EPA administrator Scott Pruitt said Tuesday that he would like to see a robust debate on climate between academics televised for the whole world to see.
There is a slew of questions about global warming that have yet to be answered, Pruitt told reporters. Such a debate would need to be televised to maximize the impact, he added.
“Who better to do that than a group of scientists… getting together and having a robust discussion for all the world to see,” the former Oklahoma attorney general said. He did not mention on what metric the scientists would be chosen.
“I think so. I think so. I mean, I don’t know yet, but you want this to be open to the world. You want this to be on full display. I think the American people would be very interested in consuming that. I think they deserve it,” he said about the prospect of putting the discussion on television.
Pruitt’s comments come less than a month after he signaled an intent to start a “red team, blue team” exercise as part of an “at-length evaluation of U.S. climate science.” Experts will be chosen to serve on each team.
Military and intelligence agencies use similar tactics to expose vulnerabilities to strategic systems. Skeptics say it would give needed balance to climate science, a field of research many believe has been monopolized by activists.
Activists and scientists, meanwhile, say it’s “dangerous” to elevate dissenting voices who disagree with them on global warming.
“Such calls for special teams of investigators are not about honest scientific debate,” wrote climate scientist Ben Santer and Kerry Emanuel and historian and activist Naomi Oreskes.
“They are dangerous attempts to elevate the status of minority opinions, and to undercut the legitimacy, objectivity and transparency of existing climate science,” they wrote in a Washington Post op-ed earlier this year.
They argue that the existing peer-review process works better than a “red team vs. blue team” project. They also scientific bodies, like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, provide a forum for scientific debates.
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