By Andy May
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published a review of Steven Koonin’s new book Unsettled on April 25, a little over a week before it went on sale. A blog called “Climate Feedback” published a “Fact Check” of the book review on May 3rd, the day before the book came out. This so-called fact check was used by Facebook to attempt to discredit the WSJ review and the book itself whenever a post linked to the book review.
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board objected to this practice with a strongly worded editorial. They pointed out the so-called “fact check” was not checking anything, but simply arguing against Koonin’s analysis. Arguing with Koonin is fine, arguing is an important part of science, but don’t call it a fact check. The “fact check” blog post doesn’t contradict or challenge anything in Koonin’s book. Koonin provides a rebuttal in today’s WSJ here.
Koonin’s more detailed point-by-point rebuttal of the fact check is here.
I noticed on Saturday, when I searched for Koonin’s book on Amazon.com using search text, like “Steven Koonin Unsettled,” that I was led to books critical of Koonin’s book, but not to his book. Amazon appeared to have “canceled” a best seller. Later the same day, searches on Amazon began to work properly again, hopefully it was a simple programming error and not attempted suppression by a rogue employee.
You can get to his book on Amazon.com at this link, if searches fail again. The book can also be found, on BarnesandNoble.com. Both purchases will have be eBooks, the print edition is sold out, probably until June. Koonin’s book is now on two of WSJ’s best seller lists!
We have dealt with fraudulent fact checks and fake news before, they are plentiful. See here and here. We have also seen blatant lying about climate science debate on the internet by otherwise respectable organizations, like Intelligence Squared (IQ2US), see here. In this case the record shows that the climate skeptics, Michael Crichton, Richard Lindzen, and Phillip Stott won a public climate change debate in New York decisively. Their opponents were Brenda Ekwurzel, Gavin Schmidt, and Richard Somerville. The correct results remained on the website for ten years after the 2007 debate, yet someone in IQ2US changed the clear and well documented results sometime after 2017, according to the Wayback Machine. Now the IQ2US website says the opposite, they say the climate alarmists won. Shameful, but true. We notified them of their erroneous reporting in December, but the wildly incorrect results were still on their website, months later, on May 15, 2021. It is probably still there.
The news media and our institutions can no longer be trusted. Their fact checks cite a statement, say it is false, then subtly change it to a truly false statement and refute that. Then they claim to have refuted the original. For example, Koonin and the review say: “Greenland’s ice sheet isn’t shrinking any more rapidly today than it was eighty years ago.” This is true, Greenland was melting at a very rapid pace in 1940, much faster than today. Yet, Twila Moon’s “refutation” claims that Greenland lost more mass from 2003 to 2010 than it did from 1900 to 2003, which may be true, but it is not what Koonin wrote. Further, much of the period from 1900 to 2003, Greenland was gaining, not losing ice. Further cherry-picking a seven-year period is not relevant climatologically.
Frederikse, et al., clearly show that melting glaciers in Greenland were a major contributor to sea level rise from the late 1930s to the mid 1940s, but were a minor influence in the last few decades. Overall, the rate of sea level rise recently, is quite comparable to the rate seen in the late 1930s to the mid 1940s. This deceptive sort of “refutation” is used throughout the “fact check” and Koonin picks them all apart in his detailed post. This is the modus operandi of today’s fact checkers, beware of them.
Professor Koonin joins the long list of former liberals who have been mugged.
You should not refer to propagandists “fact checkers”. They would not know a fact if it bit them.
It is clear that most people have never received adequate training to understand the difference between a fact and an argument or opinion. These kind of people then become the “fact checkers”. Unfortunately, many people just accept what these so-called “fact checkers” write.
It is a political trick to sidestep inconvenient facts and answer them with irrelevant points.
The book is presently “Temporarily out of Stock” on both the Amazon and the Barns & Noble sites. I can get the “Kindle” version but you how that is, one can’t “share” the book with friends and relatives, and there’s no such thing as a personal library where one can easily deposit books into and share. 🙁
Koonin most likely touched on the contribution of elevated CO2 to bumper harvests and and a ~20% increase in global forests, including expansion into the Sahel on the southern fringe of the Sahara and in the other arid areas of the planet (NASA reported 15% in 2014 but has been reluctant to revisit this inconvenient topic).
The delicious irony here is that the only palpable evidence of climate change at all is the splendiferous Great Greening of the planet, thanks to the fossil fuel industry, and the Climate Synod is sworn to silence on the subject. They try to take subdued pot shots at it peripherally as something bad now and again because it would be indecent to ignore such a huge, in-your-face phenomenon entirely. But, in their hearts they now know that anthropo CO2 is overwhelmingly beneficial with, thus far, no sign of anything to be concerned about.
Liberals tend to believe that screaming “you’re wrong”, counts as a rebuttal.
MarkW,
May I suggest replacing your L-word with “Leftist”? Don’t give in to NewSpeak.
Okay, as with all things context matters. In reading what the ‘fact checkers’ do in order to ‘refute’ statements is pretty meaningless. However this does not mean that there are no issues with what Mr. Koonin’s book says. While I agree the amount of temperature rise is overly attributed to CO2 rise, there is, unfortunately a strong correlation.
Now do I feel that it has become overly ‘simplified’ science. Yes. Do I feel it has become a money grab. Yes. Do I think all the science around it is wrong? No.
So I wish we could get along with one another and come to real solutions to the issue.
To people like Nick Stokes – do you HONESTLY believe that Solar and Wind power is a real solution? Based on all evidence I have seen to date I would suggest that this has numerous additional unintended environmental impacts that BECAUSE we see the specter of ‘CO2’ being the driving fear of all things climate related are not being thought through.
Already we see cities altering rain/precipitation and temperature patterns ( not linking to articles here so this is a GENERAL statement if you really want me to get into it I can ) adding wind turbines and large solar panels can have negative ( and climate altering repercussions as well ) which may well not be understood for decades to come, and may in fact be as damaging if not more so than CO2 emissions
I am always curious as to what people are thinking about when they attempt to treat a symptom without dealing with the actual disease.
Anyway, have not read the book but the criticism seems to be out of context of the explanation.
“I noticed on Saturday, when I searched for Koonin’s book on Amazon.com using search text, like “Steven Koonin Unsettled,” that I was led to books critical of Koonin’s book….”
I searched “Koonin” and his book came up first. But it was accompanied by five or six ‘Summaries’ purportedly by different authors, although all in the same cover format which received one or two stars. It seems like a concerted propaganda war. In fact, the propagandists are shooting themselves in the foot by giving so much attention to Koonin. The alarmists must be alarmed.
Climate Science is a religion for the Left, with its own dogma, its own commandments, its own savior. And it has nothing to do with science.