Trump Admin Hires Science Deniers

2004 called – they want their climate deniers back.

The Trump administration has hired three notable climate deniers to shadowy roles.
Among them, Steven Koonin, known among other things, for pushing a “Red Team vs Blue Team” debate to re-litigate the long settled science of climate change, both within the Government, and also at the American Physical Society.

Dr Ben Santer was a participant in the “Red/Blue” exercise at the APS, and related his experience to me in an interview, above.

New York Times:

The Energy Department has hired at least three scientists who are well-known for their rejection of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, according to records reviewed by The New York Times.

The scientists are listed in the Energy Department’s internal email system as current employees of the agency, the records show. They are Steven E. Koonin, a physicist and author of a best-selling book that calls climate science “unsettled”; John Christy, an atmospheric scientist who doubts the extent to which human activity has caused global warming; and Roy Spencer, a meteorologist who believes that clouds have had a greater influence on warming than humans have.

Their hiring comes after the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship report on how climate change is affecting the country. The administration has also systematically removed mentions of climate change from government websites while slashing federal funding for research on global warming.

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Video here describes the incompetency of John Christy and Roy Spencer.

A vast majority of scientists around the world agree that human activities — primarily the burning of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal — are dangerously heating the Earth. That has increased the frequency and intensity of heat waves, droughts and colossal bursts of rain like the storm that caused the deadly flooding now devastating central Texas.

A small minority of scientists, however, rejects this consensus. Dr. Koonin, who has said he is a friend of Energy Secretary Chris Wright, has been one of the loudest critics.

During President Trump’s first term, Dr. Koonin proposed that the Environmental Protection Agency conduct a “red-team, blue-team” exercise to challenge mainstream climate science. A “red team” of climate skeptics would critique major scientific reports on global warming, and a “blue team” of climate scientists would then rebut these claims. At the time, mainstream climate scientists said the proposal would make a mockery of scientific research and create a platform for marginal views that had already been disproved in the normal course of scientific debate.

Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator at the time, told coal industry executives that he planned to conduct the exercise. But John F. Kelly, then the White House chief of staff, ultimately blocked the effort.

Now, Dr. Koonin is listed as a “special government employee” in the Energy Department’s internal email system, the records show. Federal law says special government employees are executive branch appointees named to “perform important, but limited, services to the government, with or without compensation, for a period not to exceed 130 days” during a one-year period. Elon Musk had that classification when he began Mr. Trump’s cost cutting initiative, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Dr. Koonin also serves as a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative-leaning research organization on Stanford University’s campus. He previously worked as a physicist at New York University, a scientist for the oil and gas company BP and an under secretary at the Energy Department during the Obama administration.

In his 2021 book, “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t and Why It Matters,” Dr. Koonin argued that while the planet was warming and human activities had played a role, the scientific consensus was not as certain or as dire as it was frequently portrayed.

In a phone interview in November, Dr. Koonin said that the book had made an impression on Mr. Wright, who ran the oil and gas company Liberty Energy before he was confirmed as energy secretary in February.

“He reached out when I wrote the book and said, ‘This is great,’” Dr. Koonin recalled. “He asked me to come talk to his company at one point — it was a couple years ago — and we got to know each other.”

He added, “Chris and I have talked quite a bit over the last couple years, and I think he is well aligned with what I wrote in the book.”