We get it, Scott Pruitt.
We get that you hate the environment and the Paris agreement as much as you enjoy support from the fossil fuel industry. We get that you are keen to remove as many scientists from your Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as possible. We get that you are happy with your own agency’s funding to be slashed to historic lows.
We also get that you dislike science in general, and are happy to go on live television and boldly claim that basic facts about physics and chemistry are wrong. But can you please, please not set up a committee that pits a number of climatologists against an equal number of climate change deniers and get them to debate the science of it all?
Unbelievably, that’s exactly what Pruitt wants to set up. Speaking to a Breitbart reporter just recently, the head of the now-sickeningly ironic EPA said that he wants a “red team-blue team” approach on climate change, where two opposing teams argue a consensus over climate change.
This is not how science works, at all. Scientists can obviously debate with other scientists over peer-reviewed data, but this is not what is being proposed.
Somewhere between 97 and 99 percent of scientists that have studied climate change accept that humanity is driving it with their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. There is an unbelievable amount of evidence available across a cornucopia of scientific fields that points towards climate change as being anthropogenic in nature.
Climate deniers, on the other hand, are the new flat-Earthers. They are charlatans of the highest and most dangerous order, using out-of-context data and willful misinterpretation to confuse the general public.
Getting climate scientists to debate with climate deniers on its basic scientific principles is ludicrous. Would you get medical professionals to come to a “consensus” on vaccines with anti-vaxxers? Would you get physicists to sit in a room with people who think the sky is just a painting and debate the fundamentals of gravity?
No – no you would not. This new idea touted by Pruitt is nothing less than ridiculous. He is metaphorically soiling on centuries of science.
Setting up this contrarian committee is just another way to give hardcore climate deniers a platform with which to voice their erroneous remarks. It’s just another way of getting the public to think the science behind climate change isn’t settled and that the scientific community is split down the middle.
It is not.
“What the American people deserve is a true, peer-reviewed, objective, transparent discussion about CO2,” Pruitt said at the time. He’s right, but he’s currently doing the very opposite of this.
As ever, Pruitt is to science as a wildfire is to a house.
