Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

by Steven E. Koonin

Even given the need for brevity, this is a misleadingly incomplete and imprecise accounting of the state of climate science. It conflates human-caused warming with the changing climate in general, erroneously implying that human influences are solely responsible for these changes. It invokes “certain extreme events” while omitting the fact that most types (including those that pop most readily to mind when one reads the phrase “extreme events,” like hurricanes) show no significant trend at all. And it states that “sea level is rising” in a way that not only suggests that this, too, is solely attributable to human-caused warming, but elides the fact that the rise is nothing new.