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

by Steven E. Koonin

The Science.” We’re all supposed to know what “The Science” says. “The Science,” we’re told, is settled. How many times have you heard it?

Although “tuning” sounds like a minor detail, as in “fine-tuning,” there isn’t anything “fine” or minor about it. It’s the process of adjusting the model to deal with troublesome inconsistencies or paper over irksome uncertainties. And sometimes modelers are tuning subgrid parameters in ways that aren’t based on their “knowledge” of the parameter, but rather are aimed at producing a desired result.

The failure of even the latest models to warm rapidly enough in the early twentieth century suggests that it’s possible, even likely, that internal variability—the natural ebbs and flows of the climate system—has contributed significantly to the warming of recent decades.20 That the models can’t reproduce the past is a big red flag—it erodes confidence in their projections of future climates. In particular, it greatly complicates sorting out the relative roles of natural variability and human influences in the warming that has occurred since 1980.

It’s clear that media, politicians, and often the assessment reports themselves blatantly misrepresent what the science says about climate and catastrophes. Those failures indict the scientists who write and too-casually review the reports, the reporters who uncritically repeat them, the editors who allow that to happen, the activists and their organizations who fan the fires of alarm, and the experts whose public silence endorses the deception. The constant repetition of these and many other climate fallacies turns them into accepted “truths.”

In the years since, US media outlets have developed more explicit and more differentiated points of view themselves, and those have likewise seeped from their editorial pieces into their reporting. Most notably, as the age of the internet advanced, headlines became more provocative to encourage clicks—even when the article itself didn’t support the provocation. Today, the shift toward the alarming—and shareable—has traveled well beyond the headlines. That’s especially true in climate and energy matters.

H. L. Mencken’s 1918 book In Defense of Women noted: The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.2

Anyone referring to a scientist with the pejoratives “denier” or “alarmist” is engaging in politics or propaganda. And using the term “climate change” without distinguishing between natural and human causes signals a (perhaps deliberate) sloppiness in thinking. Many an article that purports to be about how humans have broken the climate (or how we must reduce our emissions to “fix” it) is nevertheless filled with examples of climate trends that are not attributable to (or fixable by) humans.