Unsettled Quotes

“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”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“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.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“Projections of future climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for the purpose.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The bottom line is that the science says that most extreme weather events show no long-term trends that can be attributed to human influences on the climate.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“the land is warming more rapidly than the ocean surface, and the high latitudes near the poles are warming faster than the lower latitudes near the equator. More generally, the coldest temperatures (at night, during the winter, and so on) are rising more rapidly than the warmest temperatures—the climate is getting milder as the globe is getting warmer.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“I would have offered a somewhat different statement, based upon my familiarity with the assessment reports and literature: The earth has warmed during the past century, partly because of natural phenomena and partly in response to growing human influences. These human influences (most importantly the accumulation of CO2 from burning fossil fuels) exert a physically small effect on the complex climate system. Unfortunately, our limited observations and understanding are insufficient to usefully quantify either how the climate will respond to human influences or how it varies naturally. However, even as human influences have increased almost fivefold since 1950 and the globe has warmed modestly, most severe weather phenomena remain within past variability. Projections of future climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for the purpose.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“This is not new. 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.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“There are many ways we might further enhance the albedo, including brightening the land surface with “white roofs” on buildings, engineering crops to be more reflective, brightening the ocean with microbubbles on the surface, and putting up giant reflectors in space, to name a handful. However, creating aerosols in the stratosphere might be the most plausible way to make a significant global impact. The haze in the stratosphere that occurs naturally after major volcanic eruptions demonstrably cools the planet for a few years as the haze particles settle out.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The could question is very different from the question of “What should we do?” Any discussion of how the world should respond to a changing climate is best informed by scientific certainties and uncertainties. But it’s ultimately a discussion of values—one that weighs development, environment, and intergenerational and geographical equities in light of imperfect projections of future climates. And the could and should questions are different still from asking “What will we do?” Answering that involves assessing the realities of politics, economics, and technology development. Indeed, the simple truth is that there are many things the world could do and perhaps even should do—such as eliminating poverty—but which it will not do for various reasons. Importantly, making a judgment about will is not at all the same as stating an opinion about should.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“More bluntly, they’re saying that we’ve no idea what causes this failure of the models. They cannot tell us why the climate changed during those decades. And that’s deeply unsettling, because the observed early twentieth-century warming is comparable to the observed late twentieth-century warming, which the assessment reports attribute with “high confidence” to human influences.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The implication is that the models generally agree. But that isn’t at all the case. Comparisons among models within any of these ensembles show that, on the scales required to measure the climate’s response to human influences, model results differ dramatically both from each other and from observations. But you wouldn’t know that unless you read deep into the IPCC report. Only then would you discover that the results being presented are “averaging” models that disagree wildly with each other.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The world’s oceans are both the most important and the most problematic piece of the earth’s climate system. They hold more than 90 percent of the climate’s heat and are its long-term memory. Conditions in the atmosphere swing wildly from day to day and year to year in response to any number of influences—that’s part of what makes untangling weather and climate so difficult. The oceans, on the other hand, change—and respond to changes—over decades to centuries.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“human influences on the climate were negligible prior to 1900. There weren’t many people around in 1900 (only one-fifth of today’s count), and they were mostly farming; industrialization was just getting underway for most of the globe. Human influences remained quite small as late as 1950, when they were less than one-quarter of what they are today. Variations in the climate before 1950, then, show that other phenomena must have been at play, if not dominant, since the earth actually cooled a bit between 1940 and 1980 even as warming human influences grew.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“climate is not the weather—a distinction often missing in popular discussion. The weather anywhere varies constantly in ways both predictable and unexpected—through the day (it’s usually warmer at 4 pm than it is at 4 am), across days (as when a front passes through), with the seasons, and from year to year. On the other hand, a location’s climate is the average of its weather over decades. In fact, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization defines climate as a thirty-year average, although climate researchers will sometimes discuss averages over a period as short as ten years. So changes in the weather from one year to another do not constitute changes in climate.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The process of science is less about collecting pieces of knowledge than it is about reducing the uncertainties in what we know.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“There should be no question about “what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.” It is the height of hubris for a scientist even to consider deliberately misinforming policy discussions in service of what they believe to be ethical. This would seem obvious in other contexts: imagine the outcry if it were discovered that scientists were misrepresenting data on birth control because of their religious beliefs, for instance”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The right to search for truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true.” As”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“Fifteen years ago, when I was in the private sector, I learned to say that the goal of stabilizing human influences on the climate was “a challenge,” while in government it was talked about as “an opportunity.” Now back in academia, I can more forthrightly call it what it is: “a practical impossibility,” as I’ll discuss in this book’s Part II.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“reflectivity”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“insulation provided by the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which raises our planet’s surface temperature to its observed value. How that insulation”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“Today, TV weather presenters have morphed into climate and weather presenters, blaming a “broken climate” for many of the severe weather events that they cover. Indeed, it has become de rigueur for the media, politicians, and even some scientists to implicate human influences as the cause of heat waves, droughts, floods, storms, and whatever else the public fears. It’s a pretty easy sell: the on-the-scene reporting is powerful—and often moving—and our poor memories of past events can make “unprecedented” quite convincing. But the science tells a different story. Observations extending back over a century indicate that most types of extreme weather events don’t show any significant change—and some such events have actually become less common or severe—even as human influences on the climate grow. In general, there are high levels of uncertainty involved in detecting trends in extreme weather. Here are some (perhaps surprising) summary statements from the IPCC’s AR5 WGI report, indicating what we know (or don’t know) about a few such trends: •​“. . . low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale.”1 •​“. . . low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the middle of the 20th century . . .”2 •​“. . . low confidence in trends in small-scale severe weather phenomena such as hail and thunderstorms . . .”3 •​“. . . confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones [storms] since 1900 is low.”4”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“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.18”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.14”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“Physicists generally expect changes to be commensurate—a 1 percent change in heat interception should produce something like a 1 percent change in temperature—and when they’re not, it’s a sign that we’re missing a piece of the puzzle.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“If you’ve followed this far, you might be puzzled by two things. First, how could changing fewer than three molecules out of 10,000, a 0.03 percent change, increase the atmosphere’s heat-intercepting ability by about thirty times that amount (1 percent)? And second, how could a mere 1 percent increase in heat-intercepting ability be such a big deal?”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“As we discussed, that cooling becomes stronger as the temperature increases—if the earth gets hotter, it emits more heat—making it a kind of thermostat.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“Leo Tolstoy’s 1894 philosophical treatise The Kingdom of God Is Within You contains the following thought: The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“But scientists are trained to explore all possible solutions to a problem, and an important part of science advising is to lay out the full spectrum of options, along with the advantages and drawbacks of each.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters