WHAT COLOR IS YOUR RED TEAM ?

The Original Red Team:  Comrade State Security Colonel Putin, (far right)
 is using glorious people's AK-47  to encourage Left Deviationists to toe new Party Line

E&E News reports red  is to replace orange as the new black, orange being the color of Heartland Institute Science Director Jay Lehr PhD.'s uniform  when he was sent to  Federal prison for  defrauding  the  EPA of  over a hundred grand back in the '90's. He is clearly the  beau ideal  of a  Red Team  leader the new  EPA  Administrator  might  approbate,  for on  hearing of Pruitt's appointment,  Lehr declared:

“This is a great day for the environment, the American people, and the economy—which will soon no longer be crippled by totally insane regulations, including the idea that humans exhale a pollutant with their every breath,”  

“It’s  beginning  to look a lot  like Christmas !” chimed in another  Heartland  researcher  last   Pearl Harbor Day.

From the generally sensible Niskanen Institute, long suspected of harboring  Scientific Republicans and even critical readers of Scientific  American,  to  rambling  wrecks from  Georgia  Tech who admire  Pruitt for thinking that the Law is the Queen of the Sciences, with petroleum geology a close second, many agree we need  broader  policy horizons  than the partisan dreams of climate activists marching in lockstep, left and right.

Many  climatistas  seem  to span  the  subscription  spectrum from The Nation  to The Guardian, and  respect  dissent  less than  Lenin  with  a  hangover.  In  high  marxistant  dudgeon, Climate Maoists and Naomi Klein fans, from La Jolla to La Paz, have joined past generations of their ilk in denouncing enemies of the revolution as deserving of jail, if not liquidation.

But haven't we been down the climate Red Team road before?

Having  listened  with  great  respect, but  some  puzzlement to Professor  Richard Lindzen  of MIT’s  cogent  expression of his views on global warming, two public-spirited  and  authentically skeptical Kansan graduates of that institution opted a few years ago to fund a Red Team exercise of their own.

They called in a Berkeley professor, skeptical as themselves as to the global temperture record, and as astute and scientifically accomplished as Lindzen himself, and asked him to dissect the issue  anew.  So  his  diligent  Left Coast  crew  delved into the temperature  record , including  one   Willard Watts  contention that badly sited thermometer stations were behind the apparent rise, and  did  a  goodly amount  of  research, and gigabytes of analysis, statistical and dimensional. 

Whereupon Professor Richard Muller announced that his Red Team had changed his mind, and to a degree that might have cost him his head in the court of the Red Queen or the White, let alone  the looking glass world  of K-Street. He concluded the meteorological  common  wisdom was indeed true- there was no decline for erstwhile ‘Climate Skeptics‘ to hide behind. Global temperatures urban and rural, wet and dry, were going up, not down or sideways as some die hards still contended:

As that was good enough for the sponsors of the exercise, the fossil fuel rich  and  worldly-wise MIT educated  brothers Koch, why  should us taxpayers  pay for an instant replay ? Certainly not on the  say-so of some far  oilier  oil patch folks, the former Chief Scientist of that great Koch competitor, British Petroleum, and a West Wing afraid to listen to anything more sciency than an ex-Attorney General of Oklahoma pontificating on Breitbart :

https://soundcloud.com/breitbart/breitbart-news-daily-epa-administrator-scott-pruitt-june-5-2017