Recorded on August 15, 2023.
Steven Koonin is one of America’s most distinguished scientists, with decades of experience, including a stint as undersecretary of science at the Department of Energy in the Obama administration. In this wide-ranging discussion, based in part on his 2021 book, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, Koonin gives a more refined look at the science behind the climate issue than the media typically offers, guiding us through the evidence and its implications. As Koonin explains in this interview, he was “shaken by the realization that climate science was far less mature than I had supposed” and that the “overwhelming evidence” of catastrophic implications of anthropogenic global warming wasn’t so overwhelming after all.
For further information:
https://www.hoover.org/publications/u…
Koonin is a former Obama Dnergy department staffer, a Cal Teh Provost and an informed commentor. Well worth watching.
I hope that Richard Lindzen lives to be 125 but if we eventually lose him at least we have Steven Koonin.
There is NO CLIMATE EMERGENCY!
Agree. Koonin is about the closest we currently have to Feynman. Would be good to get Koonin and Shellenberger together for a chat on hte record (if they haven’t already).
Hearing that the SPM’s are written by government functionaries (to put it politely) who possess an agenda was very revealing.
The SPMs from day one have had almost nothing in common with the Working Groups.
the working groups should let this fact be know to everyone on the planet
It took me a while, but I had already worked it out. A summary for policy makers is written by them (or their agents), FOR OTHERS to read and obey. Not a summary written by others for them to understand.
You’ve gotta hand it to them sometimes, they run rings around honest people with their lawyerly use of words.
And his book “Unsettled” is a must read.
Koonin’s ‘conversion’ is itself an interesting story. APS put out a ‘climate alarm’ position paper which caused Nobel laureate Gaiever to resign from APS. Koonin was tasked to revisit the issue for APS. He convened a fact finding session including Judy Curry; the workshop’s 600 page transcript is available over at Judith’s. Koonin recommended a strongly revised and tempered APS position paper. APS ignored him. Unsettled was his eloquent response.
Here you go:
https://www.aps.org/policy/statements/upload/climate-seminar-transcript.pdf
Required reading – its a gold mine of the truth about many aspects of climate and models. Not least because the team comprised 3 alarmists and 3 sceptics, all top drawer, its on the record and the outstanding Koonin chairing had already done his homework on the IPCC AR report at the time.
Long, detailed but highly recommended.
On a side note … humor …
“Did you know “Vegetarian” is a Native American word?
It means “Lousy Hunter”
ht to hey gee .
😉
One of my nieces gave me a t-shirt that defines the word thusly:
“Vegetarian: Ancient tribal slang for the village idiot that can’t hunt, fish or ride.” 😅🤣😂
In a world where the importance/ relevance/ truth of some ‘fact’ is dependent upon the social status of the last person to express said ‘fact’, why don’t we just crowdfund and hire a bunch of Hollywood Bollywood every Otherwood glitterati to smile and repeat the skeptics’ soundbites?
It worked for Antonchrist Frauci, with one Zoom call, and it would be a lot cheaper than de-Bolsheviking the educational system.
Imagine the togetherness of all them shiny people confessing their epiphany… the trauma of realising they were misled by their laziness to open a real book.
Antonchrist Frauci
Good one!
Yeah, he’s best fiends with Baal Gates…
A House committee grilled John Kerry to find out exactly what he is doing or thinks that he is doing – Koonin should have been there too to make things more interesting.
He mostly thinks about how his hair looks, what with $700/cut.
From the article: “As Koonin explains in this interview, he was “shaken by the realization that climate science was far less mature than I had supposed” and that the “overwhelming evidence” of catastrophic implications of anthropogenic global warming wasn’t so overwhelming after all.”
Koonin was assuming too much. Then he looked a little deeper into the matter, and found out the truth about CO2/Climate Science.
I think there are millions of people who have done the same thing Koonin did, and they are assuming too much because the media and politicians are encouraging this false narrative.
We eagerly await the time when these millions come to Koonin’s realization.
I’m just a meteorologist and have never believed there was any catastrophe in the making whatsoever and I am still of that belief 40yrs later.
Like everyone else, Koonin still has a lot to learn with regard the climate system on Earth. So the word “truth” is imprecise in this context. However it is a fact that current climate models are unphysical claptrap.
Climate science has been led into a dead end by the singular focus on radiation heat transfer. It is a bit player within the system.
The convection working group’s sole focus is on short term weather events. No one is looking at why oceans cannot sustain a temperature above 30C. No climate model can link the cloud formation to surface temperature because the vertical resolution of even the highest resolution climate model is still an order of magnitude too low..Koonin did not even mention vertical resolution when he was talking about surface area and time resolution.
Radiative heat transfer is probably not a “bit” player as shown by the sinusoidal temperature profile during the day and the exponential/polynomial decay at night. But it is certainly not THE major player. As you rightly point out there are other MAJOR players (e.g. ocean temp, clouds) that the models simply get wrong or ignore entirely. The models are nothing more than fancy curve matching exercises and, therefore, offer little basic understanding of the climate physics and offer little predictive expertise.
How are we going to survive this Climate Change ™ if it keeps up like this? It’s blue sky sunny, 25°C (77°F) and 43% humidity here in north central Connecticut. With a light breeze no less. Oh the humanity!
As I like to say, “what a gorgeous day – must be ‘climate change.'”
Yep, all weather, even the beautiful days, are consistent with climate change.
HOW DARE YOU!
CLIMATE NORMAL..
Looking out of the window , I see another gorgeous late-winter morning, blue skies, a couple of wispy clouds. The wind of the last few days seems to be gone.
It is still cool though, around 10ºC, but the forecast is around 22ºC
It really is tough under climate normal. !
Omg if my late February had 10°C days with a 22°C forecast, I might literally die of too much bliss. It’s definitely worse than I thought.
Mind you, there is no doubt summer will be considerably warmer. 😉
Still a little toasty in Texas this summer. We’ve been spoiled the last few years by several moderate summers. We would pay dearly for your weather right now!
Please keep up. CO2 cannot be selective, it either affects all weather or none at all. You should be having a drought. Or a flood. Or something. Normal weather is a climate catastrophe!
You’re so right! The weather is dangerously unprecedentedly normal. Overly boringly pleasant. This CAN’T be a good sign.
It’s been a cool summer in Cleveland, Ohio
Cleveland has been a little bit north of the jet stream for most of the summer, which keeps temperatures moderate and brings in moisture.
Now, the high-pressure system that was over the Desert Southwest earlier in the year has moved northeast and has pushed the jet stream up around the Canadian border, so expect Cleveland to heat up while it is under this high-pressure system.
This is adverse weather now for power generation.
Yes. I’m in a similar area to you, northeastern PA. After all the warmunist wailing about a hot July, August here has been notably cooler than usual. Some nights have gotten into the 40’s F. Rather pleasant for August. Must be global warming causing cooling.
Rich, I live in northeastern CT and it just baffles me to read all of this climate crisis and climate doom idiocy. We’ve hit 90 degrees three times this summer, even counting the “boiling” July. It was in the 70s here today with the breeze and very comfortable, even becoming chilly as the sun was going down. Yet, these bozos want us to give up our way of life and to live like peasants.
Enjoy the Quiet Corner spren!
Propaganda sets perception and perception is reality when it comes to politics.
Start with data that is a bit higher than normal. Latch on to a few faulty readings and exaggerate from there to boiling oceans and frying corpses.
If we don’t just give up our way of life to live like peasants voluntarily, Demonrats are planning to take it away and give it to actual peasants streaming in from third world countries.
The CAGW advocates are truly statistical idiots. They don’t recognize that there are places *below* the average and places *above* the average. They see the “entire globe” as the “average value”. They don’t understand that if the average goes up that it doesn’t mean the maximums have gone up, they just see the globe as headed for being a cinder.
Right, the weather in New England is SUPPOSSED to suck 98% of the time. Such good weather is truly abnormal and reeks of an emergency! We must slash carbon emissions and get back to NORMAL weather here in CT and MA!
(having been a forester for 50 years in MA)
“Conventional climate science” is not science.
More like a cult. Thou shalt believe, or else…
The word “conventional” creates a problem – it implies some better version that somebody wants to sell.
If people were not told day in and day out that globalwarmingclimatechangemergencyGORE were occurring, nobody would notice a thing about it.
Well, all must genuflect to Algore, the Archbishop of the First Church of the Boiling Globe.
People have been talking about the weather since…
Story tip
https://climatechangedispatch.com/the-bloomberg-funded-scheme-to-ban-planes-cars-meat-and-more-in-14-us-cities/
The billionaire elites have gone full tonto – resistance is not futile, it’s critical to all human prosperity
I think we should ban Bloomberg.
Common sense mostly in the video.
The one thing he still needs to realise is that CO2 has no measurable warming effect on the planet…
… and that there is no real scientific evidence that is has had, or that it will in the future.
The only evidence of CO2 and warming is the Warming jumps up first and the CO2 levels follow at a couple hundred years later.
Same evidence would say the roster crowing makes the sun rise.
That’s largely true in the paleoclimate (geologic scale earth history), although there are cases like the Ordovician ice age initiating after a rise in CO2. The CO2 “control knob” idea is total bunk.
At the same time there is evidence that CO2, like water vapor, absorbs infrared light and delays cooling of the surface. If you cool less at night, you warm more starting from a higher temperature at dawn. The effect is real.
Most of the greenhouse effect is due to water vapor and extremely beneficial to life. It is the enhanced greenhouse effect of added CO2 that leads to all the hullabaloo. That effect is also real but minor. Not quite trivial. A matter of 1% when many other factors can and do counteract the effect from time to time.
We should not base our argument on denial of the greenhouse effect. The empirical evidence demonstrates that the real world effect is less than 2° per doubling of CO2 concentration. Why attempt to convince people of an idea that is widely believed when you don’t need them to accept that in order to agree that there is NO CLIMATE EMERGENCY?
“If you cool less at night, you warm more starting from a higher temperature at dawn. The effect is real.”
I don’t agree with this at all. The max temp the next day is not driven by the temp at sunrise but by the weather at that point in time and the rest of the day. Wind, clouds, terrain, geography, humidity, etc all play a big role in determining what the following day high temp will be and they do not have a direct relationship to what the minimum nighttime temp is.
It’s one reason why temperature is such a poor proxy for the heat in the biosphere. It’s why the forecasters here in northeast Kansas keep getting our temperature forecasts wrong. They keep forecasting 105F temps with humidity at about 35-40%. But here the temps are staying around 95F-100F with humidity in high 60%’s to low 70%’s.
It’s why temps in the desert can be near freezing at night but soar into the 90F’s or more during the day.
Tim
If you start out the day at a higher enthalpy then on average, you’ll end the day with a higher enthalpy than you would have if you had started out at a lower enthalpy. Of course winds and storms can also raise or lower the enthalpy some days, moving heat around.
I certainly agree with you that temperature is not a good measure. We need to consider latent heat as well as sensible heat.
Anyway you’re trying to pull me off my focus. The natural greenhouse effect is real measurable and significant, mostly due to water vapor. The enhanced greenhouse effect of CO2 is minor, difficult to measure apart from confounding factors, and if anything, is beneficial. There is therefore NO CLIMATE EMERGENCY.
We don’t need to persuade voters that there is no enhanced greenhouse effect to persuade them that there is NO CLIMATE EMERGENCY. We can just point to empirical evidence that even if all observed warming is due to the enhanced GHE, it would imply an Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity to doubled CO2 concentration of just 1.7°. NO CLIMATE EMERGENCY!
Why limit ourselves to getting the votes of people who are willing to believe what even most skeptics don’t accept?
“If you start out the day at a higher enthalpy then on average, you’ll end the day with a higher enthalpy than you would have if you had started out at a lower enthalpy.”
Nope. It depends on the weather! Lots of winter days wind up with colder temperatures, i.e. lower enthalpy, at 3PM in the afternoon than it was at sunrise.
“Of course winds and storms can also raise or lower the enthalpy some days, moving heat around.”
That’s exactly what I am saying. I think what you are getting at is seasonal variation. Yes, daytime temps are cooler in winter because nighttime temps are cooler. Yes, daytime temps are higher in summer because the nighttime temps are warmer. But that is more a function of the relationship between the earth and the sun than it is with the starting enthalpy at sunrise.
And it’s not just wind and storms, it’s a conglomeration of lots of things, clouds, humidity, terrain, geography, elevation, pressure, etc.
“The enhanced greenhouse effect of CO2 is minor, difficult to measure apart from confounding factors, and if anything, is beneficial. There is therefore NO CLIMATE EMERGENCY.”
I agree with you totally on this. I would only add that if temperature is going to be used as a proxy then the way to use it is to integrate the entire temperature curve during the 24 hour period – i.e. an integrative degree-day value. We’ve had the capability of doing that for 40 years – and climate science is that far behind in their analysis protocols. By the same token we’ve had the ability to calculate enthalpy for the same period by using humidity, pressure, etc along with the temp. But climate science is that far behind in their analysis protocols. It’s like they are afraid of what a real scientific analysis using the vast amount of data available would show. They would rather “adjust” past temperatures to get the answer they need to feed the money flow!
Bnice, Koonin used some excellent nuanced language. Without going back to listen again, I believe he said something like it “tends toward warming”. In other words he said that all other things being equal, it should lead to warming, but it may not necessarily. He also said it was a minor 1% effect in a highly dynamic complex system.
I don’t mind being a broken record on this because I believe it bears repeating. We need to convince persuadable voters that there is NO CLIMATE EMERGENCY.
Denying the greenhouse effect is a bad tactic toward that end. A big tactical error. The natural greenhouse effect is very real and significant. To deny its existence is disqualifying. The enhancement of the greenhouse effect due to CO2 concentration increases is theoretically sound but so small that other effects could counteract it.
So in that respect, it is not measurable as you say. We can’t attribute the measurable rise in temperature that we have observed to a specific cause, or tease out how much is due to the enhanced GHE.
That is evidence that the effect is too small to be a serious concern. It is not evidence that there is no effect. How we phrase it is important since the urgent goal is to be persuasive. If we’re seen as denying sound science, even though we’re right that there’s no cause for concern, we will defeat ourselves.
As Koonin said, temperatures have risen and the rise in CO2 tends toward warming, but it’s NOT A CLIMATE EMERGENCY.
The CAGW advocates have it exactly backwards. The emergency is too little CO2. Humans do better in warmer climes because of less cumulative stress on the body and more abundant food sources. CAGW *is* a cult, no different from the guy on the corner with the sign saying “The Worlds Ends Tomorrow”.
And how much money have our governments flushed down the toilet to date on this CAGW BS ? And yet they can’t even provide adequate fire prevention ,fire fighting , emergency management and manage the relief effort in one little town in Maui . Basically don’t count your governments for anything anymore.
Don’t count on them for justice, don’t count on them to run a election fairly, don’t count on them to manage any facet of our economy for gods sakes and definitely don’t count on the government to help you in a real emergency.
This is never mention in the climate news stories as far as I have seen. The climate of the Earth as a whole is a 2.58-million-year ice age named the Quaternary Glaciation. The Earth is in a warm interglacial period that happens about every 100,000 years and lasts about 10,000 years which alternates with a cold glacial period that lasts about 90,000 years.
This is probably the study that showed that deaths from cold outnumber deaths for heat 9 to1. The cold weather we have every year causes about 4.6 million deaths a year worldwide mainly through increased strokes and heart attacks, compared with about 500,000 deaths a year from hot weather.
‘Global, regional and national burden of mortality associated with nonoptimal ambient temperatures from 2000 to 2019: a three-stage modelling study’
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00081-4/fulltext
This study from 2015 says that cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather and that moderately warm or cool weather kills far more people than extreme weather. Increased strokes and heart attacks from cool weather are the main cause of the deaths.
‘Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multi-country observational study’ https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)62114-0/fulltext
“The climate of the Earth as a whole is …. named …”
Words invented by people who believed certain things- if I name an ice cream cone “death mush” it would probably affect sales.
I thought Koonin was excellent, but the interviewer, Peter Robinson, was insufferable. He made me cringe every time he interrupted and spoke over Koonin. I can’t tell you what I wanted to do to him.
About 45:30. “Wind and solar can be an ornament on the real electrical system. They can never be the backbone of the system.”
Good one!
I would be more apt to describe them as “a pimple on the backside of” rather than as an ornament.
Below 60-70 degrees Fahrenheit is the coldest a person can life at with minimal clothing for a week or more.
The Global temperature is 57.7. That’s colder than humans can live at without heat of some kind.
Been reading “Winter Games” by Daniel Church?
I haven’t read it. But I know from lots of outdoor camping with ill-prepared Boy Scouts that scvbwxq is pretty close to the mark.
Steven Koonin was one of the people who helped me when I first dipped my toes in the waters of skepticism. I first saw him on Jordan Peterson’s series on climate, and rather than what I imagined a “denier” would be like he was calm, rational, and his arguments were well thought out and backed with data. I later read his most recent book and appreciated how he took down alarmism mostly using the science from the IPCC reports. It gave me confidence that even the “gold standard” of climate science didn’t warrant alarm and helped open up my eyes to the ways in which science had been distorted by members of politics, media, and even, and most ashamedly, “scientists”.
And now you have ended up at WUWT. Good for you! You’ve found the place where all this stuff is hashed out.
Europe is not hotter it’s the same spin they are doing with Hawai’i and everything else.
Worthwhile interview on several levels. The final question he answered with the
two greatest immoralities today, the first of 60% of the globe population not
access to energy and the second regarding our youth having the “bejesus scared out of them”
by climate alarmism was a good ending. The Held vs Montana is a perfect example of the
latter.