Push on for White House Climate Science Review Panel

June 5, 2019 (EIRNS)—National Security Council Senior Director for Emerging Technologies Dr. William Happer, a physicist, met with President Donald Trump in early May to brief him on plans for the formation of a climate science review panel, and the idea is to settle on the plan “sooner rather than later,” Environment & Energy News reported on May 31, citing unnamed sources described as “close to the planning.”

It will be a month, at least, before the panel will be announced, “and it would likely be done through an executive order,” according to this report. The original plan for the review panel to consist of outside academic researchers is reported also to have held the day, against the attempt by opponents within the administration to castrate any serious review of the man-made climate change “consensus” by using federal government “climate science experts” only. The project “could produce a working white paper in as soon as three months after it begins, according to one of the planners.”

Working with Happer in preparing the panel is Steve Koonin, a New York University physicist and former Science Advisor for the Energy Department in the Obama Administration. Koonin had proposed a similar sort of “red team, blue team” climate science review in an April 20, 2017 Wall Street Journal op-ed, which former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt had then tried to set up, with Happer and Koonin working together on it.

E&E News quotes Koonin arguing the need for an “update” of the “man’s responsible for climate change” National Climate Assessment, at Indiana’s Purdue University last month: “There’s a real disconnect between what’s in the reports and in the scientific literature and what you hear in the political, in the popular and in the media coverage of climate science,” he told the event. “There are natural influences that are also operative, and you better have those under control if you’re going to attribute what you see to human influences.”