The top Democrat on the Senate environment committee on Wednesday used news of a gigantic iceberg breaking off from Antarctica to denounce the Trump administration’s plan to set up expert teams to debate climate change.
“We don’t need a ‘red team’ to tell us. #Climatechange is already redrawing maps and taking a toll on our planet,” tweeted Sen. Tom Carper, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee.
The comment was included with a retweet of a USA Today report that a 1-trillion-ton iceberg, one of the largest on record, was set loose Wednesday from the southern ice shelf, according to the MIDAS Project that monitors the ice shelf.
The report said the iceberg was the size of Carper’s home state of Delaware.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt and others in the Trump administration are floating the idea of setting up a “red team” process that the military has used to test assumptions and apply it to climate change.
“There are lots of questions that have not been asked and answered [about climate change],” Pruitt said in an interview with Reuters published Tuesday.
“Who better to do that than a group of scientists … getting together and having a robust discussion for all the world to see,” Pruitt said.
The idea was suggested this year by Steve Koonin, a former Obama administration office at the Energy Department, in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal, which the Trump camp picked up on in recent weeks amid continued questioning about the administration’s position on global warming.
The process would set up red and blue teams to challenge and defend scientific data on climate change. Energy Secretary Rick Perry suggested the idea, citing Koonin, at a budget hearing last month. Pruitt later began discussing it as a proposal that he is in support of using to settle how much human activity is affecting the temperature of the planet.
Perry and Pruitt believe enough difference in scientific data exists to justify using the process to understand climate change better.
Critics of that position point out that the science on the issue of climate change has been settled, with the majority of scientists blaming human activity for causing global warming from the burning of fossil fuels.
