on Team B

The Blue Team at Daily Kos: Deniers Calling for a Red Team to Create Debate on Climate Science

Why doesn't Big Oil fund alternative climate research?


* Top photo with birds, shame by Tiago Almeida used with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) license.

* Black and white photo of boy, shame, by Lee Carson used with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) license.

* Photo of "Taoist monk" by Antoine Taveneaux - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

* Photo of ashamed woman by Naika Lieva used with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) license.