Unsettled: What climate science tells us and what it doesn’t

Steven Koonin’s new book, Unsettled, is an excellent introduction to climate science by an award-winning teacher. It is essential reading for anyone who wishes to develop an informed judgment on the most important scientific issue of this decade.

by Richard Schulman

Dr. Koonin has impressive academic and governmental credentials. He has a BS from Caltech and a PhD from MIT in theoretical physics. He was a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech for almost thirty years, won awards for his classroom teaching, and authored the 1985 textbook Computational Physics, which introduced a methodology for building computer models of complex physical systems. Koonin served as Undersecretary for Science in the US Department of Energy under President Obama, where his portfolio included the climate research programs and energy technology strategy. He has published some two hundred peer-reviewed papers in physics and astrophysics, currently is a professor at NYU with appointments to three of its schools (business, engineering, and physics), and is a member of Governor Cuomo’s Blue Ribbon Commission to Reimagine New York in the post-COVID-19 era.

Science versus propaganda

Koonin shares with his mentor and later colleague at Caltech, the Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, a personal identity of getting to the truth and explaining this clearly to the public, even when this is contrary to prevailing opinion. Koonin contrasts such an identity with that of the late IPCC climate researcher Stephen Schneider, who confessed that “to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination,” scientists must “offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.”

The Schneider attitude unfortunately continues. Koonin found that when he pointed out the discrepancy between what the scientific papers were showing and what the public was being told, he was told to keep his criticisms within the scientific community and asked “whether I was a Trump supporter.” (He wasn’t.) That cancel culture approach to Koonin continues. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial complains that Facebook is suppressing the Journal’s book review of Unsettled.

The shame of the AAAS

Kunin’s book begins with several chapters on the basics of climate science and how the science gets rewritten in its voyage from scientific papers to IPCC assessments to the media and finally the politicians with their trillion dollar spending bills. As an example of this sad journey, he quotes from a 2019 climate summary published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the largest US scientific membership organization:

Across the country, extreme weather events such as hurricanes, floods, wildfires and drought are occurring with greater frequency and intensity…. Science tells us that the sooner we respond to climate change, the lower the risks and the costs will be in the future.

https://howwerespond.aaas.org/report/

Koonin, an AAAS member for five decades, observes that the statement “was never submitted for comment, let alone endorsement, by the organization’s 120,000 members.” Had he been asked to comment, he would have noted that human influences such as burning fossil fuels “exert a physically small effect on the complex climate system.” Furthermore, “most severe weather phenomena remain within past variability” and “projections of future climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for the purpose.” In short, what the science actually says and what the AAAS is proclaiming are worlds apart.

What the science says, vs. the media and politicians

Koonin’s book provides clear, detailed explanation of the data – relying almost entirely on official sources – to support his conclusions. He shows how some in the science community, who should and probably do know better, cherry pick the data to show only snippets depicting a recent sudden rise in adverse events. They suppress historical data, often pre-dating the fossil-fuel era, showing that the “extreme weather events such as hurricanes, floods, wildfires and drought” are not “occurring with greater frequency and intensity” but are just part of natural variability.

The climate models on which politicians are basing their spending programs are, as Koonin says, “demonstrably unfit for the purpose.” With successive IPCC reports, they should be converging. Instead, they diverge. Far from being able to predict, they can’t even retrodict (“predict” the past). They can’t explain the 1910-1940 warming, much less 500 million years of changing climate. Clouds, a key input, are inadequately modeled.

Koonin concludes by discussing how climate science became broken through a convergence of interests among politicians wanting to do something big, scientists eager for tenure and grant money, NGOs promoting climate hysteria to raise funds, and media promoting crisis narratives to attract readers and offer click bait.

Readers of Koonin’s Unsettled will come away, as the full title promises, wiser in what we do know about climate, what we don’t, and why it matters that we be inoculated against attempts to persuade us that unprecedented extreme climate events are happening, human combustion of fossil fuels is the culprit, and net zero the solution.