Has the climate-change controversy reached a milestone? That depends in part on whether President Donald Trump follows through with his desire to appoint a President’s Committee on Climate Security (PCCS) under the National Security Council (NSC). The PCCS would be tasked with assessing the pros and cons of various perspectives on climate change—subjecting them to serious scientific testing. That’s something climate alarmists haven’t wanted done, which is why they’ve insisted for decades that “the science is settled,” “the debate is over,” “there is no debate.”

The milestone would be the actualization of the PCCS. But a lead-up to it happened yesterday, when 113 independent scholars (including 25 whom I recognize as specifically focused on climate science) joined 36 organizations and their representatives to send a letter to President Trump urging him “to create by Executive Order a President’s Commission on Climate Security.”

With its deliberations “subject to the transparency requirements of the Federal Advisory Committees Act,” the PCCS would conduct “an independent, high-level review of the Fourth National Climate Assessment and other official reports relating to climate and its implications for national security,” the signers say.

“In our view,” the letter says, “an independent review of these reports is long overdue.  Serious problems and shortcomings have been raised repeatedly in the past by highly-qualified scientists only to be ignored or dismissed by the federal agencies in charge of producing the reports.” It continues,

Among major issues that have been raised and that we hope the commission will scrutinize: the models used have assumed climate sensitivities to CO2 concentrations significantly higher than recent research warrants; the models used have predicted much more warming than has actually occurred; predictions of the negative impacts of global warming have been made based on implausible high-end emissions scenarios; the positive impacts of warming have been ignored or minimized; and surface temperature data sets have been manipulated to show more rapid warming than has actually occurred.  An underlying issue that we hope the commission will also address is the fact that so many of the scientific claims made in these reports and by many climate scientists are not falsifiable, that is, they cannot be tested by the scientific method.

The conclusions and predictions made by these reports are the basis for proposed energy policies that could cost trillions of dollars in less than a decade and tens of trillions of dollars over several decades.  Given the magnitude of the potential costs involved, we think that taking the insular processes of official, consensus science on trust, as has been the case for the past three decades, is negligent and imprudent.  In contrast, major engineering projects are regularly subjected to the most rigorous and exhaustive adversarial review.  We suggest that climate science requires at least the same level of scrutiny as the engineering employed in building a bridge or a new airplane.

You can—and should—read the whole letter here. Aside from my high regard for the scientific acumen of Dr. William Happer, the emeritus Princeton Professor of Physics and NSC staff member who is planning and would direct the PCCS and whom I am blessed to call my friend, and of other scientists and scholars who would be involved, a Biblical principle accurately expressed in Proverbs 18:17, “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him,” drove my own determination to sign the letter.

Proverbs 18:17 isn’t the only place where the Bible supports hearing opposing views. Here are a few others just in the same chapter: “Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgment” (18:1). “A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion” (18:2). “If one gives an answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame” (18:13). “An intelligent heart acquires knowledge, and the ear of the wise seeks knowledge” (18:15).

And then there is this verse, one I love, one I consider to be the foundation of scientific method: “test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

Advocates of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW), or climate alarmism, or the “consensus,” or whatever other name we might give to it, have been loathe to see their ideas tested. They have shown a strong propensity for over two decades to resist all attempts to subject their work to intensive scrutiny. They have hidden their raw data, refused to debate skeptics, and benefited from a near monopoly of the billions of dollars in funding from governments around the world, while skeptics’ funding amounts to less than a tenth of a percent of that. It’s time to level the playing field. The PCCS alone wouldn’t do that, but it would be an important step in that direction.