Comments on Steven E. Koonin’s “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters”

This book brings bad news for the warmists. First, Koonin claims that the science is not settled (despite the pronouncements of politicians) regarding anthropogenic global warming, and second, even if it were, there is probably nothing we can do about it anyway.

The author, a physicist, used to be a believer and in fact had worked to reduce carbon emissions, but then changed his mind. He describes his conversion this way. In 2014 he ended up leading a workshop involving physicists and climate scientists designed to “stress test” climate science, to see exactly what we know about the climate. He writes, “For my part, I came away ... not only surprised, but shaken by the realization that climate science was far less mature than I had supposed” [4]. He notes that “humans exert a growing, but physically small, warming influence on the climate” and that “government and UN press releases and summaries do not accurately reflect the reports themselves.”

For us skeptics, this isn’t news. We’ve been insisting on this all along. But it’s nice to see it in print from a former believer. Naturally, when he first acknowledged what he had learned (through a Wall Street Journal essay), he was piled on by people who mostly acknowledged that he was right, but insisted that he was wrong to say all of that publicly. Yup, scientists wanted the truth about the science kept hidden.

Anyway, he expanded that essay into this book, which is replete with charts and discussions about most aspects of the issue of global warming. As I said, it’s bad news for the warmists. There just isn’t any evidence, he claims, that hurricanes or tornados are becoming more intense or are occurring more frequently. Also, the various models used are the result of something beyond “just physics,” because each modeler has to make choices about a number of variables, and there is no agreed-upon way to do this. And so the models differ from one another in their conclusions instead of all reaching the same conclusion.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the models is that they can’t account for the warming period early in the twentieth century, a period that matches our own for warming [88-9]. This is supposed to have happened before there was much human influence, so it is all natural. It shouldn’t have happened, but it did. And that suggests that maybe our own era’s warming is completely natural.

Finally, and this for me was most telling, when Koonin suggested publicly that it would be a good idea to subject all the results of these models to a blue team versus red team challenge, to see where they were least and where they were most reliable, the scientists involved rejected it flat out. Peer review was good enough, they claimed. Not for me, but then I’m a nobody, so they can easily ignore me.

That was the first part of the book, and in the second part, he talks about what we ought to do, assuming there is warming. He claims, and I have no reason to disagree, that “even stabilizing human influences [would be] so difficult as to be essentially impossible” [212]. The reason is that fossil fuels remain the most reliable source of energy for us, it is very difficult to change the energy infrastructure, and developing countries are going to be using fossil fuels even if we were to decrease our use of them. And it’s not likely that we will do so in the near future. He points out that Japan turned to coal-fired power plants after the Fukushima disaster [223].

What should we do, then? Ultimately, he figures, we will adapt. If it ever looks like warming is going to be increasing at an alarming rate, we could try imitating volcanos and spewing a haze of chemicals into the air. But when he first proposed this, he said the reaction was “tight-lipped silence” [238]. However, as more and more people realize that lowering emissions is not going to work, people are starting to come around and seriously consider such proposals. Still, he predicts that what we will do as the earth warms is to adapt.

Let me make a few comments before I ding him a bit. First, it was nice hearing a scientist say that other scientists were basically involved in lying to the public. Second, an interesting fact he mentions about hurricanes that I hadn’t known before is that they seldom occur in the South Atlantic. Third, I hadn’t realized it before reading the last section of his book, but it seems that many people just do not know how difficult it would be to get us to reduce emissions. I have always known it, and that is why I always thought of these climate conferences as a waste of time, though I’m sure it makes for a great party if you’re one of the elites. But people actually think we can somehow do this.

Fourth, he doesn’t say so, but the sad fact is that we should have been preparing for this way back in about 1970. We should have gone full-speed ahead with building nuclear reactors and with funding research to make them even better. But back then, we were being told we were headed for an ice age, and we were also being told that nuclear reactors were so dangerous we should get rid of the ones we already had.

Now let me ding him for a few points. He doesn’t explain why scientists got so screwed up about a looming ice age back in the 1970s. After all, I don’t think that the science of measuring temperatures has changed in any significant way so that we can attribute our new understanding that the earth is warming and not cooling to that. We could measure temperatures as well back then as we can now. So, what did they screw up on? Apparently, there was a period of cooling back then that the warmists don’t want to talk about. Koonin talks about this obliquely when he points out that the models can’t explain the period of warming before that cooling, but he doesn’t really talk about the ice age predictions.

Second, he doesn’t talk about the Michael Mann hockey stick fiasco or the ClimateGate scandal. And third, and somewhat related, he presents a few tips to determine when you’re being scammed about “science,” such as references to a consensus or a scientist as a denier or conclusions that don’t include numbers. However, he neglects to mention scientists who won’t share their data.

Aside from these little problems, this is a book you can hand to your warmist relatives over the holidays and ask them to read it.

Comments

[Borepatch]

Dr. Richard Mueller from Berkeley Earth Sciences gave an outstanding overview of ClimateGate a few years back:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbR0EPWgkEI&t=1748s

And as an intro to Dr. Mueller, he does think that we're causing the climate to warm, but hates the corruption that overtook the field.

[John Pepple]

Thanks. I'd call it lying for the cause rather than corruption, but whatever. And notice that at 31 minutes, he talks about not wanting to release data, which I think is a sure sign of a scientific scam.

[Charles N. Steele]

Here’s an example of corruption: IPCC SR15 (the report that shifted the limit from 2C to 1.5C) had two chapters on what to do. These chapters dismissed nuclear power, carbon capture, and carbon taxes, and endorsed political agendas totally unrelated to climate, especially international coordination of tax policies, international govt-to-govt financial transfers, and UN SDGs. The bureaucrats pushing this stuff would personally gain power and wealth. That’s corruption.

Then there are things like Tom Steyer’s massive donations to Hilliary’s 2016 campaign in return for her pledge to have federal government “invest” in half a trillion dollars of solar panels (guess what his company makes) or Al Gore’s attempt to set up a billion-dollar company to rake commissions from the proposed cap-and-trade program (happily it failed to pass). That’s corruption.

[John Pepple]

Thanks. I wasn't denying that there was corruption. I was referring to one incident in the video that Borepatch linked to, the incident of "hiding the decline." That is what I call lying for the cause.