12/9 Summary: ""Alternative Facts" about Climate Change"
From Scientific American
(Summary)
It is crucial to discriminate between objective reality and declared reality. Recently, EPA administrator and Energy Secretary have called for the establishment of “Red Team/Blue Team” (RT/BT) to reassess the credibility of key findings of climate change, believing previous evaluations were untrustworthy, self-serving, underestimate key uncertainties, and lack participation from critical voices. The Trump administration implicates that only they can conduct a fair and unbiased assessment of climate science. However, it’s wrong. First, climate science has been reviewed for decades by many trustworthy entities. Also, critical voices are part of the review process, too. When it comes to uncertainties, they are the nature of science. Knowing there is much left to uncover, scientists are reducing important uncertainties. Secondly, if there truly were lack of evidence of climate science, some researcher would have already found that evidence, but for the time being many have failed. Reality cannot be altered by denying its existence: humans are affecting global climate. What we need to do is call out these efforts to confuse and devalue well-established science. (173 words)
