Unsettled Quotes

“... the most likely societal response will be to adapt to a changing climate, and that adaptation will very likely be effective.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“I believe the socio-technical obstacles to reducing CO2 emissions make it likely that human influences on the climate will not be stabilized, let alone reduced, in this century. If the effects of those influences become more evident and more severe than they have been to date, of course, the balance of costs and benefits might shift, and society might well shift along with it. But I’d be surprised if this happened anytime soon.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“It is well within the capabilities of current technology to create a stratospheric haze via any of a number of methods, including additives to jet fuel or artillery shells that disperse the gas hydrogen sulfide (H2S, which smells like rotten eggs) at high altitude. This would not be a onetime exercise: the haze would have to be refreshed constantly, as the particles settle out over a year or two. The amount of sulfur that would have to be added to the stratosphere each year would be only about one-tenth of that humans currently emit at much lower altitudes, so direct health impacts would be minimal. And projected costs are low enough that a small nation or even a single wealthy individual could carry out the entire project themselves.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“Humans have been inadvertently increasing the earth’s albedo for almost two centuries, as the burning of sulphur-laden coal produces tiny particles (aerosols) in the lower atmosphere that enhance the planet’s reflectivity. One of my first calculations upon joining BP in 2004 had to do with that aerosol cooling. The company was embarking on a campaign to brand natural gas as “a bridge to a low-carbon future,” as it produces only half as much carbon dioxide per unit of energy as coal. However, I 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.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“2011, I led the Department of Energy’s Quadrennial Technology Review to develop strategies for government support of emerging clean energy technologies. In one town hall meeting, I faced advocates for four different vehicle technologies—internal combustion engines powered by biofuels, compressed natural gas, hydrogen-powered fuel cells, and battery-powered plug-ins. Each of them believed that their technology was the optimal vision for the future, and that all the government had to do was support the development of the appropriate fueling infrastructure. When I reminded them that the country could probably deploy no more than two new fueling technologies at scale, a squabble ensued. There are several reasons I believe that electricity will fuel the passenger vehicles of the future, but one of them is that the existing electrical grid is a good start on the fueling infrastructure. If a widespread transition to plug-in electric cars does come about, systems thinking will be even more important as the electrical and transportation systems would have to work together to accommodate charging millions of vehicles.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“the three major sectors (electricity, transportation, and industry) all produce comparable emissions. But they’d be affected very differently by an economy-wide carbon price. For example, coal fueled about one-quarter of US electricity in 2019, and each metric ton of that coal was sold for about $39.7 A carbon price of $40 for each ton of CO2 emitted would effectively double that cost to power plant operators and so be a strong inducement for them to forswear coal. In contrast, that same carbon price would increase the effective price of crude oil by only about 40 percent above $60 per barrel. And if that cost were passed through to the pump, gasoline would increase by only some $0.35 per gallon. Since that’s small compared to how much pump prices have varied historically, consumers wouldn’t have much incentive to move away from gasoline. So reductions in emissions from power (and, as it turns out, heat) are much easier to encourage than reductions from transportation, fundamentally because oil packs a lot more energy per carbon atom than does coal.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“if nothing changed except that India’s per capita emissions grew to be equal to those today of, say, Japan—one of the lowest emitting of the developed countries—global emissions would increase by more than 25 percent”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“According to the IPCC, just stabilizing human influences on the climate would require global annual per capita emissions of CO2 to fall to less than one ton by 2075, a level comparable to today’s emissions from such countries as Haiti, Yemen, and Malawi. For comparison, 2015 annual per capita emissions from the United States, Europe, and China were, respectively, about 17, 7, and 6 tons. •​Energy demand increases strongly and universally with rising economic activity and quality of life; global demand is expected to grow by about 50 percent through midcentury as most of the world’s people improve their lot. •​Fossil fuels supply 80 percent of the world’s energy today and remain the most reliable and convenient means of meeting growing energy demand. •​The energy-supply infrastructure of electric generating plants, transmission lines, refineries, and pipelines changes slowly for unavoidable structural reasons. •​Developed countries would certainly have to reduce their emissions, but even if those were to halve, and per capita emissions of the developing world grew only to those of today’s lower-emitting developed countries, annual global emissions would still increase by midcentury. •​The tension between emissions reductions and economic development is complicated by uncertainties in how the climate will change under human and natural influences and how those changes will affect natural and human systems.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“was increasingly convinced that The Science needed a Red Team exercise, a concept I’d already been refining for a few years. In such an exercise, a group of scientists (the “Red Team”) would be charged with rigorously questioning one of the assessment reports, trying to identify and evaluate its weak spots. In essence, a qualified adversarial group would be asked “What’s wrong with this argument?” And, of course, the “Blue Team” (presumably the report’s authors) would have the opportunity to rebut the Red Team’s findings. Red Team exercises are commonly used to inform high-consequence decisions such as testing national intelligence findings or validating complex engineering projects like aircraft or spacecraft; they’re also common in cybersecurity.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“So for the past three decades, sea level has been going up by about 3 mm (0.12 inches) each year—higher than the overall average rate (1.8 mm or 0.07 inches per year) since 1880.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“Sophisticated satellite sensors first began monitoring wildfires globally in 1998. Unexpectedly, analysis of the images showed that the area burned annually declined by about 25 percent from 1998 to 2015.29”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The AR5 says pretty much the same thing for the globe as a whole, expressing—no doubt to the surprise of many—“low confidence in a global-scale trend in drought or dryness since the middle of the 20th century.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“Indeed, as the CSSR notes, there is a pronounced decline in snow cover during the spring (and also, to some extent, in summer) as would be expected in a warming globe—especially one in which low temperatures are increasing, as discussed in Chapter 5—while snow cover during the fall and winter has been increasing modestly.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“Precipitation is also expected to become “lumpier,” with dry areas becoming drier and wet areas wetter with more periods of intense rainfall. This could lead to an increase in flooding in some areas, but since higher temperatures would also increase evaporation from land, droughts might also increase. There is little consensus among models about exactly how, where, and when these changes would play out.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The driest place on Earth is in South America, on the northern edge of the Chilean Atacama Desert: Arica, which averages 0.6 mm (0.02 inches) of rain each year. The wettest is Mawsynram, India, which averages 11,871 mm (467 inches).”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“the average annual precipitation over the globe is 980 mm (38.6 inches) of water—”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The sun’s energy moves water among these various reservoirs to form what’s termed “the hydrological cycle.” The largest and most dynamic part of this cycle is the flow of water from the earth’s surface into the atmosphere (85 percent of this flow comes from evaporation of the ocean, the other 15 percent from the land, much of it transpired by plants). That water remains aloft for an average of ten days before condensing and falling back to the surface as rain or snow (77 percent falling on the ocean and 23 percent on the land).”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The amount of water on the earth is essentially fixed. Almost all of it (some 97 percent) is in the oceans, and almost all of the rest is on the land—in ice and snow (especially the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets), in lakes and rivers, and in groundwater. But as we saw in Chapter 2, the one hundred-thousandth of the earth’s water that resides in its atmosphere plays a central role in climate—water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas, and clouds account for most of the earth’s albedo.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“weather and climate are not at all the same thing. 1 The relationships between the two are complicated, especially for weather phenomena related to precipitation, otherwise known as rain and snow. For example, though it may seem counterintuitive, rising temperatures can indeed lead to more snow—for instance, if a rise in low temperatures keeps the Arctic Ocean from freezing in winter, more water will evaporate into the atmosphere.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“We can correct for the past observation bias against counting weak storms by looking only at storms in category EF1 and stronger (those most likely to cause destruction). This gives us the two graphs in Figure 6.6. The upper graph, an annual count of US tornadoes strength EF1 or greater, shows no trend over the past sixty years, although there is a hint of a forty-year cycle. The lower graph looks at only the strongest tornadoes (EF3 or above) and shows that their number decreased by about 40 percent during the sixty years following 1954. In other words, as human influences have grown since the middle of the twentieth century, the number of significant tornadoes hasn’t changed much at all, but the strongest storms have become less frequent.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“Today, weather radar can detect even very weak tornadoes from distances of more than 160 km (100 miles). Before radar was widely deployed, however, weak tornadoes didn’t always make it into the record. While strong tornadoes leave an evident trail of destruction, weaker tornadoes can come and go without a trace, particularly in sparsely populated areas. To see if there’s been a real change in the number of tornadoes over the past seventy years, we’ve got to correct for the observing bias in favor of strong storms early in the record.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The fact is that, while it is not unreasonable to think that warming might indeed lead to some kind of change in hurricane activity at some point, right now there simply isn’t evidence that this is happening. Yes, economic damages from hurricanes are increasing, but that’s because there are more people and more valuable infrastructure near the coasts, not because storm characteristics are changing long-term.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“There are about forty-eight hurricanes each year across the globe. Two-thirds of them are in the Northern Hemisphere (where hurricane season is June though November) and one-third is in the South (where the season is November through May). In round numbers, about 60 percent are in the Pacific, 30 percent in the Indian Ocean, and 10 percent in the North Atlantic; they are very rare in the South Atlantic.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The lower the eye pressure, the stronger the winds surrounding it. A hurricane has winds greater than 119 km (74 miles) per hour; if weaker, it’s called a tropical storm and, weaker still, a tropical depression.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“I quickly understood that there’s a big problem with running records—they tend to become less frequent as the years go on because each new record “raises the bar” and makes it more difficult to achieve a subsequent record.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“Cloud-aerosol interactions are on the bleeding edge of our comprehension of how the climate system works, and it’s a challenge to model what we don’t understand. These modelers are pushing the boundaries of human understanding, and I am hopeful that this uncertainty will motivate new science.29 In other words, we don’t really understand an influence on the climate system that’s about the same size as the human-caused warming influence.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“So in 2014, we were no more certain of how sensitive the climate is than we were in 1979.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“A common measure of how the climate system responds to human influences, and an important piece of information we hope to learn from models, is the equilibrium climate sensitivity, or ECS. That’s how much the average surface temperature anomaly (recall that the anomaly is the deviation from the expected average) would increase if the CO2 concentration were hypothetically doubled from its preindustrial value of 280 ppm. If emissions continue at their current pace and the carbon cycle doesn’t change much, that doubling would happen in the real world toward the end of this century. The higher the ECS (i.e., the larger the predicted temperature increase), the more sensitive the climate is to human influences (or at least to increased CO2”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

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

“spread of the CMIP5 ensemble in the years after 1960 is larger than that of the models in CMIP3—in other words, the later generation of models is actually more uncertain than the earlier one. So here is a real surprise: even as the models became more sophisticated—including finer grids, fancier subgrid parametrizations, and so on—the uncertainty increased rather than decreased.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters