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

by Steven E. Koonin

led him to describe the “Gell-Mann Amnesia” effect: You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business . . . In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

As a scientist, I’m disappointed that so many individuals and organizations in the scientific community are demonstrably misrepresenting the science in an effort to persuade rather than inform. But you also should be concerned as a citizen. In a democracy, voters will ultimately decide how society responds to a changing climate. Major decisions made without full knowledge of what the science says (and doesn’t say) or, even worse, on the basis of misinformation, are much less likely to lead to positive outcomes. COVID-19 offered a sobering illustration of this, and it’s as true for climate and energy as it is for pandemics.

In early 2017, it had been three years since the American Physical Society workshop that opened my eyes to problems with “The Science.”

(Note that the use of “Red” and “Blue” is traditional in the military, where these exercises originated; it has nothing to do with US politics.)

The processes for drafting and reviewing the climate science assessment reports do not promote objectivity. Government officials from scientific and environmental agencies (who might themselves have a point of view) nominate or choose the authors, who are not subject to conflict of interest constraints. That is, an author might work for a fossil fuel company or for an NGO promoting “climate action.” This increases the chances of persuasion being favored over information.

Their essential point was that a Red Team exercise was superfluous since climate research, and the assessment reports, were already peer reviewed.

if the idea is to have the red team poke holes in the mainstream scientific community’s (the blue team) consensus on climate change, it discounts that such challenges have already been applied thousands of times while that consensus was gradually developed.

Some proponents may believe, naively, that such a rag-tag process could unearth flaws in mainstream climate science that the rigorous, decades-long scrutiny of the global climate-science community, through multiple layers of formal and informal expert peer review, has somehow missed.

It’s telling that neither article addressed the NCA2014 misrepresentation of hurricane data that I had highlighted nor explained how it had survived the “decades-long scrutiny” of “multiple layers of formal and informal expert peer review.”

On March 7, 2019, Senator Schumer (together with Senators Carper, Reed, Van Hollen, White-house, Markey, Schatz, Smith, Blumenthal, Shaheen, Booker, Stabenow, Klobuchar, Hassan, Merkley, and Feinstein) introduced Senate bill S.729 . . . 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.

Although the bill never went anywhere, and it certainly wasn’t the first time Congress has attempted to stop an administration from doing something, I confess to being shocked—an “effort to challenge the scientific consensus” could easily include many climate science research studies, and enshrining a certain scientific viewpoint as an inviolable consensus is hardly the role of government (at least in a democracy).

Any appeal to the alleged “97 percent consensus” among scientists is another red flag. The study that produced that number has been convincingly debunked.8 And in any event, nobody has ever specified exactly what those 97 percent of scientists are supposed to be agreed upon. That the climate is changing? Sure, count me in! That humans are influencing the climate? Absolutely, I’m there! That we’re already seeing disastrous weather impacts and face an even more catastrophic future? Not at all obvious (for reasons I hope you understand, having read this far).

These barriers, combined with the uncertainty and vague nature of future climate impacts, mean that the most likely societal response will be to adapt to a changing climate, and that adaptation will very likely be effective.

I had been out of the government for four years in December 2015 when politicians and activists from 194 countries came together in Paris and agreed to limit human influences on the climate sufficiently to keep the global temperature from rising more than 2ºC (3.6ºF).

A third assumption is that warming of 1.5ºC or 2.0ºC will be net detrimental. In fact, many analyses suggest that a warming of less than 2ºC is likely to have a small net positive economic impact, thanks to improved agricultural conditions and reduced heating costs in the temperate northern latitudes.

Some dozen years before 1.5ºC became fashionable, I had a chat with Schellnhuber during which I asked him, “Why 2ºC and not 1.5 or 2.5 or whatever?” His response was something like “2ºC is about right, and it’s an easy number for politicians to remember.” Evidently, politicians’ memories have improved during the last decade.

Each of the assumptions in the Obama White House statement is dubious, if not just plain wrong, at least according to the science presented in the assessment reports and discussed in Part I of this book.

And under current trends, every 10 percent reduction that the developed world makes in its emissions (a reduction it has barely managed in fifteen years) will offset less than four years of growth in the developing world.

Progress under the agreement is being reviewed every five years (beginning in 2020), with each country self-reporting its accomplishments. The phrase “self-reporting” likely raised your eyebrows on its own, but the agreement also has no enforcement mechanism and is nonbinding—as the Trump administration demonstrated in November 2020, when it withdrew the US, and the Biden Administration demonstrated again by initiating the process to rejoin as one of its first official acts in January 2021.

That is, to zero out the emissions associated with their personal behaviors. Air travel, large homes (and surely second homes), and meat would all be verboten.

For instance, you may be surprised to hear that the amount of energy provided by wood (by far the leading energy source for most of the nineteenth century) is today the same as it was at the time of the Civil War, though other sources of energy have grown enormously since then.

good one is the “hydrogen highway” that California inaugurated in 2004. After sixteen years, just over seven thousand of California’s thirty-five million vehicles run on hydrogen.

It is a bad thing to waste energy. But efficiency is about how well we use energy, not about how much we use—that is conservation.

Together, geoengineering and adaptation constitute the “Plans B.”

quickly estimated, literally on the back of an envelope, that a sizable portion of that CO2 reduction would be negated by the loss of aerosol cooling from the coal. BP management was not pleased when I pointed that out.

And projected costs are low enough that a small nation or even a single wealthy individual could carry out the entire project themselves. As far as I know, the notion that “chemtrails” are evidence of covert geoengineering is entirely unfounded.