Unsettled Science

It may surprise you to learn that there are eminent scientists who believe that the science surrounding climate change is anything but settled. Indeed, much of what we "know" about the climate controversy we apparently don't really "know" at all.

A pair of articles in the Wall Street Journal, one by Holman Jenkins (see here) and one by Mark Mills (see here) features a brilliant - and brave - physicist named Steve Koonin who has written a book titled Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters in which he explains why we should be much more critical of what we're told by our media about climate than many of us are.

Jenkins tells us a bit about the author:

Mr. Koonin is a Brooklyn-born math whiz and theoretical physicist, a product of New York’s selective Stuyvesant High School. His parents, with less than a year of college between them, nevertheless intuited in 1968 exactly how to handle an unusually talented and motivated youngster: You want to go cross the country to Caltech at age 16? “Whatever you think is right, go ahead,” they told him.

“I wanted to know how the world works,” Mr. Koonin says now. “I wanted to do physics since I was 6 years old, when I didn’t know it was called physics.” ... He would teach at Caltech for nearly three decades, serving as provost in charge of setting the scientific agenda for one of the country’s premier scientific institutions.

Jenkins adds that,

For the record, Mr. Koonin agrees that the world has warmed by 1 degree Celsius since 1900 and will warm by another degree this century, placing him near the middle of the consensus.

Neither he nor most economic studies have seen anything in the offing that would justify the rapid and wholesale abandoning of fossil fuels, even if China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and others could be dissuaded from pursuing prosperity.

He’s a fan of advanced nuclear power eventually to provide carbon free base-load power. He sees a bright future for electric passenger vehicles. “The main reason isn’t emissions. They’re just shifted to the power grid, and transportation anyway is only about 15% of global greenhouse-gas emissions.

There are other advantages: Local pollution is much less and noise pollution is less. You’re sitting in a traffic jam and all of these six- or four-cylinder engines are throbbing up and down burning fuel and just doing no good at all.”

But these are changes it makes no economic sense to force. Let technology and markets work at their own pace. The climate might continue to change, at a pace that’s hard to perceive, but societies will adapt. “As a species, we’re very good at adapting.”

Mills tells us that Koonin challenges four widely accepted claims about climate:

1. Heat waves in the US are now no more common than they were in 1900” and “the warmest temperatures in the US have not risen in the past fifty years.

2. Humans have had no detectable impact on hurricanes over the past century.

3. Greenland’s ice sheet isn’t shrinking any more rapidly today than it was eighty years ago.

4. The net economic impact of human-induced climate change will be minimal through at least the end of this century.”

This is not to say that Koonin isn't sympathetic to environmental concerns:

Mr. Koonin says he wants voters, politicians and business leaders to have an accurate account of the science. He doesn’t care where the debate lands.

Yet his expectations are ruled by a keen sense of realities. I mention, along with some names, that I never met anyone of serious judgment who didn’t privately pooh-pooh the idea that humanity will control CO2 by means other than the mostly unregulated progress of markets and technology. Mr. Koonin nods his agreement.

He speaks of “could,” “should” and “will”—and what “will” happen is a lot less than elites, in response to current reward structures, are pretending will happen. Even John Kerry, Joe Biden’s climate czar, recently admitted that Mr. Biden’s “net-zero” climate plan will have zero effect on the climate if developing countries don’t go along (and they have little incentive to do so).

Mr. Koonin hopes that “a graceful out for everybody” will be to see the impulse for global climate regulation “morph into much more impactful local environmental action: smog, plastic, green jobs. Forget the global aspect of this.”

Mills goes on to discuss a few more of Koonin's concerns:

Mr. Koonin laments the sloppiness of those using local weather “events” to make claims about long-cycle planetary phenomena. He chastises not so much local news media as journalists with prestigious national media who should know better.

This attribution error evokes one of Mr. Koonin’s rare rebukes: “Pointing to hurricanes as an example of the ravages of human-caused climate change is at best unconvincing, and at worst plainly dishonest.”

When it comes to the vaunted computer models, Mr. Koonin is persuasively skeptical. It’s a big problem, he says, when models can’t retroactively “predict” events that have already happened. And he notes that some of the “tuning” done to models so that they work better amounts to “cooking the books.”

He should know, having written one of the first textbooks on using computers to model physics phenomena.

So why have so many people uncritically accepted the climate change alarmism peddled by our elites? Mills again:

Since all the data that Mr. Koonin uses are available to others, he poses the obvious question: “Why haven’t you heard these facts before?” He is cautious, perhaps overly so, in proposing the causes for so much misinformation.

He points to such things as incentives to invoke alarm for fundraising purposes and official reports that “mislead by omission.” Many of the primary scientific reports, he observes repeatedly, are factual. Still, “the public gets their climate information almost exclusively from the media; very few people actually read the assessment summaries.”

I said above that Koonin is brave. To deviate publicly from the progressive consensus today is to invite vitriolic attacks upon one's self and family and to risk being "canceled," and Koonin is not unaware of what's in store for him. Mills closes with this:

Mr. Koonin says that he knows he’ll be criticized, even “attacked.” You can’t blame him for taking a few pages to shadow box with his critics.

But even if one remains unconvinced by his arguments, the right response is to debate the science. We’ll see if that happens in a world in which politicians assert the science is settled and plan astronomical levels of spending to replace the nation’s massive infrastructures with “green” alternatives.

Never have so many spent so much public money on the basis of claims that are so unsettled. The prospects for a reasoned debate are not good. Good luck, Mr. Koonin.

Jenkins' column concludes with these words:

First, the mainstream climate community will try to ignore his book, even as his publicists work the TV bookers in hopes of making a splash. Then Mr. Koonin knows will come the avalanche of name-calling that befalls anybody trying to inject some practical nuance into political discussions of climate.

He adds with a laugh: “My married daughter is happy that she’s got a different last name.”