There’s only one climate team
The scientific debate is over: It’s past time to act on climate change
Climate change is an accelerating risk to our national security and to a safe, peaceful world. Its impacts threaten to increase instability and conflict around the globe. To keep America safe and strong, our leaders must work now to reduce climate-related risks.
Scientists know climate change is happening because they have looked closely at the evidence for many decades. U.S. armed forces, including the current secretary of defense, James Mattis, have taken seriously their warnings and their rigorously reviewed findings.
A 2015 report from the U.S. Department of Defense acknowledged “the reality of climate change and the significant risk it poses to U.S. interests globally.” Pointing to the threats posed by natural disasters, refugee flows and resource conflicts, the report called climate change “an urgent and growing threat to our national security,” and added that climate impacts “are already occurring, and the scope, scale and intensity of these impacts are projected to increase over time.”
That’s why it’s disheartening to hear officials such as EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt claiming we need a “red team, blue team” exercise to debate the existence of climate change further before taking action to protect ourselves.
Over the past two decades, climate science has advanced and deepened. Climate change is one of the most-investigated scientific issues across institutions and disciplines, and the evidence for it continues to increase. For example, all of the warmest years on record have occurred since 1998 — and 2016, 2015 and 2014 are the top three on the list. Whatscientists once hypothesized about is now being confirmed by observation and measurement. Climate changeis happening, and we know why: It’s caused primarily by the atmospheric effects of human beings burning fossil fuels.
I spent more than 30 years on active duty as a naval officer. I earned a Ph.D. and now work at a major research university. I have been part of red-team/ blue team exercises and have participated in peer review. Both of these processes can be useful, but it is important to recognize that they differ dramatically and have different goals. Red teams can help look for the flaws or holes in a plan or proposal, but there must be a defined plan, policy goal or other outcomein mind.
Science, however, is not an effort to further a particular policy, but rather an enterprise engaged in deepening our understanding of how the world works. Peer review — science’s preferred quality-assurance program — does not attempt todrive to a “yes” or “no” answer, but rather offers a rigorous check to make sure a given research effort is well grounded in previously accepted science, that its methods are sound, that its analysisis appropriate to the question at hand and that its conclusions flow logically from theevidence presented.
All science is subject to the rigorous, skeptical scrutiny of peer review — and this is the main reason science has succeeded in explaining so much about our world. Climate science is no exception. Indeed, few fields of science have come under as much scrutiny and gone through as rigorous a peerreview process as the scienceof climate change.
Is Mr. Pruitt’s red-team/ blue-team exercise designed to give skeptics who feel unheard a shot at taking down the understood climate science? If so, he should know that such an effort already hasbeen undertaken.
As far back as 2010, Richard Muller, a physics professor at the University of California-Berkeley, convened the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project to carefully review the issues raised by climate skeptics. In the end, Mr. Muller — once a climate-change skeptic himself — concluded that global warming was real and caused almost entirely byhuman activities.
If we don’t take concrete actions quickly, the impacts of climate change we are seeing today will almost surely accelerate — at great cost to America and the world. Instead of looking for excuses for inaction, we need to put our resources toward better understanding the risks, preparing for the changes already underway and rapidly reducing our greenhousegas emissions to protect the generationsto come.
In the military, we are trained to act based on the “facts on the ground” when we face significant risks, not on how we might wish things to be. An officer who insists on creating his or her own facts, or who won’t listen to evidence, puts lives at risk. Today, the facts on the ground show that climate change presents such a risk. It’s the duty of our leaders to respond.