Its candidates are already public—the names of 132 nominees were posted last week. At least a dozen of these "experts" in their fields are vocal climate change deniers. Five candidates, according to The Washington Post, opposed the EPA in court over scientific evidence—such as the " social cost of carbon ," which relies on peer-reviewed literature to estimate the monetary damages of carbon emissions—used to support the Clean Power Plan.

A committee of climate change deniers may soon influence how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uses science in decisionmaking. The agency is currently restaffing its Science Advisory Board, a panel of experts that peer reviews the science that the EPA uses to inform rules like clean air regulations.

"I am sure that many scientists who have lived off of the Global Warming scam are concerned about their future," he told me. "Climate science was a sleepy little subject, until James Hansen and Al Gore turned it into a TRILLION dollar per year industry. Climate hysteria will disappear quickly if the vast cash underpinning it disappears."

Fulks, according to his published works, detests the influence of this mainstream climate science at the EPA. He once once compared the sudden firing of an Oregon State University professor, who was also a climate change denier, to the suppression of political dissent in the Soviet Union. "I am concerned that many who promote the idea of catastrophic global warming reduce science to a political and economic game," he wrote in The Oregonian in 2010. "Scare tactics and junk science are used to secure lucrative government contracts."

One of these nominees, astrophysicist Gordon Fulks, has been an especially outspoken critic of mainstream climate science. A policy advisor to the Heartland Institute, a conservative think-tank that mailed anti-climate science propaganda to 25,000 teachers earlier this year, Fulks is perhaps best known for fiery opinion pieces like "Global Warming: Climate Orthodoxy Perpetuates a Hoax."

"I suspect that President Trump understands this and will cut budgets at the EPA, GISS [NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies], and other places where the taxpayer has not received real value for his tax dollars. But cutting budgets is a far cry from firing scientists who dare to speak up or putting them in front of a firing squad as Joseph Stalin did. The mistreatment of scientists during the Obama era was far worse than anything that has came before or after." (Fulks did not offer an example of President Obama allegedly mistreating scientists, and I could not independently find evidence of this claim.)

While the EPA's Science Advisory Board is voluntary, its members have three-year term limits, some of which are ending now. Nominees may submit their own names for consideration, or be nominated by the public. Although the agency's nominations are listed for public input, members are ultimately appointed by the EPA Administrator. This means Administrator Scott Pruitt, who does not accept anthropogenic climate change, can populate the board however he chooses.

Pruitt, in his effort to dismantle existing EPA structures, recently suggested a "red team-blue team" debate meant to give the impression there are two sides to the climate "debate," when, in fact, scientists have overwhelmingly reached a consensus.