By Andy May
I was honored to be selected by NYU Professor Steven E. Koonin to review his wonderful new book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why We Got It Wrong. According to Amazon.com, the Kindle version (Koonin, 2021) will download on May 4th if you order it now. Professor Koonin sent me an almost definitive draft for reading and commenting in November, and I chose it a little, but the draft was in good shape even then. It is better now. I received a signed early copy a few weeks ago, but I still pre-ordered a Kindle version for easy access, and I recommend you do too. This is an important book, not only because Koonin is a brilliant and famous physicist, but also because of the content. It’s a good overview of science, but also philosophically important.
Koonin has written more than 200 academic papers and articles. They have been cited over 14,000 times, according to Google Scholar. These deal mainly with his main areas of nuclear and atomic physics. He has also written on biofuels, energy, climate science, observations of the earth’s albedo, and analysis of the human genome. He was once the chairman of the small JASON group of scientists advising the Pentagon and other federal agencies. As the Wall Street Journal reported in its most recent review of the book, “Mr. Koonin’s scientific references are impeccable. “(Mills, 2021).
We can assume he will be upset by the press for not sticking to the party line, but he is clearly correct and level-headed in the book. The book isn’t open to the public yet, but it’s already a # 1 best seller on the Amazon Kindle Store under Weather. A couple of interesting quotes from the early copy he sent me:
“The earth has warmed up in the last century, partly due to natural phenomena, partly as a reaction to increasing human influences. These human influences (especially the accumulation of CO2 from the combustion of fossil fuels) have only a small physical effect on the complex climate system. Unfortunately, our limited observations and understanding are insufficient to meaningfully quantify how the climate responds to human influences or how it changes naturally. Although human influences have increased fivefold since 1950 and the globe has warmed up slightly, most severe weather phenomena remain within the variability of the past. Projections of future climate and weather events are based on models that have been shown to be unsuitable for this purpose. “(Koonin, 2021, p. 24)
This quote is especially important as many in the public do not realize that human effects on climate have never been observed or measured in nature. They think it’s a fact, but the IPCC only gave us a very rough estimate based on models. What does Professor Koonin say about the climate models?
“It’s easy to be seduced by the idea that we can simply feed the current state of the atmosphere and oceans into a computer, make some assumptions about future human and natural influences, and thus accurately predict the climate decades into the future. Unfortunately, that’s just a fantasy as you can tell from weather forecasts, which can be up to two weeks or so accurate. “(Koonin, 2021, p. 79)
Two weeks? Koonin is very generous, his hint is here. He adds a few pages later:
“Anyone who says that climate models are ‘just physics’ either does not understand them or is deliberately misleading” (Koonin, 2021, p. 81).
Some scientists at the Max Planck Institute described how they optimized their climate model by aiming for an ECS (the climate or temperature sensitivity to a doubling of the CO2 concentration) of around 3°C by customizing their cloud feedback. In order to understand how terrible this is, one understands a lot that clouds are not modeled; They are adjustable parameters. ECS is not a model input, but is calculated from the model input. Koonin’s comment: “The researchers tuned their model to be as sensitive to greenhouse gases as they imagined. Talk about cooking the books. “(Koonin, 2021, p. 93).
The world’s governments and the United Nations have spent billions of dollars on climate research, and thousands of scientists around the world have spent their entire careers on the subject. How are we Koonin tells us:
“One amazing problem is that the spread of the [IPCC AR5] The CMIP5 ensemble in the years after 1960 is larger than that of the models in CMIP3 – in other words, the later generation of models is actually more insecure than the earlier. So here’s a real surprise: Even as the models became more complex – including finer grids, more unusual subgrid parameterizations … the uncertainty increased ”(Koonin, 2021, p. 87).
We add that the uncertainty in calculating the impact of CO2 on global warming (ECS) in AR5 is exactly the same as the calculation in the Charney report (Charney et al., 1979, p. 2), 1.5° until 4.5° (IPCC, 2013, p. 16).
Koonin was first trained in physics at Cal Tech, where he met and studied Richard Feynman, the famous physicist who taught us to believe “in the ignorance of experts.” Koonin reports on this passage from Feynman’s Cal Tech opening speech from 1974:
“I heard last night [on TV] that wesson oil does not soak from eating. Well that’s right. It’s not dishonest; But I’m not just talking about not being dishonest, I’m talking about scientific integrity, which is another level. The fact that should be added to this promotional statement is that oils will not leak through food when operated at a certain temperature. If they are operated at a different temperature, they will all – including Wesson Oil. So it is the implication that has been conveyed, not the fact that is true, and the difference is what we have to deal with. “(Koonin, 2021, p. 7)
As Koonin reports, this is the state of the art in climate science today. What the IPCC and the US government say about climate science is generally true, but in their efforts to “convince rather than inform” they leave out what does not fit their narrative. They tell us enough to be alarmed, not enough to educate. It is the loss of scientific integrity that is alarming, not the climate.
Much of the book is spent dispelling the myth that extreme weather events are on the increase due to man-made climate change. He reports that heat waves are no more frequent today than they were in 1900, tornadoes are neither trending nor droughts. Koonin criticizes the media for claiming that extreme weather is in some way related to human activity when it is clear there is no evidence to back it up.
Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal also read and wrote a draft of the book based on an interview with Koonin:
“Koonin is not arguing against current climate science, but that what the media, politicians and activists say about climate science is so far removed from actual science that it is absurd and demonstrably wrong.” (Jenkins, 2021)
Jenkins and Koonin lament both the loss of honesty and belief in the importance of honesty and truth in today’s news media and politics. From 2009 to 2011, Koonin was President Obama’s Undersecretary for Science in the Department of Energy. Later in 2020, Obama declared that we were in “an epistemological crisis”. Whether we agree with Obama on these issues or not, we agree that the US is in crisis over truth and knowledge. Science is about determining the truth objectively and reproducibly. Your feelings don’t matter, excuses don’t matter, consensus opinions don’t matter what you call it (“global warming” or “climate change”), it doesn’t matter, only what you present that can be independently reproduced matters . The concern is restlessly to get science back on track. Scientists should report what they know, what they don’t know, what they model, and what they observe. Nothing more, nothing less.
Some of you may remember that in 2014, Professor Koonin led an interesting, star-studded American Physical Society workshop on climate change. They discussed and debated the essential elements of the ongoing debate on climate change. My summary of the workshop can be read here. Reading the minutes of this workshop opened my eyes, it’s 573 pages long, but a great example of science well done. Unfortunately, the big holes in the popular man-made climate science narrative that identified them have been ignored. Koonin actively promoted such formal scientific debates about science; represented by both sides, but unfortunately every proposal was shot down. As he describes in Chapter 11, “Fixing the Broken Science,” prominent Democratic Senators Markey, Schatz, Smith, Blumenthal, Shaheen, Booker, Stabenow, Klobuchar, Hassan, Markey, and Feinstein literally sought federal funding for the climate science debate forbid, their bill partly read:
“… prohibit the use of funds by federal agencies to establish a panel, task force, advisory committee, or other effort to challenge the scientific consensus on climate change and for other purposes.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 202)
Are you really trying to sort out a research result? Science is debate. There is no real science without debate. The various scientific academies are no better than the Senate. Koonin and his colleagues have asked them to be faithful to their principles and to inform rather than convince, but their requests have been ignored. Here we are today. We applaud Professor Koonin’s position on scientific integrity and encourage others to follow his example.
Charney, J., Arakawa, A., Baker, D., Bolin, B., Dickinson, R., Goody, R.,. . . Wunsch, C. (1979). Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment. National Research Council. Washington DC: National Academies Press. doi: https: //doi.org/10.17226/12181
IPCC. (2013). In T. Stocker, D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S. Allen, J. Boschung,. . . P. Midgley, Climate Change 2013: The Physical-Scientific Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Retrieved from https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_SPM_FINAL.pdf
Jenkins, H. (2021 April 16). How a Physicist Became a Climate Truth Teller. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-a-physicist-became-a-climate-truth-teller-11618597216?mod=article_inline
Koonin, SE (2021). Restless: What climate science tells us, what not and why it matters. Dallas, Texas, USA: BenBella. Retrieved from https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08JQKQGD5/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Mills, MP (2021 April 25). “Troubled” review: the “consensus” on the climate. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from https://www.wsj.com/articles/unsettled-review-theconsensus-on-climate-11619383653
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