The Science (No, Really) of Climate Alarmism

Atlas Society CEO, Jennifer Grossman, recently interviewed Steven Koonin, whose PhD in theoretical physics is from MIT. He taught in that field for 30 years at Caltech, served as an undersecretary for science in the Biden Administration Department of Energy, and is now a professor at New York University. Dr. Koonin just published Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters. The TAS interview is about 8,600 (well worthwhile) words, but here are a few quotes:

“I realized the science was nowhere near as certain or settled as I had been led to believe from the media. From talking with experts informally, yes, everybody agreed the globe was warming, and everybody agreed that human influences were growing, but exactly how the climate would respond and what the impacts of those responses would be for society and ecosystems was pretty much a subject of great uncertainty and disagreement among the experts.

“There were really two sets of reports that I think are most important. One is produced by the UN by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Each of the reports has a large body of text, a thousand pages or more, but then it's got a so-called summary for policymakers, which is much more condensed and there's opportunity for great mischief because those summaries for policymakers are heavily influenced by the government, if not written by them. And so, when you compare the report with the summary, they don't agree at all.

"The other set of reports are produced by the US government, the so-called “National Climate Assessment.” It's mandated by Congress that the administration produce one every four years. The last one was produced in 2017 and 18 in two parts. The next one is expected in 2023.

"A common phrase is that we've broken the climate and that we're headed for disaster unless we take prompt and immediate action. That's just not true in the reports. It's not accurate at all.

"For example, there are no detectable human influences on hurricanes over almost the past century. And it says it right there in the report, certainly sea level, while it's rising at a more rapid rate in the last few decades, if you go back 70 or 80 years, it was rising at the same rate when human influences were much smaller and, maybe most surprisingly of all, if you look at the reports and ask, what do they say about the economic impact of a change in climate? What they say is that if the global temperature were to rise by six degrees, which is four times more than what's being discussed in the Paris Accords, then the economic impact on the US and on the globe would be minimal. It would delay growth by a couple years at the end of the century. So no, it's not an emergency.

"The scientists’ responsibility is to bring the facts to the table, and they're the only people who can do that. What I've discovered is that the climate science community, let's say, falls somewhat short in that dimension. I first got to see it when I was running the American Physical Society exercise, and one of the American Physical Society members said, you know, we can't say that in public because it would give ammunition to the deniers.

"I had somebody come up to me who was a distinguished scientist at one of the nation's best universities and say, you know, I agree with pretty much everything you wrote, but I don't dare say that in public.

"[Politicians and the media have been] “saying the science is certain, it's settled. If you don't believe it, you're an idiot. I have been most disappointed by the public reaction of many of the consensus scientists who refuse to engage on the scientific points I've written. They're happy to engage in name calling...

"What's interesting is that, as I mentioned, the next report will come out on Monday. The models that inform that report, which is the newest generation of models (they've already been out there for a year or so), are coming in much more discrepant with each other and with the actual high-net than the previous generation. So as they introduce more sophistication, the models are becoming less certain, and that's not a whole lot of settled science.

"Let me just make a comment about the cooling. If you look at the global temperature record, the official record, it warmed from 1910 to 1940 at a pretty good clip. It then went down from 1940 to 1970, or 1975 it cooled. And then it's been going up again for the last 35, 40 years, the rate of warming in the early part of the 20th century from 1910 to 1940, it was about the same as the rate of warming that we've seen in the last decades. And the cooling was there even as human influences grew. So just by looking at that graph, you can see that this is already a lot more complicated than just that rising CO2 is warming the earth.

"I get many unsolicited emails from scientists and engineers… who, again, they might disagree with some of the things I wrote, but by-and-large said, you got it about right as to the public reaction of other folks like Michael Mann, Naomi Oreskes. They have written what I, again, would consider unprofessional pieces in Scientific American in which, again, there's a lot of name calling and motive imputation, but very little direct engagement on the facts

"Start with some fire facts, which might surprise you. If you look at the US as a whole, and I'm sure there are comparable figures for just the West Coast fires, much more common in the early 20th century, five or six times more common than they are today in terms of acreage burned and the reason for that. Then they declined, the incidents, to about 1970. And, the reason for that decline was Smokey The Bear. The forest service put in a policy of suppressing or not letting burn at all macro-fires, whether natural or human-caused. Since then we've seen a gradual rise over the last 40 years from the minimum around 1970, but it's still about one sixth of what it was before that. So, fire is a natural part of the West Coast landscape.

"I think something like 80% of US wildfires are started by people in one way or the other.

"So, let me just talk about extreme events. I mean, we've seen fires, we've seen floods in Europe. We've seen the heat wave in the Northwest. These are weather phenomena. And, what I like to use as a demonstration of that is the record of the level of the Nile river as measured in Cairo over about a thousand years.

"The Egyptians were doing that from about 650 or so, up until the Aswan dam messed things up in the 1970s. And, when you look at that record, you see tremendous year-to-year variation in the water level of the Nile, but there are smooth trends over decades. And if you're looking—I have a graph in the book—if you look in 650 to 750 or so, it was going down, and you can just imagine some medieval Egyptian climate panel saying, we've got to pray some more and maybe do some sacrifices. And then, it turns around again in 50 or 60 years. So, there are these natural variations. And, one of the challenges in climate science is to separate those natural variations from the response to human influence.

"Major technical projects, like the launch of a spacecraft, for example, are always subject to red-team reviews. Climate science doesn't have that. there is no independent, hard-scrub of them."

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