 Contrarian dissent has impacted the practice of climate science in various ways. Most obviously, research is sometimes directed (at least in part) at rebutting contrarian claims and arguments. For example, a recent research paper related to tropospheric temperature trends (Santer et al. 2017) is explicitly framed as a response to contrarian claims made in the course of testimony to the U.S. Senate (see also Lewandowsky et al. 2015 on "seepage" and the hiatus controversy). In addition, Brysse et al. (2013) contend that pressure from contrarians and the risk of being accused of alarmism may be part of the explanation for climate scientists’ tendency to err on the side of caution in their predictions related to climate change. Drawing these threads together, Biddle and Leuschner (2015) suggest that contrarian dissent has impeded scientific progress in at least two ways: 