Unsettled Quotes

“Just like that cold weather gear, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere intercept and impede the flow of infrared heat from the earth’s surface into space. Some of that heat finds its way back down to the surface, where it causes additional warming”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“Knowing the earth’s albedo (as averaged over the globe and daily and seasonal cycles), we can determine its equilibrium temperature by balancing the sunlight absorbed against the infrared cooling. 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

“eventually we were able to determine annual average albedos accurate to ± 0.003 from 1999 to 2014 that showed no significant trend, in agreement with the satellite values.5 That uncertainty is about twice that of the satellite-derived values, but at one-thousandth the cost.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The French astronomer André Danjon first measured the earth’s albedo in the early 1930s. His very clever method was to observe “earthshine,” the faint glow of the “dark” part of the lunar disk most visible when the moon is less than half-full, as shown in Figure 2.1. As that light stems from sunlight reflected by the earth and then reflected again by the lunar surface, its brightness depends upon the earth’s reflectivity, and so is a measure of the global albedo.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“If the average albedo were to increase from 0.30 to 0.31, say because of a 5 percent increase in cloudiness, that additional reflectivity would largely compensate for the warming influence of doubling the atmosphere’s CO2”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“Because the earth is not completely black, it absorbs only 70 percent of the sunlight that reaches it; the other 30 percent is reflected back into space and doesn’t contribute to the planet’s warming. That 30 percent number, corresponding to the earth’s reflectivity, is called the “albedo” (from the Latin word albus, meaning “white”). When the albedo is higher, the earth reflects more sunlight and so is a bit cooler, and conversely when the albedo is lower, the earth absorbs more sunlight and is warmer. While the planet’s average albedo is 0.30, its value at any given moment depends upon which part of the earth is facing the sun (oceans are darker, land is brighter, clouds are brighter still, and snow or ice is very bright),”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“fundamental physical law—the Stefan-Boltzmann law—discovered around 1880 by two physicists working in Austria tells us that the amount of infrared radiation an object emits increases with its temperature in a very predictable way. So as a planet’s temperature rises due to solar warming, the cooling by infrared radiation also increases until the infrared cooling is equal to the solar warming. The technical term for this Goldilocks condition—where the planet is neither gaining nor losing energy and its temperature is steady—is “radiative equilibrium.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“the earth’s temperature results from a crucial balance between warming by sunlight and cooling by heat radiated back out into space. On the warming side of this balance is the sunlight energy that the planet absorbs. As the planet heats up, it emits infrared radiation back into space, which makes up the cooling side of the balance.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change defines “climate change” as: . . . a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods . . .7 That definition explicitly excludes changes due to natural causes, which differs from the plain-language meaning of the term. So when the average person hears “climate change” (as in the commonly shouted credo Climate change is real!), they are likely to assume it means change we are responsible for.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“An aphorism traceable to 1901 captures it well: Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“the annual average temperature in, say, New York City (about 13°C or 55°F) can vary from year to year by more than 2°C (3.6°F), greater than the entire range of the graph.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“Those same three issues—influence, response, and impact—form the core questions of climate science: •​How have humans influenced the climate—and how will those influences change in the future? •​How does the climate respond to human (and natural) influences? •​How will the climate’s response impact ecosystems and societies?”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.” —TIMOTHY WIRTH, PRESIDENT OF THE UN FOUNDATION”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” —PAUL WATSON, COFOUNDER OF GREENPEACE”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The late Stephen Schneider, a prominent climate researcher, said it explicitly as early as 19897: On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but—which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“Most of the climate researchers I’ve met pursue their work with the objectivity and rigor that are the norm in every field of science. But because the potential impact of a changing climate strikes at human existence itself, the issue understandably engenders passion and emotion.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“beginning in 2004, I spent about a decade turning those same methods to the subject of climate and its implications for energy technologies. I did this first as chief scientist for the oil company BP, where I focused on advancing renewable energy, and then as undersecretary for science in the Obama administration’s Department of Energy, where I helped guide the government’s investments in energy technologies and climate science.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

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

“The public gets their climate information almost exclusively from the media; very few people actually read the assessment summaries, let alone the reports and research papers themselves.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“Humans exert a growing, but physically small, warming influence on the climate. The deficiencies of climate data challenge our ability to untangle the response to human influences from poorly understood natural changes. •​The results from the multitude of climate models disagree with, or even contradict, each other and many kinds of observations. A vague “expert judgment” was sometimes applied to adjust model results and obfuscate shortcomings. •​Government and UN press releases and summaries do not accurately reflect the reports themselves. There was a consensus at the meeting on some important issues, but not at all the strong consensus the media promulgates. Distinguished climate experts (including report authors themselves) are embarrassed by some media portrayals of the science. This was somewhat shocking. •​In short, the science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what effect our actions will have on it.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“An actual “climate denier” would be, say, an antiscience politician who refuses to accept the evidence of the data—quite the opposite of my position.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“As the chair of a highly respected university earth sciences department told me privately, “I agree with pretty much everything you wrote, but I don’t dare say that in public.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters