By Andy May
I was honored to be chosen by NYU Professor Steven E. Koonin to review his wonderful new book, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t, and Why It Matters. According to Amazon.com, if you order the Kindle version (Koonin, 2021) now, it will download on May 4th. Professor Koonin sent me a near final draft to read and comment on in November and I nitpicked it a bit, but the draft was in good shape even then. It is better now. I received a signed early copy a couple of weeks ago, but I pre-ordered a Kindle version anyway for easy access, and I recommend you do as well. This is an important book, not only because Koonin is a brilliant and famous physicist, but also because of the content. It is a good overview of the science, but also important philosophically.
Koonin has written more than 200 academic papers and articles. They have been cited over 14,000 times according to Google Scholar. These are mostly on his main fields of nuclear and atomic physics. He has also written on biofuels, energy, climate science, observations of Earth’s albedo, and analysis of the human genome. He was once chairman of the small JASON group of scientists that advise the Pentagon and other federal agencies. As the Wall Street Journal reports in their recent review of the book, “Mr. Koonin’s science credentials are impeccable.” (Mills, 2021).
We can expect that he will be excoriated by the press because he does not toe the party line, but he is clearly correct and level-headed in the book. The book is not available to the public yet, but it is already a #1 best seller in the Amazon Kindle store, under “Weather.” A few interesting quotes from the early copy he sent me:
“The earth has warmed during the past century, partly because of natural phenomena and partly in response to growing human influences. These human influences (most importantly the accumulation of CO2 from burning fossil fuels) exert a physically small effect on the complex climate system. Unfortunately, our limited observations and understanding are insufficient to usefully quantify either how the climate will respond to human influences or how it varies naturally. However, even as human influences have increased fivefold since 1950 and the globe has warmed modestly, most severe weather phenomena remain within past variability. Projections of future climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for the purpose.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 24)
This quote is particularly important because many in the public do not realize that the human impact on climate has never been observed or measured in nature. They consider it a fact, but, the IPCC has only provided us with a very rough estimate based on models. What does Professor Koonin have to say about the climate models?
“it’s easy to be seduced by the notion that we can just feed the present state of the atmosphere and oceans into a computer, make some assumptions about future human and natural influences, and so accurately predict the climate decades into the future. Unfortunately, that’s just a fantasy, as you might infer from weather forecasts, which can be accurate out to two weeks or so.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 79)
Two weeks? Koonin is being very generous, his reference is here. He adds a couple of pages later:
“anyone who says that climate models are ‘just physics’ either doesn’t understand them or is being deliberately misleading” (Koonin, 2021, p. 81).
Some scientists from the Max Planck Institute described how they tuned their climate model by targeting an ECS (the climate or temperature sensitivity to a doubling of the CO2 concentration) of about 3°C by adjusting their cloud feedbacks. To understand how awful this is, one much understand that clouds are not modeled; they are adjustable parameters. ECS is not a model input, it is computed from model output. Koonin’s comment: “the researchers tuned their model to make its sensitivity to greenhouse gases what they thought it should be. Talk about cooking the books.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 93).
The world’s governments and the U.N. have spent billions of dollars on climate research and thousands of scientists around the world have spent their entire careers on this subject, so how are we doing? Koonin tells us:
“One stunning problem is that the spread of the [IPCC AR5] 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 uncertain than the earlier one. So here is a real surprise: even as the models became more sophisticated – including finer grids, fancier subgrid parameterizations … the uncertainty increased” (Koonin, 2021, p. 87)
We add that the uncertainty in the calculation of the effect of CO2 on global warming (ECS) in AR5 is exactly the same as the calculation given in the Charney Report (Charney, et al., 1979, p. 2), 1.5° to 4.5° (IPCC, 2013, p. 16).
Koonin was first trained in physics at Cal Tech, where he knew and studied with Richard Feynman, the famous physicist who taught us to believe “in the ignorance of experts.” Koonin reports this passage from Feynman’s 1974 Cal Tech commencement speech:
“Last night I heard [on TV] that Wesson Oil doesn’t soak through food. Well, that’s true. It’s not dishonest; but the thing I’m talking about is not just a matter of not being dishonest, it’s a matter of scientific integrity, which is another level. The fact that should be added to that advertising statement is that no oils soak through food, if operated at a certain temperature. If operated at another temperature, they all will—including Wesson Oil. So, it’s the implication which has been conveyed, not the fact, which is true, and the difference is what we have to deal with.” (Koonin, 2021, p. 7)
As Koonin relates, this is the state of climate science today. What the IPCC and U.S. government tells us about climate science is generally true, but in their effort “to persuade, rather than inform,” they leave out what doesn’t 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 increasing due to human-caused climate change. He relates that heat waves are not more common today than they were in 1900, tornados are not trending up, nor are droughts. Koonin criticizes the media for claiming that extreme weather is somehow related to human activities, when it is clear there is no evidence to support this.
Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal also read a draft of the book and has written this, based on an interview with Koonin:
“Koonin argues not against current climate science but that what the media and politicians and activists say about climate science has drifted so far out of touch with the actual science as to be absurdly, demonstrably false.” (Jenkins, 2021)
Jenkins and Koonin lament both the loss of honesty and the belief in the importance of honesty and truth in the news media and politics today. From 2009 through 2011, Koonin was President Obama’s Under Secretary for Science in the Department of Energy. Later in 2020, Obama declared we are in an “epistemological crisis.” Whether we agree with Obama on the issues or not, we agree that the U.S. is in a crisis with respect to truth and knowledge. Science is all about determining the truth in an objective and reproducible way. One’s feelings don’t matter, excuses don’t matter, consensus opinions don’t matter, what you call it (“global warming” or “climate change”) doesn’t matter, only what you present that can be reproduced independently matters. Unsettled is about getting science back on track, scientists should report what they know, what they don’t know, what they modeled, and what they observed. Nothing more, nothing less.
Some of you may remember that Professor Koonin led an interesting star-studded American Physical Society workshop on climate change in 2014. They discussed and debated the essential elements of the ongoing climate change debate. My summary of the workshop can be read here. Reading the transcript of this workshop was eye-opening for me, it is 573 pages long, but a great example of science well done. Unfortunately, the large holes in the popular man-made climate science narrative it identified were ignored. Koonin actively advocated for more such formal scientific debates on the science; with both sides represented, but sadly 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 tried to literally outlaw federal funding of debate on climate science, their bill read in part:
“… to prohibit the use of funds to 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 they really trying to legislate a research outcome? Science is debate. Without debate, true science does not exist. The various scientific academies are no better than the Senate. Koonin and his colleagues have urged them to remain true to their principles and inform, rather than persuade, but their pleas were ignored. This is where we are today. We applaud Professor Koonin’s stand on scientific integrity and encourage others to follow his lead.
Works Cited
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 Science 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, S. E. (2021). Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells us, What it doesn’t, 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, M. P. (2021, April 25). ‘Unsettled’ Review: The ‘Consensus’ On Climate. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from https://www.wsj.com/articles/unsettled-review-theconsensus-on-climate-11619383653
Koonin is all over YouTube- but y’all must watch a new interview of him by Alex Epstein:
“Obama administration physicist explains why climate catastrophism is unscientific”
“What the IPCC and U.S. government tells us about climate science is generally true, but in their effort “to persuade, rather than inform,” they leave out what doesn’t 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.”
Very true, that god awful “State of the global climate” uses the same technique and language.
No context, no history, no mitigating factors, it’s a disaster everywhere and it’s all our fault.
They can’t keep pretending.
“Two weeks? Koonin is being very generous [about weather forecasting]”
I’d say two days was generous.
As the Wall Street Journal reports in their recent review of the book, “Mr. Koonin’s science credentials are impeccable.” (Mills, 2021).”
Mr. instead of Dr. How low can they go?
The New York Post carried this story a couple of days ago:
https://nypost.com/2021/04/24/obama-admin-scientist-says-climate-emergency-is-based-on-fallacy/
We’ll see who else picks it up.
what settled science looks like- the mass of a proton = 1.6726219 × 10-27 kilograms
what unsettled science looks like- the ECS = somewhere, probably between 1.5° to 4.5°
the later generation of models is actually more uncertain than the earlier one.
=========
Further evidence that ECS is non physical. As per Bertrand Russell: when you believe something to be true that isn’t, you can prove anything (and nothing)
Subtract warming due to recovery from the little ice age. Subtract warming due to the explosion in urbanization. Subtract warming due to experimenter expectation bias. Subtract warming due to unknown unknowns.
All that and it may well be that increasing CO2 does not warm the planet; because of negative water feedback (clouds).
No one knows. Water feedback is just a WAG. Assumed to be 3, it could be -1, in which case ECS = 0.
Koonin’s book might be a valuable addition to the neutralization of the rabid greens but is mostly only visible to people identified by algorithms as probable “skeptics”….but my alter ego “average citizen” news feed has at least 8 climviro catastrophe scare articles and zero about Koonin. That’s before breakfast…
Sceptics are losing this battle because rabid greens are targeting skeptic newsfeeds with false-win stories.
“As Koonin relates, this is the state of climate science today.” Plus oceanography?
https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/13/777/2021/ –OceanSODA-ETHZ: a global gridded data set of the surface ocean carbonate system for seasonal to decadal studies of ocean acidification []
From the abstract– “We assess the fidelity of the computed parameters by comparing them to direct observations from GLODAP, finding surface ocean pH and DIC global biases of near zero, as well as root mean squared errors of 0.023 and 16 µmol kg−1, respectively. These uncertainties are very comparable to those expected by propagating the total uncertainty from pCO2 and TA through the thermodynamic computations, indicating a robust and conservative assessment of the uncertainties….. Concretely, we find…”
From the conclusions “However, pH uncertainties are not as well resolved, most likely due to a mismatch in the representativity of the measured pH.”
Is there are journal – “Uncertainty Science” or is it this one? You don’t have to be much of physics major to understand the problem here, robust, concrete, but uncertain. Give the authors a little tiny bit of credit.
From the article: “We applaud Professor Koonin’s stand on scientific integrity”
Yes, we do!
It is about the “agenda.” The “agenda” of globalism and concentration of political power is driving the climate scam, the propaganda promoting it, and the loss of scientific integrity in the science Academies’ leadership.
At the forefront of this loss of scientific integrity in the US is the NAS, APS, AGU and the AAAS. These organizations were set upon by “scientist” activists 2 1/2 decades ago as VP Al Gore steered science funding and influence in the 1990’s during the Clinton Administration. VP Gore made sure folks like Happer and Bill Gray were forced out by having funding cut-off and also out of government positions of influence in the climate debate.
Bill Gray’s excellent essay here: https://www.friendsofscience.org/index.php?id=820
For those who are unfamiliar with Dr Gray he was a 3 decades long hurricane expert at CSU before VP Al Gore got his funding cut for refusing to bow to his demands on building the climate scam in 1993. He passed in 2016.
Those actions by Al Gore are still hugely damaging today as the people who got the funding, promotions, and accolades from their IPCC and National Climate Assessment spin and propaganda and are now in senior positions across the various climate science disciplines. They are corrupted and will continue to steer the agenda, promote themselves and the junk science that got them started in their careers, the science be damned… because their Democrat puppet masters will keep feeding them grants and positions from which to push their junk science of climate models and their mal-adjustments of surface temp data sets.
I am sure Dr. Koonin has written a valuable and scientific book, and I thank him for it. However, it is not good science to state in the same (paragraph 1 above) comment that “partly in response to human growing influences.” and then “…weather phenomena remain within past variability.” This is a claim to accurately measure something, human influence, against natural variability. There is simply no ability to detect a useful signal against the background of natural variability. When lizards are as big as dinosaurs, call me.
Andy,
The book title ends with “and Why It Matters”, rather than “and Why We Got It Wrong”.
Or did I get that Wrong? Does it Matter? 🙂
Okay, the print copy comes up on May 4, too but you can order ahead now. If you buy the print copy, you don’t have to worry about losing it if the electrons stop buzzing around in the screen. 🙂
Nothing like a little light reading during suppertime.
OT
Canada’s transmountain ppl expansion has been given stop-work order for 4 months.
Because they found some hummingbird nests and so the migratory bird act allows this.
To date, no Wind turbine ki!!ing migratory birds has ever been shut down.
All BS, all the time. Heads i win, Tails you lose.
Edit: used the K word by mistake
The basis of the models is WRONG. Starting with the concept of a “Greenhouse Effect” is where the problem begins.
Clouds are a response to the surface temperature. Cloud behaviour changes dramatically with small changes in sea surface temperature above 26C.
There is no way of parameterising clouds. They need to be based on the physics of the atmosphere.
“Unfortunately, our limited observations and understanding are insufficient to usefully quantify either how the climate will respond to human influences or how it varies naturally.”
But wait! That doesn’t sound like a climate emergency.
If you order the Kindle version now it is $11.99 a $12.96 saving over the post May 4 retail price. Order now and save.
https://financialpost.com/opinion/terence-corcoran-read-this-book-then-forget-climate-panic
There was an interesting discussion about Dr. Koonin’s book on Judith Curry’s “Climate Etc.” blog a few days ago:
https://judithcurry.com/2021/04/17/week-in-review-science-edition-125/#comment-947624
Steve Koonin isn’t telling us anything about climate modeling we didn’t already know.
Some physicists, possibly Frederick Seitz, had already criticized climate modeling as curve fitting back in the 1990’s. The modelers hotly denied that, but it’s true. So it’s no revelation that scientists from the Max Planck Institute tuned their climate model to get the ECS they wanted.
All the modelers tune their models to observables so as to reproduce the temperature trend since 1900. Jeffry Kiehl reported on that in 2007. Adjustment science is specious science, but climate modelers have been getting away with it since at least 1988.
“From 2009 through 2011, Koonin was President Obama’s Under Secretary for Science in the Department of Energy.”
Then why the bloody hell didn’t he advise Obama back then that AGW is a crock? Did Steve Koonin change from believer to skeptic between now and then? How did that happen?
“Some of you may remember that Professor Koonin led an interesting star-studded American Physical Society workshop on climate change in 2014 …. [Its report was] a great example of science well done.”
Here’s an extract from the APS’ current (2021) statement about climate (my bold): “While natural sources of climate variability are significant, multiple lines of evidence indicate that human influences have had an increasingly dominant effect on global climate warming observed since the mid-twentieth century.
“Although the magnitudes of future effects are uncertain, human influences on the climate are growing.
“The potential consequences of climate change are great and the actions taken over the next few decades will determine human influences on the climate for centuries.…In particular, the connection between rising concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases and the increased warming of the global climate system is more compelling than ever.”
Where’s the great example of science well-done in that? It’s total, unscientific BS. The APS management knows nothing of what they claim.
There are no such “multiple lines of evidence…”
“the connection … is more compelling than ever” is a claim made from ignorance.
The APS has betrayed science to make that statement. Steve Koonin and his star-studded workshop have had no positive effect at all.
I’ve taken a look at the 2014 APS workshop report. It’s a good discussion. They talk about physical error and the lack of error propagation in their calculations. But then they go on to other topics.
Toward the end of Collins’ discussion, he says this, “You looked at the difference between 2010 and 1950 and said, oh look, it’s 1.7 [W/m^2]. What if, in fact, it’s 1.7 plus or minus one watt per meter squared?
“If you do the most naïve propagation of that, through the calculation you will find that you get, the range of this explodes toward the high end.”
So: propagate model error and the range of uncertainty explodes. With even just a 1 W/m^2 uncertainty in tropospheric forcing. So says the 2014 APS commission on climate science.
At the end of Collins’s presentation, Steve Koonin asked, “Will these uncertainties in the forcings get propagated into the projections for the next several decades or into the projection after 2100?”
Collin’s response was to equivocate.
The propagation of error Steve Koonin asked about is exactly what I did in “Propagation of Error and …” Except the forcing uncertainty is ±4 W/m^2.
And yet, the 2021 version of the APS still claim evidence of danger from CO2 emissions despite their own 2014 statement acknowledging their own ignorance.
The APS’ inability to follow science and reason is beyond understanding.
Maybe Steve Koonin can address that question. How did the APS come to abandon science and reason, and instead embrace a corrosive irrationality? Maybe the APS can have a star-studded workshop focused on that.
I don’t fear questions that can’t be answered; I fear answers that can’t be questioned.
In the last century I published a peer reviewed paper in the formal literature
(ref. Courtney RS, An Assessment of Validation Experiments Conducted on Computer Models of Global climate (GCM) Using the General Circulation Model of the UK Hadley Centre, Energy & Environment, v.10, no.5 (1999).)
It concluded;
“The IPCC is basing predictions of man-made global warming on the outputs of GCMs. Validations of these models have now been conducted, and they demonstrate beyond doubt that these models have no validity for predicting large climate changes. The IPCC and the Hadley Centre have responded to this problem by proclaiming that the inputs which they fed to a model are evidence for existence of the man-made global warming. This proclamation is not true and contravenes the principle of science that hypotheses are tested against observed data.”
More recently, in 2007, Kiehle published a paper that assessed 9 GCMs and two energy balance models.
(ref. Kiehl JT,Twentieth century climate model response and climate sensitivity. GRL vol.. 34, L22710, doi:10.1029/2007GL031383, 2007).
Kiehl found the same as my paper except that each model he assessed used a different aerosol ‘fix’ from every other model.
The above quotation from Koonin says climate modellers continue their practice of claiming inputs they choose to feed to a model are evidence that indications of the model output are correct. I see no reason why people will listen this time.
Indeed, I refer to this item http://allaboutenergy.net/environment/item/2208-letter-to-senator-james-inhofe-about-relying-on-ipcc-richard-courtney-uk .
It is a poorly formatted copy (Americans use strange paper size) of my reply to a request to me for information on climate change from US Senator James Inhoffe, Chair of the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, that I provided in 2008.
No information requiring any alteration to that letter to Senator Inhoffe has subsequently been found (but additional supporting evidence for its contents has been found). This demonstrates
(a) there is stasis in climate science,
and
(b) there was no imminent climate crisis in 2008 and there is no reason to think such an imminent crisis has developed since then.
Importantly, the letter to Senator Inhoffe addresses all the issues mentioned in the above article about Koonin’s book. He used the information in the letter and he cited it in the US Senate, But nobody took notice and few know of it.