The Trump administration is rolling out nominees for various cabinet positions and the transition team is submitting questions to federal departments required for their due diligence prior to the handover of executive responsibility.

All this is normal procedure, yet the climate establishment is going ballistic. The Progress websites have gone into overdrive, led by Podesta and funded by Soros and Steyer. It is a massive outpouring of articles intended to inflame and incite outrage against anything the Trumpers are up to in taking up their mandate.

Other alarmists are producing reports like this recent one: Trump’s transition: sceptics guide every agency dealing with climate change, from the Guardian (here). In all such communications, the appointees are profiled, and denigrated:

Trump has assembled a transition team in which at least nine senior members deny basic scientific understanding that the planet is warming due to the burning of carbon and other human activity. These include the transition heads of all the key agencies responsible for either monitoring or dealing with climate change. None of these transition heads have any background in climate science.

Trump has also nominated Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt to lead the EPA and is expected to pick congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers to head the interior department. Pruitt has claimed that scientists “continue to disagree” about the causes and extent of global warming while McMorris Rodgers has said that former vice-president Al Gore, who has championed climate action, “deserves an ‘F’ in science.”

Time for Climatists to Put Up or Shut Up

Amazingly, these long-entitled activists are blind to the opportunity now presented to them. For many years, climate alarmists have refused to debate the science of their position, declaring that the “science is settled.” People like John Christy suggested that there could be at least a little funding for “red teams” to present the counter view to IPCC consensus science. All was for naught when true believers were in power.

Now there will be roundtable discussions at the highest levels of powerful departments and agencies, such as Energy, Interior, NASA, and EPA. If the incoming powers-to-be are uneducated in climate science, let those concerned about global warming make their case, show their facts, convince skeptical people through reason and persuasion. It is now time to put up or shut up. It is exactly the wrong time to be appealing to emotions and trying to stir up craziness. Moral indignation and trash-talking the other side is the opposite of engaging in discussion and debate over what is claimed to be an essential issue of our times.

We may yet have the great climate debates so long avoided by those convinced they had all the answers and the others should just trust them. If climatists have something reasonable to say and not just fear and bullying, it is time to step up to the plate.

As Greg Sorrell writes at the Federalist (here), the Trump administration is right to take emotion out of climate policy.

One of the last formal debates was prior to 2009 Copenhagen COP. Pre-debate the audience was 61% Pro and 39% Con on the premise: Climate change is mankind’s defining crisis, and demands a commensurate response. Post-debate, it was 53% Pro and 47% Con. With such results occurring frequently, climatists stopped participating.