Science is Not Team Sport

The blue team response to DOE CWG shows that climate assessment is broken

This is not how scientific assessment should be done

The Blue team has responded to the report of the Department of Energy’s Climate Working Group (DOE CWG) — the Red team. Together, the two reports show how not to do scientific assessment.

Led by Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M and Robert Kopp of Rutgers, the report (DK25) includes contributions from 85 contributors (mostly academics from various disciplines) and spans 459 pages. The authors should be commended for working fast to prepare their substantive response. Science is better when discussion and debate take place.¹

Dessler, who calls the DOE report “bullshit,” pulls no punches in asserting that there is absolutely nothing that is scientifically accurate in the DOE CWG report:

To be clear, the DOE report raises no “interesting questions” overlooked by the scientific community, highlights no ignored research gaps, and brings no fresh perspective. Instead, it’s a rats’ nest of bad arguments.

To the extent that there are legitimate scientific arguments in there, those have already been rejected by the scientific community. But scientific arguments are rare in the DOE report; rather, it’s mainly selective misquoting of the scientific literature (cherry picking), omission of contrary results from the scientific literature, and simple errors due to a lack of understanding of the science.

This framing has been adopted by the media, as you can see in the headlines below characterizing the critique upon its release this morning.

Move along, nothing to see here.

I took a look at the DK25 report in my areas of expertise, as I did with the DOE CWG, and I found numerous statements that were simply false — among them that World Weather Attribution was not created with litigation in mind, that NOAA”s “billion dollar disasters” (RIP) tabulation was scientifically valid, that SRES had 6 not 40 scenarios, and that RCP8.5 has not been the most commonly used scenario in research and assessment. DK25 ignored all of our research that was accurately cited by DOE CWG.

DK25 also includes a bizarre claim regarding the detection of changes in extreme weather events:²

“the absence of statistically significant trends in the historical records does not mean that changes are not occurring”³

Actually, that is exactly what the absence of detection means — don’t take it from me, take it from the IPCC, which defines a change in climate as follows:

A change in the state of the climate that can be identified (e.g., by using statistical tests) by changes in the mean and/or the variability of its properties and that persists for an extended period, typically decades or longer.

This line of argument seems not to be against the DOE CWG report — which relies heavily on the IPCC — but against the IPCC’s framework for detection and attribution, which is already under siege for not producing strong indications of change in most measures of weather extremes.

I summarized these various false claims in the boxes in the figure below.

Assessing complex and contested science is difficult. However, these are some howlers.

Extreme event attribution, RCP8.5, and “billion dollar disasters” are not the hills I’d choose to die on, but apparently the authors of DK25 were so intent in asserting that every claim of DOE CWG is false, that they could not admit the many places where DOE CWG got things right.

My view is that there are stronger and weaker claims in both DOE CWG and DK25. In my areas of expertise — notably scenarios and extreme weather — the DOE CWG is pretty strong (but could be better) and DK25 is pretty weak. In other areas, the balance will surely be different. But the Manichean nature of climate debates is that no territory can be given to the enemy.

The exercise — Red team vs Blue team — does reveal something important: science is not team sport.

There is a big obstacle to inclusive, adversarial assessment in climate science — Politics.

Dessler makes very clear that he believes that this exercise is all about politics:

If you don’t follow climate policy closely, you may not know that the Trump administration is launching an effort to overturn one of the most fundamental pillars of American climate policy: the scientific finding that carbon dioxide endangers human health and welfare (the so-called “Endangerment Finding”). If successful, this move could unravel virtually every U.S. climate regulation on the books, from car emissions standards to power plant rules.

To support this effort, the Department of Energy hand-selected five climate contrarians who dispute mainstream science to write a report, which ended up saying exactly what you would expect it to say: climate science is too uncertain to justify policies to limit warming. . .

The history of cigarettes shows that such tactics can delay policy action for decades, but they cannot indefinitely postpone scientific reality from emerging. The only real question is how much damage the delay causes.

The assumption here is that if you find some degree of merit in the DOE CWG then climate policy is doomed and if you instead side with DK25, then carbon dioxide regulation is on its way. Viewed from this perspective, scientific assessments are ”tactics” to be mobilized to support political action or delay.

Such a perspective turns scientific assessment into partisan politics. Scientific integrity inevitably suffers.

What if there is merit to aspects of both the DOE CWG and DK25? What if both also have flaws? What if science does not dictate policy? What if there are common sense climate policies that make sense independent of the climate science food fights? what if turn climate science into climate politics weakens climate science?

Politics is indeed made up of Red and Blue teams.

In contrast, science is shades of gray — with many claims that are contested, challenged, overturned, incomplete, preliminary, unknown, and, sometimes, just wrong.

If the Trump administration valued scientific assessment, they’d openly acknowledge that they have competing perspectives on some key climate science issues, and then request that these experts get together and sort things out — recognizing areas of agreement and disagreement. To be clear, I don’t see any evidence that the Trump administration values assessment or climate science in general.

However, if it did, it could restart the U.S. National Climate Assessment and implement it not as a Red or Blue team, but as an inclusive project open to debate and differing perspectives. In the history of the USNCA that has never been tried, as the effort has always been too close to politicals in the White House.

Climate science has long been politicized into camps segregated according to their political perspectives. One consequence has been the marginalization of legitimate views deemed to be politically unhelpful to aggressive climate policy. The result has been a climate science community that defends bad science — as DK25 shows us for RCP8.5, extreme event attribution, and billion dollar disasters.

I am hopeful that the dueling reports of DOE CWG and DK25 help many in the community who also care about good science and effective assessment to realize that we have had enough of Red teams and Blue teams.

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1. I should also note that Dessler has me blocked on social media platforms and routinely characterizes me as a “climate denier.”

2. DK25 goes through some incomprehensible and convoluted rhetorical gynamstics to try to explain that IPCC AR6 Ch.12 Table 12.12 does not say what it says. That goes beyond the scope of this post, but the concept of the time of emergence of detected changes in climate in relation to IPCC AR6 12.12 here and here.

3. The phrase — “are not occurring” — does a lot of work in that sentence as it mixes up tenses. It would still be wrong, but it would make senese if it read: “the absence of statistically significant trends in the historical records does not mean that changes have not been detected.” Alternatively, and correctly now: “the absence of statistically significant trends in the historical records does not mean that changes will not be detected in the future.”