How a Physicist Became a Climate Truth Teller After a stint at the Obama Energy Department, Steven Koonin reclaims the science of a warming planet from the propaganda peddlers. https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-a-...te-truth-teller-11618597216?mod=hp_opin_pos_2 on edit: I'll add the text Barack Obama is one of many who have declared an “epistemological crisis,” in which our society is losing its handle on something called truth. Thus an interesting experiment will be his and other Democrats’ response to a book by Steven Koonin, who was chief scientist of the Obama Energy Department. Mr. 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. This is not an altogether innocent drifting, he points out in a videoconference interview from his home in Cold Spring, N.Y. In 2019 a report by the presidents of the National Academies of Sciences claimed the “magnitude and frequency of certain extreme events are increasing.” The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is deemed to compile the best science, says all such claims should be treated with “low confidence.” In 2017 the U.S. government’s Climate Science Special Report claimed that, in the lower 48 states, the “number of high temperature records set in the past two decades far exceeds the number of low temperature records.” On closer inspection, that’s because there’s been no increase in the rate of new record highs since 1900, only a decline in the number of new lows. Mr. Koonin, 69, and I are of one mind on 2018’s U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment, issued in Donald Trump’s second year, which relied on such overegged worst-case emissions and temperature projections that even climate activists were abashed (a revoltcontinues to this day). “The report was written more to persuade than to inform,” he says. “It masquerades as objective science but was written as—all right, I’ll use the word—propaganda.” Mr. Koonin is a Brooklyn-born math whiz and theoretical physicist, a product of New York’s selective Stuyvesant High School. His parents, with less than a year of college between them, nevertheless intuited in 1968 exactly how to handle an unusually talented and motivated youngster: You want to go cross the country to Caltech at age 16? “Whatever you think is right, go ahead,” they told him. “I wanted to know how the world works,” Mr. Koonin says now. “I wanted to do physics since I was 6 years old, when I didn’t know it was called physics.” He would teach at Caltech for nearly three decades, serving as provost in charge of setting the scientific agenda for one of the country’s premier scientific institutions. Along the way he opened himself to the world beyond the lab. He was recruited at an early age by the Institute for Defense Analyses, a nonprofit group with Pentagon connections, for what he calls “national security summer camp: meeting generals and people in congress, touring installations, getting out on battleships.” The federal government sought “engagement” with the country’s rising scientist elite. It worked. He joined and eventually chaired JASON, an elite private group that provides classified and unclassified advisory analysis to federal agencies. (The name isn’t an acronym and comes from a character in Greek mythology.) He got involved in the cold-fusion controversy. He arbitrated a debate between private and government teams competing to map the human genome on whether the target error rate should be 1 in 10,000 or whether 1 in 100 was good enough. He began planting seeds as an institutionalist. He joined the oil giant BP as chief scientist, working for John Browne, now Baron Browne of Madingley, who had redubbed the company “Beyond Petroleum.” Using $500 million of BP’s money, Mr. Koonin created the Energy Biosciences Institute at Berkeley that’s still going strong. Mr. Koonin found his interest in climate science growing, “first of all because it’s wonderful science. It’s the most multidisciplinary thing I know. It goes from the isotopic composition of microfossils in the sea floor all the way through to the regulation of power plants.” From deeply examining the world’s energy system, he also became convinced that the real climate crisis was a crisis of political and scientific candor. He went to his boss and said, “John, the world isn’t going to be able to reduce emissions enough to make much difference.” Mr. Koonin still has a lot of Brooklyn in him: a robust laugh, a gift for expression and for cutting to the heart of any matter. His thoughts seem to be governed by an all-embracing realism. Hence the book coming out next month, “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.” Any reader would benefit from its deft, lucid tour of climate science, the best I’ve seen. His rigorous parsing of the evidence will have you questioning the political class’s compulsion to manufacture certainty where certainty doesn’t exist. You will come to doubt the usefulness of centurylong forecasts claiming to know how 1% shifts in variables will affect a global climate that we don’t understand with anything resembling 1% precision. His book lands at crucial moment. In its first new assessment of climate science in eight years, the U.N. climate panel—sharer of Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize in 2007—will rule anew next year on a conundrum that has not advanced in 40 years: How much warming should we expect from a slightly enhanced greenhouse effect? The panel is expected to consult 40-plus climate computer simulations—testament to its inability to pick out a single trusted one. Worse, the models have been diverging, not coming together as you might hope. Without tweaking, they don’t even agree on current simulated global average surface temperature—varying by 3 degrees Celsius, three times the observed change over the past century. (If you wonder why the IPCC expresses itself in terms of a temperature “anomaly” above a baseline, it’s because the models produce different baselines.) Mr. Koonin is a practitioner and fan of computer modeling. “There are situations where models do a wonderful job. Nuclear weapons, when we model them because we don’t test them anymore. And when Boeing builds an airplane, they will model the heck out of it before they bend any metal.” “But these are much more controlled, engineered situations,” he adds, “whereas the climate is a natural phenomenon. It’s going to do whatever it’s going to do. And it’s hard to observe. You need long, precise observations to understand its natural variability and how it responds to external influences.” Yet these models supply most of our insight into how the weather might change when emissions raise the atmosphere’s CO2 component from 0.028% in preindustrial times to 0.056% later in this century. “I’ve been building models and watching others build models for 45 years,” he says. Climate models “are not to the standard you would trust your life to or even your trillions of dollars to.” Younger scientists in particular lose sight of the difference between reality and simulation: “They have grown up with the models. They don’t have the kind of mathematical or physical intuition you get when you have to do things by pencil and paper.” All this you can hear from climate modelers themselves, and from scientists nearer the “consensus” than Mr. Koonin is. Yet the caveats seem to fall away when plans to spend trillions of dollars are bruited. For the record, Mr. Koonin agrees that the world has warmed by 1 degree Celsius since 1900 and will warm by another degree this century, placing him near the middle of the consensus. Neither he nor most economic studies have seen anything in the offing that would justify the rapid and wholesale abandoning of fossil fuels, even if China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and others could be dissuaded from pursuing prosperity. He’s a fan of advanced nuclear power eventually to provide carbon free base-load power. He sees a bright future for electric passenger vehicles. “The main reason isn’t emissions. They’re just shifted to the power grid, and transportation anyway is only about 15% of global greenhouse-gas emissions. There are other advantages: Local pollution is much less and noise pollution is less. You’re sitting in a traffic jam and all of these six- or four-cylinder engines are throbbing up and down burning fuel and just doing no good at all.” But these are changes it makes no economic sense to force. Let technology and markets work at their own pace. The climate might continue to change, at a pace that’s hard to perceive, but societies will adapt. “As a species, we’re very good at adapting.” more
Not subscribing, but the article seems to be about the extreme events not having much relation to global warming (which I've heard scientists talk about this before). That stated, emissions is still a big problem, seems just not an "end-of-the-world in a 100 years" problem, but more of an "end-of-the-world in 300 years" problem at this pace? This article needs no subscription: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00177-3
Physic, Energy. Not much in climate. "In 2004, Koonin joined BP as their Chief Scientist where he was responsible for guiding the company’s long-range technology strategy, particularly in alternative and renewable energy sources" "The Trump administration proposed creating "red team" exercises in the EPA to challenge the scientific consensus on climate. Koonin was proposed to be involved in these exercises.[13]" "The Trump administration proposed to create a presidential committee in 2019 that would conduct an "adversarial" review of the scientific consensus on climate change. Koonin was actively involved in recruiting others to be part of this review.[14]" Steven E. Koonin | Department of Energy Steven E. Koonin - Wikipedia
2014: Climate Science Is Not Settled - WSJ Climate Science Is Not Settled We are very far from the knowledge needed to make good climate policy, writes leading scientist Steven E. Koonin
I'm not behind the paywall so can't read the whole article but will note in the portion that is free this was inlcuded: "Nor is the crucial question whether humans are influencing the climate. That is no hoax: There is little doubt in the scientific community that continually growing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, due largely to carbon-dioxide emissions from the conventional use of fossil fuels, are influencing the climate. There is also little doubt that the carbon dioxide will persist in the atmosphere for several centuries. The impact today of human activity appears to be comparable to the intrinsic, natural variability of the climate system itself." This is a basic issue between understanding science and policy. The science is overwhelmingly clear that humans are affecting the climate. The issue is the policy. Here we can decide whether we just want to gamble that things aren't going to be as bad as many of the predictions indicate or prepare for the possibility that they might be that bad. Another issue in all this is that addressing Climate Change doesn't solely affect Climate Change. As many point out there are negative economic consequences in the short term but consider the long term. Even CO2, Methane and other manmade emissions had no affect on the climate addressing those provides us with more energy from inexhaustible sources. It provides energy generation that can be generated virtually anywhere so energy is no longer a geo political issue. Improvements in efficiency reduce the amount of cost spent on energy. Those benefits alone justify moving away from fossil fuels.
I don't know his position that much, but I can guess where he's coming from because frankly, every one of the Scientists that want to get into policies and advocate for "wait and see" that I have read is coming from the same angle. Yes, there is 100% consensus on climate change, CO2, and all that stuff. But climate is complex and there is uncertainty. This is all true. When you step out of your house today, there is uncertainty if you will come back. You can't predict events due to the complex nature of things that can happen, but you sure can do certain things to increase your chances to come back. Advocates of "pause and wait" do not believe in doing anything or doing very small things because of uncertainty. Now, as I said many times about this topic, there is enough data to nitpick until you can sell your story. Maybe he's not one of those, but I wouldn't be surprised if he is going to do that in his new "unsettled" book coming up in May.
The problem with stuff like this is that most people don't understand risk assessment. Yes the models are very complex and as we all know accurate prediction of even the weather is essentially impossible. What it is is about probabilities and the vast majority of probabilities point to things being bad. They might not but is that really a gamble that people want to take from the policy side?
conclusion to above: The public now believes CO2 is something that can be turned up and down, but about 40% of the CO2 emitted a century ago remains in the atmosphere. Any warming it causes emerges slowly, so any benefit of reducing emissions would be small and distant. Everything Mr. Koonin and others see in the science suggests a slow, modest effect, not a runaway warming. If they’re wrong, we don’t have tools to apply yet anyway. Decades from now, we might have carbon capture—removing CO2 directly from the atmosphere at a manageable cost. He’s less keen, except in the most extreme circumstances, on what many see as the cheaper, easier fix of augmenting the aerosol effect, which already partially offsets the warming caused by greenhouse gases, by injecting particles into the upper atmosphere. The political and practical unknowns are large. “You could have some country or even some individual do it. The policy community is just starting to grapple with that.” Mr. Koonin does not drive an electric car. He drives what he jokes is the official car of Putnam County, a Subaru Outback, while he and his wife weather the pandemic in a woodsy enclave along the Hudson River. An Audi meant to haul them and the dog back to New York City, where he started and ran New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, collects dust. Mr. Koonin says he wants voters, politicians and business leaders to have an accurate account of the science. He doesn’t care where the debate lands. Yet his expectations are ruled by a keen sense of realities. I mention, along with some names, that I never met anyone of serious judgment who didn’t privately pooh-pooh the idea that humanity will control CO2 by means other than the mostly unregulated progress of markets and technology. Mr. Koonin nods his agreement. He speaks of “could,” “should” and “will”—and what “will” happen is a lot less than elites, in response to current reward structures, are pretending will happen. Even John Kerry, Joe Biden’s climate czar, recently admitted that Mr. Biden’s “net-zero” climate plan will have zero effect on the climate if developing countries don’t go along (and they have little incentive to do so). Mr. Koonin hopes that “a graceful out for everybody” will be to see the impulse for global climate regulation “morph into much more impactful local environmental action: smog, plastic, green jobs. Forget the global aspect of this.” This is a view widely shared and little expressed. First, the mainstream climate community will try to ignore his book, even as his publicists work the TV bookers in hopes of making a splash. Then Mr. Koonin knows will come the avalanche of name-calling that befalls anybody trying to inject some practical nuance into political discussions of climate. He adds with a laugh: “My married daughter is happy that she’s got a different last name.” Mr. Jenkins writes the Journal’s Business World column.
5 ley takeaways from this conclusion - Not really an emergency The private market will take care of it America gov shouldn't bother to lower emissions F*ck the world, Murica 1st The science community on climate thinks he's a clown
the problem with the spin that this is propaganda is that the "propaganda" is true and the points it makes still salient. It's not that model will predict the future with 95% accuracy 50 years down the road, it's that the models from 20 years ago have been accurately predicting the present state of affairs - or in reality - underestimated the impact. global warming predicted back in the 1980's the the high temperatures would not be the ones that would be increasing, it would be the low temperatures. this is the source of the crisis. co2 greenhouse effect doesn't happen during the day, it happens at night, when the warmed ground radiates heat in the form of infrared radiation that gets reflected back by c02 warming certain layers of the atmosphere and thus raising lows. the results of small changes in average global temperature are not small unfortunately. the problem with letting the markets solve this coming crisis is that the markets are not moving fast enough to slow the crisis. if aliens attackeds the earth you would let business figure out how to profitably fight back. the markets are not in charge of disaster relief. the markets are not incentivized to serve nations or humanity, they serve themselves which creates a benefit but not a benefit that is a cureall. something must be done. no one wants to put the world into a global depression, but that's exactly what will happen if solutions are not taken soon. we are not tackling this crisis, and there is little leadership or political will to build things like nuclear power plants that could give us more time. the pace of climate change is alarming right now.
