Red Team/Blue Team False Climate Debate

From Reuters:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is in the early stages of launching a debate about climate change that could air on television – challenging scientists to prove the widespread view that global warming is a serious threat, the head of the agency said.

The plan, involving as yet unnamed scientists broken into two teams to "debate" the science on TV, was pushed by EPA head Scott Pruitt.

Scott Pruitt is a climate science denier:

EPA chief Scott Pruitt just went full climate denier. Until today, the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency has walked a fine line between accepting and denying climate science. He’s been careful not to explicitly deny that humans cause climate change, claiming only that the debate is “far from settled” (false), and he’s dodged questions about whether he accepts the science. In his confirmation hearing, Pruitt said his “personal opinion” on climate change “is immaterial to the job” of being EPA administrator.

But now that Pruitt’s all settled in at the EPA, he’s getting a little less shy. In a CNBC interview on Thursday morning, Pruitt explicitly said that carbon dioxide doesn’t cause global warming. “I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact,” Pruitt said. “So no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.” [Bolding and links in original.]

The problem with Pruitt's two team debate is that it's already been done, as Senator Al Franken pointed out recently to Energy Secretary Rick Perry, as an ongoing part of science:

“It’s my understanding” that “the blue team makes an argument and red team tries to knock it down and the blue team then refines their argument and they go back and forth until consensus is reached,” Franken said.

“But that’s exactly how science works. Including climate science. Researchers collect data and make arguments, peer reviewers poke holes in the argument. The researchers respond. It goes back and forth until consensus is reached. Every peer review climate study goes through that red team, blue team treatment. And then thousands of studies have gathered into reports and those reports themselves go through rigorous red team-blue team and this is — that’s the scientific process.”

And as a Koch Brother (Charles, specifically) funded team one-off:

Over the weekend, UC-Berkeley professor Richard Muller outed himself as a "converted" climate "skeptic" in the New York Times after his Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project concluded the earth's surface temperature had increased 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 250 years and one and a half degrees in the past 50 years, likely entirely because of human industrial activity.

What makes this newsworthy, according to The Guardian, is that BEST had received $150,000 from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, whose namesake also runs the climate skeptic research program The Heartland Institute.

So saying that a red team/blue team is now needed just simply ignores the science in the first place.

It's not an attempt to "be fair" it's an attempt to undermine the science's legitimacy.