Listen now (54 min) | My guest this week is NYU physicist Steven Koonin, author of the book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters. As former Under Secretary for Science in Barack Obama’s White House, one might expect that he would hew to progressive narratives about climate change. But he’s emerged as a dissenter against the prevailing consensus that extreme measures must be taken immediately in order to avert global catastrophe.
Steven lost me at the start, with a kind of inductive reasoning that projects human flourishing under rising temperatures in the 20th century with flourishing in the 21st century and beyond under rising temperatures.
So big leaps in reasoning turn out not to be exclusive to the catastrophe prophets. Scientists of all kinds keep doing this and it troubles me. I heard Glen trying to help him out but my trust was too weakened to continue listening.
It is possible to believe that climate change is occurring AND also believe that govt is the least useful vehicle for addressing it. The latter is the part that is counter-intuitive. In govt, we have an institution that can barely manage to efficiently do the things most of us would agree belong in the public sector - infrastructure, the courts, public safety, perhaps schools due to the sheer size of the enterprise. Given this track record of mediocrity, at best, what sane person things elected officials and appointed bureaucrats can magically manage the climate?
The biggest obstacle to mass adoption of global anti-climate change policies is the poor people and developing nations climbing their way up. Good luck convincing them to give up relatively affordable and abundant energy sources for the sake of some future benefit that no one can quantify or empirically document. Then again, the climate cult doesn't care about the poor; the starving masses are the equivalent of collateral damage in a conventional war. But unlike most such wars, the climatists have never defined "victory." No one knows what it looks like, therefore no one would be able to recognize it, therefore the battle continues in perpetuity, which is a hallmark of activism.
The problem is terminology as well. Man cannot "manage" the climate. We can modify or alter our adverse effect on the environment: pollution, deforestation, etc. We can also adapt to climate change as thinking creatures. But as you have pointed out, the best thing we can do as wealthy countries is to enhance the lives of the Third-World countries so that they can adapt and change as well. The people who are worried about where their next meal comes from, or obtaining fresh water are not worried about some future potential climate catastrophe.
"climate science itself is quite difficult for a non-specialist to understand in its details."
Respectfully, I disagree with this, at least in part. The details are tiring and tedious to understand, in the same manner as any other technical specialty, but the difficulty is not encountered with understanding details; it lies in withholding acceptance of unsupported conclusions that are often derived from flawed datasets and spurious correlations.
We are inundated with assertions that are reliant on an empiric accumulation of conclusions, each reliant on various a priori assumptions.
When we review research papers, examining the references will reveal previous research, much of it never having been proven to have an actionable level of probability, and some of it disproven or even retracted. Adjustments to datasets is often arbitrary and reliant on redaction of specific elements that present inconveniently confounding factors.
A fascinating and potentially very useful area of inquiry, climatology, is rife with motivated reasoning and self-interested obscurantism. It is this very deliberate obscurantism that presents the challenge to understanding.
Koonin's treatise is an interesting and well-balanced example of adherence to an honestly-derived precautionary principle.
I will share with you, Glenn, that having observed the environmental movement become overwhelmed and co-opted by a growing climate-oriented industry has been an epiphany. I think that it's been good for me, intellectually, because it has induced a reexamination of the underlying assumptions that have driven my five-plus decades of environmental advocacy.
You, Sir, are vastly more qualified than I to opine on the hubris and arrogance of academics. do YOU think, knowing human nature and academia as you do, that the metastasization of a subject worthy of sober inquiry and serious consideration, into mass hysteria, is warranted?
Politicized, certainly, but more significantly; monetized. This, in and of itself, is unremarkable, but the entire field of research is now subject to perversity of incentive beyond anything we have yet encountered, given the amount of money involved.
it appears to have become a matter of secular faith, complete with megachurches.
You're old enough to remember when a certain televangelist, back in the seventies, became even more notorious than ever, for telling his flock that "Jesus had called him home, unless the faithful donated eight million dollars." I was channel-surfing one day in the eighties, and paused to watch a rebroadcast of that televised "sermon." It was fascinating, in a sad way.
In a similar fashion, the current drumbeat of hysteria that has superseded rational inquiry, is sadly fascinating. When the foundations are shaky, the structural integrity of the entire edifice is, to put it charitably, highly uncertain.
Thanks very much for the interview; it's a pleasure to observe sensible people engaging in an intelligent discussion.
I’m curious, do you have a specific example of this general observation you make? Honestly. I came away from the interview with almost the exact opposite reaction.
"do you have a specific example of this general observation you make?"
A reasonable question, Amy, albeit open-ended because I made several observations.
One observation, "Koonin's treatise is an interesting and well-balanced example of adherence to an honestly-derived precautionary principle," refers to his book, but he makes a poignant observation at 40:45 minutes into the interview; "Both climate and energy are complicated, nuanced subjects." We would do well to keep that fact in mind, every time we are subjected to any and all assertions on those subjects.
On page 31 of "unsettled," Koonin writes "Despite media coverage to the contrary, even a few unusual years do not mean a change in climate." Open almost any newspaper, Amy, and you will read all sorts of "experts say" assertions regarding the climatological significance of the precipitation or localized temperature recordings as of the newspapers' publication date. If you're not encountering such claims, I can provide links to the online versions of those print media, but they are ubiquitous and easily searched.
Another discrete observation I made, " Adjustments to datasets is often arbitrary and reliant on redaction of specific elements that present inconveniently confounding factors," can be considered by reviewing the way that recorded temperatures are used, again in the context of seeking accuracy. This "fact check" discusses the controversial exclusion of certain Australian temperature records:
If you have the time to review the language employed in the above article, you will notice an interesting bit of rhetorical legerdemain, the "straw man" fallacy. Focusing on "wiped from the record," the references in the "fact check" explain why the records in question are "not used."
The explanations are reasonable, and what's interesting to me is that I first encountered an explanation of how "heat island" effects confound the data, in the early writings of Curry and Spencer. Reference to those two highly vilified researchers will result in a wave of ad hominem, which makes Koonin's approach of working with the official data, even more wise and sensible.
"When the foundations are shaky, the structural integrity of the entire edifice is, to put it charitably, highly uncertain" is yet another observation. At 12:54 in the interview, Koonin says "One of the ways in which we can test the models, is to look in the past." Whether we're looking at climate modelling or any other predictive modelling, this is an axiom. If the model doesn't produce results that correlate closely with the past record, any predictive results are suspect.
So.... if we look at the perfectly reasonable criteria for exclusion, we are drawn a bit deeper into the way adjustments are made, and the methods employed in verifying the utility of those adjustments. Remembering the stricture about short-term observations, the proxies used in determining temperatures before any human recording methods were possible, must be examined.
Go back just a decade or two, Amy, and think about the first highly publicized "consensus," the 97% and Mann's infamous "hockey stick" graph. This was foundational and extremely important for independent researchers to verify. When I first encountered it, I was aghast at the implications and eager to see how other researchers could use his datasets as a springboard for further inquiry. This was important data.
I was doomed to disappointment about the verification, but that didn't impede other researchers from citing Mann's conclusions, nor the media from publishing hysterical headlines. One researcher reached a different conclusion, published and was sued by Mann. This, I thought, will help clear things up so we can all move on, but I was dismayed when Mann refused to release his data to the court during discovery, incurring contempt charges. Here's a brief discussion, offered with the suggestion that you ignore the opinions and consider only what can be verified:
Putting aside speculation about why he would prefer to pay, rather than simply put all of his facts on the table in a court of law, we can reasonably conclude that the entire issue is fraught with drama.
I see such dramatic controversy as a degradation of the signal-to-noise ratio, and an unwelcome distraction from "good" science, which is an objective and open-minded pursuit of verifiable facts.
So what should a non-specialist do under such circumstances?
I suggest that the best way to approach such controversial topics is to keep an open mind and avoid being led to draw conclusions based on motivated reasoning. Reject the hysterical alarmism on all sides and filter out the verifiable facts from the hyperbolic suppositions.
I haven't even referred to the economics of the situation, which becomes an essay unto itself, but I will say that having a competent and noteworthy economist such as Glenn taking an interest, is cause for optimism on that front.
To be clear, this doesn't mean that I would advocate for blind acceptance of Glenn's every observation as irrefutable fact. I say this because I have a distinct bias in favor of Glenn, and that means I have to be careful with my own thought processes.
If I were pursuing a degree in economics and could say that Glenn had a hand in helping me achieve it, I would have reason to boast. I would consider it an honor to have been his student. That said, were I to experience that pride, I would have to be particularly vigilant, because pride is a compendium of emotional responses, and emotions cloud the intellect.
We are all human, and cannot avoid emotion, nor should we try, but it's important to acknowledge emotion and filter it from our cognitive process when we're striving for objectivity.
I hope that I've answered some part of your question, Amy. Is there any particular element within the interview that stands out as influencing your reaction?
Wow, Ted. First off, thank you for taking the time and care for such a thorough response! I have a much better sense of where you are coming from.
I agree entirely with the complexity of these subjects. It is totally my pet peeve that nuance is dead and assertions are labeled as fact. I take all modeling with a, not just grain, but huge chunk of salt. I see trends, patterns, and cause/effect with far more credibility than specific quantities or predictions. I think those models are useful, don’t get me wrong, I just assume most of them are wrong because modeling is hard and people tend to not be as smart as they think they are. So that is my bias, when models are wrong I’m not surprised. When the aggregate is taken, or models are plotted together, I tend to make note of the trend and mostly ignore the specifics.
The media is terrible at science reporting, and we all behave like we have the attention span of goldfish. I notice that “scientists” used to never claim any individual storm could be tied to climate change, then the claim was that climate change causes increased numbers intensity and or number of storms and that those storms will be wetter, to now mostly agreeing individual storms are worse because of climate change. I figure that is just because that’s what the people want to hear. I guess I just ignore it. I think higher temp -> more water fits in the air-> more moisture means more precipitation and maybe more intense storms (we know warm water “feeds” hurricanes). What is “more”? 1%? 5%? With weather variation that would be hard to prove. If you are the type who would think, say, a 2% increase is negligible then you’d be upset with the reporting, and that would be fair enough.
I had not heard of The drama with Mann. Bad science makes the good science less credible. I can’t remember that data being used by scientists I knew, just in popular media. When my nine year old builds his time machine, it’ll help a lot that he’ll be able to go back and get good standardized data. Alas, in the meantime we will have to make due with modelers making sometimes questionable choices. They kind of tip you off by admitting the data is “smoothed” though. Sometimes when you read the methodology it’s clear that the model probably doesn’t mean much.
My problem primarily with Kooning’s analysis, as he presented it, is that he seems to assert that small temperature increases don’t matter that much and I’m not sure I buy that. On average the planet is rising 0.2 degrees per decade. That doesn’t sound like a lot. But we know averages can either make things more clear or obfuscate them. We have known there was warming at this rate since the 1970s (it was broadly reported, but I like this for being a quick read: https://www.axios.com/2023/01/12/exxon-climate-research-predicted-global-warming) and have spent that 50 years bickering about if there is warming? how much? is it man made? what is the best solution? Do we even need to do anything about it? Won’t my God just fix it? And so on.
In my life, there have been two other environmental crises that were quickly addressed and are not even mentioned anymore (ie acid rain, and the ozone hole). My training is in chemical engineering. My preference is to fix problems, not quibble about getting the right measurements of the problem. To me it’s like a water line bursting and someone needing to measure the exact flow rate before they turn off the water supply! Just fix it! There are easy things we can do, we should do them. We should put up more wind turbines where they make sense, and solar where it makes sense, and lots of nuclear. We probably need to improve electricity distribution (last I heard we loose about half! Of the power produced in transmission). We should incentivize consumers making more energy efficient choices. It just seems exceedingly prudent to me. The temperature/weather/climate changes, we have to live with that. We don’t have to make it worse.
An economic example: the deficit is small on a percent basis. The Debt is huge. People also bicker and quibble about how much and when these debts/deficits will matter. I don’t want to find out. I’d rather we slowly, steadily and thoughtfully decrease that debt…
That was a good interview, Glenn. Listening to this guest was exhausting. Just as he critiques the media for preventing a distorted reality, he goes on to do the same. I’m not going to defend the media, as they do a terrible job of science reporting overall.
1) the world will not end because of global warming. As the temperature increases and weather/climate changes, populations of people will move. Other animals will maybe not be able to adapt, already many population have dropped substantially (not global warming primarily, probably other man made causes). At some point we will suffocate, but that won’t be until 40,000 ppm. Health effects like sleepiness and lack of concentration start at 1000 ppm, but an increase of 200ppm is related to increased level of asthma (data from indoor air quality). We are currently at about 400 ppm, increasing at about 24 ppm per decade. Prior to the industrial revolution atmospheric carbon dioxide was consistently about 280 ppm. End of the world? No. Something real, yes.
2) modeling. Koonin describes the complexities of modeling the earth. People are terrible at dealing with that level of complexity, which is exactly why modelers make different assumptions, take different approaches, and why the results are reported in aggregate, usual as an average or worst case/best case/highest probability. Contrary to his assertion, modeling is approached many other ways than his “cubes” description. For example, ice samples deep into ice can be used to approximate atmospheric carbon for much longer than 150 years. Data from tree rings and sediment can be used to learn about local weather over time. These can be combined to estimate atmospheric conditions over time. These data can further be combined to form a picture of how things are changing. We know the last time there was this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, people didn’t exist. We also know that, and have known that, the world was increasing in an average global temperature of 0.2c per decade since the 1970s. But Koonin doesn’t seem to deny this, he just shrugs.
3) water rise. Koonin indicated the rate of water rise goes up and down. Just be clear,, that means water level is increasing, just some decades it increases by less than other decades. I didn’t think that was clear, and those sorts of comments are exactly of the type that lead people to be confused about what is really happening. He cited Manhattan, but I cite Virginia’s Bay Area, https://chesapeakebaymagazine.com/norfolks-super-king-tide-exceeds-flooding-predictions/. The problem on the whole is that the consequences are not evenly distributed, as you might expect based on the prolific use of “average”.
4) the fossil fuel transition. There is clearly a stupid way to this. Doing it the stupid way, doesn’t mean it wasn’t a worthwhile goal, it just means we did it stupidly. Using natural gas as a transition when you are wholly dependent of Russia for it, as Germany has done, is stupid. Closing down your nuclear power without something to replace it is, I would argue, stupid. The US is not centralized like Germany, so that is not going to happen here. Wind farms, like the giant one in northern Indiana (liberal bastion that Indiana is), are great for places that have lots of wind and open land. Solar is great for places with lots of sun. Yes, you need base load electricity (like nuclear) or better electricity storage schemes. (They are working on cool storage schemes, so we’ll see if any of them prove economically feasible). Let’s consider the third world for a minute… what makes more sense for a mountain village in Nepal, a central plant that needs to distribute power/ fossil fuel through the mountains… or a solar panel or wind turbine, scalable for your needs, where you are? I just saw a rebuilt house in Pakistan made of mud and thatch with solar panel on the roof! In that way, a transition to more green (no, not 100%) energy may well be easier in the third world than it is here.
5) does a few degrees matter? I don’t know, and as Koonin freely admitted, neither does he. Some things he did not mention while taking the “probably not really” position:
- the “tipping point” previously the earth was buffering out emissions so that we experienced an environment that would be predicted at a lower carbon emissions level, the difference was 50 years… so in 2000 we experienced the carbon levels in the atmosphere that you would expect from emissions in around 1950. Weird, right? They weren’t sure what was responsible for that (seems like the best guess was the ocean) but whatever it was, the capacity of the earth to do that” buffering” seems to be over, so we effective have moved into a new regime of carbon behavior, we’ll see how that goes.
- there are feedback loops that Koonin fails to acknowledge. Yes, ice is melting from Greenland and Antarctica. That will increase water levels. It is also the case that currently the ice is melting from underneath, so the surface is still white. White is reflective. Once the ice is gone, warming will increase faster because the ground will absorb more heat. Also the poles are warming faster than where most people live, so this is happening faster than it may seem to us. Permafrost is melting as well. Permafrost has captured a lot of carbon (decaying of plants can’t happen in ice) and that may well be a large carbon release. How much? I don’t know, though I am not especially eager to find out.
-water, as anyone who has taken chemistry knows, is a weird chemical. The ocean is most of the surface of our planet. I have yet to see any calculations about how temperature changing could decrease the density of water and increase water levels just right there. A big chunk of carbon has been absorbed by the ocean (causing ocean acidification, coral bleaching, etc). I don’t think people are smart enough to think of all the impacts that increased temperatures will have on water sea level, humidity, precipitation, drought, storms, glacial melting, snow pack, etc. As Koonin reminds us, modeling is hard. Perhaps it calls us to be a little humble.
-hurricanes are powered by warm water, as evidenced by the number that start in the warm, shallow waters of the Caribbean. It defies logic that warming that water won’t impact the hurricanes. More? More powerful? Koonin acknowledged that they held/released more water, while making that seem like not a big deal. I guess we shall see.
4) contrarians. I am contrarian. It’s great to keep an open mind and avoid group think. Science is a field chock full of contrarians. Koonin describes his friend workin on a paper where the question was “how do we write this?” Of course it was! We know atmospheric carbon, temperatures, and sea level are increasing. Clearly the questions are how much? How fast? What do we recommend? These could well be described as “how do we write this?” The purpose of those meetings is to write the report, not to, as would inevitably be scientists inclinations, to bicker amongst themselves about minutia of energy balances, equilibrium conditions, and who’s research is most compelling. This page seems to be filled with people who think scientists with contrarian views are silenced. People are encouraged to stick to analyzing work within their field of expertise. Individual researchers must present their works to groups that always include cranks and contrarians questioning their analysis, data collection, assumptions etc. The stuff you hear in the media is not the best science, it’s just the loudest.
Well, that was quite a rant. On the whole I heard Koonin say he’s not convinced the changes that are coming are coming quick enough to worry about and supported that argument with as much as he could correct information, while hand waving at the worst scenarios. I’m not claiming the worst is coming, that the world is burning… but there are risks and my risk-averse conservative nature wants to try to mitigate any risks I can and work to keep things as predictable as is in my control (which is severely limited). I think it’s just as important not to wave away real risks, as it is to exaggerate low probability ones. If we had really taken this problem seriously 50 years ago when it was identified, it would have been much easier to thoughtfully and responsibly make these changes/transitions. Consider that the hysteria may be a reaction to our collective lack of response, as much it is to the issue itself.
Interesting, thanks for the link. I hope that we do in fact stick to that level of warming, and that at that level of warming we continue to have relatively small changes to the environment/climate/weather. I was at some of those meetings in 2005, and consistently the increases in atmospheric carbon were higher than many people had modeled (because they had been excessively optimistic that emissions would go down).
Thank you for doing and posting this interview with Steve Koonin. He is a great source of knowledge and sound judgement on issues related to climate change hysteria. Glenn, while this is not your area of expertise, your background in Economics gives you exposure to statistics and analysis of data as well as differential equations and mathematical modeling. A month or 2 of study could probably get you to the point of being able to develop your own views on the subject.
One of the things that wasn't discussed is that a few years ago, Koonin was selected by the American Physical Society (APS) to lead a review of the state of knowledge on climate change with the idea of revising the Society's position statement on the topic. A number of prominent members had resigned because of the lack of consultation with members on the statement. He gathered 4 or 5 experts on each side of the issue and spent 2 days at NYU discussing the issues. This led to a recommendation to modify APS' position statement to a more neutral and less alarmist one. The APS ignored this recommendation.
If anyone is interested, Jordan Peterson recently did separate interviews with Koonin and Richard Lindzen (a world renowned atmospheric physicist). These are available on YouTube (links below). These interviews are considerably longer and more detail oriented (and a bit rambling as is sometimes the case with Peterson).
Given all the recent discussion about group identity, I beg indulgence so that I can kvell a bit about both Lindzen and Koonin as NYC raised, public school educated members of my tribe.
This is a bipartisan issue and I'm glad it's beginning to get a little more nuanced. The IPCC itself says they don't know with precision the ECS (Climate Sensitivity to Carbon). Which I find it difficult to understand how someone can have so much confidence that the climate change is at least 50% human caused. (I am genuinely open to someone giving me better data on this)
It seems odd that we don't know how sensitive the climate is to CO2 emissions. In my terms CO2 either has an R2 of 1% or 100% as a predictor of warming above the mean and lord only knows what the p-value is... It also rings odd that we know we have a highly complex system in climate. However, we are to believe that a univariate analysis explains it all...?
Then we are asked to slow global GDP by around $1trln each year to optimize for something that has an R2 of between 1-100. Thus it'll either have an impact or it will have a very very small impact. If all we are going to do is delay "the end of the world" by 3 weeks I supposed I'd rather have low income nations spend this last 100 years making advances.
Maybe we create a global fund of a few trillion dollars (a fraction of the annual GDP cost globally) to create incentives for businesses to produce ideas that reduce CO2 emissions even if they aren't profitable businesses. Something other than a completely unworkable solution that will result in exploding cost and likely food shortages and starvation...
When I depart this planet I will not miss those who adhere to the squeaky wheel school of thought. Climate alarmists (and "green" lobbyists) are members in good standing.
The two best questions by far -- my opinion, of course -- concerned nuclear power and the magical alignment of political party with climate catastrophe views. It seems to me, if climate change presents the peril so many suggest, that we should be building nuclear power plants like our planet depended on it. That we're not speaks volumes.
I don't understand why the majority of our (non-renewable) energy isn't from nuclear power. On the other hand, third-grade-Weekly-Reader-me (I'm now 40) also expected electric cars and solar panels on all buildings as defaults, by now.
Most electrical energy in France comes from nuclear power. The obstacles to more nuclear power in the US and Europe are primarily political and cultural, not technical.
Indeed! I don't imagine that the US will at any point in my lifetime switch to nuclear, but I sure wish that we had transitioned to nuclear during the 70s and 80s. Imagine how much lower our emissions would be, if we'd done so!
No-one wants to deal with the waste. We know how to recycle it, but an unavoidable byproduct of the recycling process is weapons-grade plutonium (which we obviously don't want to leave laying around). Alternatively, we could just seal up all the waste in a central repository deep underground in a place just about no-one goes - this was the Yucca Mountain project - but no other state wanted to have the waste getting trucked/transported through their territory both for security and health/environmental reasons. So we're left with the each plant storing their own waste on-site, which is costly, inefficient, and a security problem.
Another problem is that fission reactors are really big, and all the time-tested designs pose a potential catastrophic environmental risk in the event of natural disaster (e.g. Fukushima) or operator incompetence (e.g. Chernobyl). Thus, there's an understandable leeriness of average people to greenlight big nuke plants near the major cities which need the power the most. More advanced designs like pebble-bed or molten-salt reactors claim to get around the worst of the environmental risks, but have not been deployed in commercial production (not least of which because the prospect of anything going wrong is too hard to swallow).
Lastly, U.S. nuclear companies are primarily defense contractors (providing reactors for ships and research) and thus too accustomed to working with huge amounts of bureaucratic red tape (and are inefficient and hidebound themselves). There's no real disruption in an industry that deals in thousands of tons of concrete and massive engineering projects.
How is storing waste on site costly and inefficient? It just sits there in dry casks. The misapprehension that it's a security problem comes from confusion between high and low-level waste. https://www.nei.org/news/2019/what-happens-nuclear-waste-us
It is a serious problem that so many people seem unwilling to accept any risk from nuclear plants while accepting greater risk from other types of power plants. The Germans and Japanese seem fine with the massive pollution from coal plants as long as they can shut down their nuclear plants.
Nuclear power makes too much sense for the Democrat Party (or the Germans for that matter) as does relatively clean burning natural gas. They would rather continue to cover the earth's surface with windmills and solar panels and make believe that cost effective reliable battery backup is just around the corner.
Spoiler alert.........................it ain't gonna happen. You can't ignore the laws of physics and of supply and demand.
Thank you for putting on Dr. Koonin, who along with Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Shellenberger try to bring some reason to this discussion. Now, please get John McWhorter to listen to this. More than once, in defense of his liberal “bona fides”, he has cited the climate apocalypse, and his approval thereof, as a reason to not brand him as a conservative despite his anti-woke tenets. Most liberal policies are disasters, whether it be affirmative action, the welfare state, or climate apocalypse. Good intentions and narcissistic compassion do not a better society make. Hopefully he will come around to this “conservative” truth.
You might be interested in watching this debate between Koonin and Andrew Dessler (A highly credentialed alarmist tenured professor at Texas A&M and an IPCC contributor).
Koonin is as mainstream and credentialed as it gets. He uses the IPCC reports and papers as his source of data and explains what they say. He was an early advocate of open debate between scientists with various views on climate change and has been stonewalled on this for years.
This is not a subject that you watch a couple of 1 hour interviews of people with differing views and you make up your mind which one to believe. It takes a little work to dig into the subject enough to make up your own mind.
It's because of the stonewalling that I'm worried about. He's already seen as at best a heterodox figure in this debate and at worst a quack. So it's easy for people to say "ofcourse you spoke to Koonin, you just want material to bolster your climate skepticism..."
I read Koonin’s book and two facts stuck out to me.
The first is the divergence of the models presented by different agencies from one IPCC report to the next. Models should converge over time.
The second is the sensitivity of the models to minor factors.
It looks to this outsider like they are trying to solve the “n body problem” using finer and finer grids with more and more variables. If that’s the case then this modeling approach is an exercise in futility.
I gotta say, these Climate Alarmist folks don't seem to understand the concept of leading by example.
https://www.indiatimes.com/trending/environment/global-elites-slammed-for-arriving-at-davos-summit-in-private-jets-590644.html
Steven lost me at the start, with a kind of inductive reasoning that projects human flourishing under rising temperatures in the 20th century with flourishing in the 21st century and beyond under rising temperatures.
So big leaps in reasoning turn out not to be exclusive to the catastrophe prophets. Scientists of all kinds keep doing this and it troubles me. I heard Glen trying to help him out but my trust was too weakened to continue listening.
It is possible to believe that climate change is occurring AND also believe that govt is the least useful vehicle for addressing it. The latter is the part that is counter-intuitive. In govt, we have an institution that can barely manage to efficiently do the things most of us would agree belong in the public sector - infrastructure, the courts, public safety, perhaps schools due to the sheer size of the enterprise. Given this track record of mediocrity, at best, what sane person things elected officials and appointed bureaucrats can magically manage the climate?
The biggest obstacle to mass adoption of global anti-climate change policies is the poor people and developing nations climbing their way up. Good luck convincing them to give up relatively affordable and abundant energy sources for the sake of some future benefit that no one can quantify or empirically document. Then again, the climate cult doesn't care about the poor; the starving masses are the equivalent of collateral damage in a conventional war. But unlike most such wars, the climatists have never defined "victory." No one knows what it looks like, therefore no one would be able to recognize it, therefore the battle continues in perpetuity, which is a hallmark of activism.
The problem is terminology as well. Man cannot "manage" the climate. We can modify or alter our adverse effect on the environment: pollution, deforestation, etc. We can also adapt to climate change as thinking creatures. But as you have pointed out, the best thing we can do as wealthy countries is to enhance the lives of the Third-World countries so that they can adapt and change as well. The people who are worried about where their next meal comes from, or obtaining fresh water are not worried about some future potential climate catastrophe.
"climate science itself is quite difficult for a non-specialist to understand in its details."
Respectfully, I disagree with this, at least in part. The details are tiring and tedious to understand, in the same manner as any other technical specialty, but the difficulty is not encountered with understanding details; it lies in withholding acceptance of unsupported conclusions that are often derived from flawed datasets and spurious correlations.
We are inundated with assertions that are reliant on an empiric accumulation of conclusions, each reliant on various a priori assumptions.
When we review research papers, examining the references will reveal previous research, much of it never having been proven to have an actionable level of probability, and some of it disproven or even retracted. Adjustments to datasets is often arbitrary and reliant on redaction of specific elements that present inconveniently confounding factors.
A fascinating and potentially very useful area of inquiry, climatology, is rife with motivated reasoning and self-interested obscurantism. It is this very deliberate obscurantism that presents the challenge to understanding.
Koonin's treatise is an interesting and well-balanced example of adherence to an honestly-derived precautionary principle.
I will share with you, Glenn, that having observed the environmental movement become overwhelmed and co-opted by a growing climate-oriented industry has been an epiphany. I think that it's been good for me, intellectually, because it has induced a reexamination of the underlying assumptions that have driven my five-plus decades of environmental advocacy.
You, Sir, are vastly more qualified than I to opine on the hubris and arrogance of academics. do YOU think, knowing human nature and academia as you do, that the metastasization of a subject worthy of sober inquiry and serious consideration, into mass hysteria, is warranted?
Politicized, certainly, but more significantly; monetized. This, in and of itself, is unremarkable, but the entire field of research is now subject to perversity of incentive beyond anything we have yet encountered, given the amount of money involved.
it appears to have become a matter of secular faith, complete with megachurches.
You're old enough to remember when a certain televangelist, back in the seventies, became even more notorious than ever, for telling his flock that "Jesus had called him home, unless the faithful donated eight million dollars." I was channel-surfing one day in the eighties, and paused to watch a rebroadcast of that televised "sermon." It was fascinating, in a sad way.
In a similar fashion, the current drumbeat of hysteria that has superseded rational inquiry, is sadly fascinating. When the foundations are shaky, the structural integrity of the entire edifice is, to put it charitably, highly uncertain.
Thanks very much for the interview; it's a pleasure to observe sensible people engaging in an intelligent discussion.
I’m curious, do you have a specific example of this general observation you make? Honestly. I came away from the interview with almost the exact opposite reaction.
"do you have a specific example of this general observation you make?"
A reasonable question, Amy, albeit open-ended because I made several observations.
One observation, "Koonin's treatise is an interesting and well-balanced example of adherence to an honestly-derived precautionary principle," refers to his book, but he makes a poignant observation at 40:45 minutes into the interview; "Both climate and energy are complicated, nuanced subjects." We would do well to keep that fact in mind, every time we are subjected to any and all assertions on those subjects.
On page 31 of "unsettled," Koonin writes "Despite media coverage to the contrary, even a few unusual years do not mean a change in climate." Open almost any newspaper, Amy, and you will read all sorts of "experts say" assertions regarding the climatological significance of the precipitation or localized temperature recordings as of the newspapers' publication date. If you're not encountering such claims, I can provide links to the online versions of those print media, but they are ubiquitous and easily searched.
Another discrete observation I made, " Adjustments to datasets is often arbitrary and reliant on redaction of specific elements that present inconveniently confounding factors," can be considered by reviewing the way that recorded temperatures are used, again in the context of seeking accuracy. This "fact check" discusses the controversial exclusion of certain Australian temperature records:
https://theconversation.com/factcheck-was-the-1896-heatwave-wiped-from-the-record-33742
If you have the time to review the language employed in the above article, you will notice an interesting bit of rhetorical legerdemain, the "straw man" fallacy. Focusing on "wiped from the record," the references in the "fact check" explain why the records in question are "not used."
The explanations are reasonable, and what's interesting to me is that I first encountered an explanation of how "heat island" effects confound the data, in the early writings of Curry and Spencer. Reference to those two highly vilified researchers will result in a wave of ad hominem, which makes Koonin's approach of working with the official data, even more wise and sensible.
"When the foundations are shaky, the structural integrity of the entire edifice is, to put it charitably, highly uncertain" is yet another observation. At 12:54 in the interview, Koonin says "One of the ways in which we can test the models, is to look in the past." Whether we're looking at climate modelling or any other predictive modelling, this is an axiom. If the model doesn't produce results that correlate closely with the past record, any predictive results are suspect.
So.... if we look at the perfectly reasonable criteria for exclusion, we are drawn a bit deeper into the way adjustments are made, and the methods employed in verifying the utility of those adjustments. Remembering the stricture about short-term observations, the proxies used in determining temperatures before any human recording methods were possible, must be examined.
Go back just a decade or two, Amy, and think about the first highly publicized "consensus," the 97% and Mann's infamous "hockey stick" graph. This was foundational and extremely important for independent researchers to verify. When I first encountered it, I was aghast at the implications and eager to see how other researchers could use his datasets as a springboard for further inquiry. This was important data.
I was doomed to disappointment about the verification, but that didn't impede other researchers from citing Mann's conclusions, nor the media from publishing hysterical headlines. One researcher reached a different conclusion, published and was sued by Mann. This, I thought, will help clear things up so we can all move on, but I was dismayed when Mann refused to release his data to the court during discovery, incurring contempt charges. Here's a brief discussion, offered with the suggestion that you ignore the opinions and consider only what can be verified:
https://principia-scientific.org/breaking-fatal-courtroom-act-ruins-michael-hockey-stick-mann/
Putting aside speculation about why he would prefer to pay, rather than simply put all of his facts on the table in a court of law, we can reasonably conclude that the entire issue is fraught with drama.
I see such dramatic controversy as a degradation of the signal-to-noise ratio, and an unwelcome distraction from "good" science, which is an objective and open-minded pursuit of verifiable facts.
So what should a non-specialist do under such circumstances?
I suggest that the best way to approach such controversial topics is to keep an open mind and avoid being led to draw conclusions based on motivated reasoning. Reject the hysterical alarmism on all sides and filter out the verifiable facts from the hyperbolic suppositions.
I haven't even referred to the economics of the situation, which becomes an essay unto itself, but I will say that having a competent and noteworthy economist such as Glenn taking an interest, is cause for optimism on that front.
To be clear, this doesn't mean that I would advocate for blind acceptance of Glenn's every observation as irrefutable fact. I say this because I have a distinct bias in favor of Glenn, and that means I have to be careful with my own thought processes.
If I were pursuing a degree in economics and could say that Glenn had a hand in helping me achieve it, I would have reason to boast. I would consider it an honor to have been his student. That said, were I to experience that pride, I would have to be particularly vigilant, because pride is a compendium of emotional responses, and emotions cloud the intellect.
We are all human, and cannot avoid emotion, nor should we try, but it's important to acknowledge emotion and filter it from our cognitive process when we're striving for objectivity.
I hope that I've answered some part of your question, Amy. Is there any particular element within the interview that stands out as influencing your reaction?
Wow, Ted. First off, thank you for taking the time and care for such a thorough response! I have a much better sense of where you are coming from.
I agree entirely with the complexity of these subjects. It is totally my pet peeve that nuance is dead and assertions are labeled as fact. I take all modeling with a, not just grain, but huge chunk of salt. I see trends, patterns, and cause/effect with far more credibility than specific quantities or predictions. I think those models are useful, don’t get me wrong, I just assume most of them are wrong because modeling is hard and people tend to not be as smart as they think they are. So that is my bias, when models are wrong I’m not surprised. When the aggregate is taken, or models are plotted together, I tend to make note of the trend and mostly ignore the specifics.
The media is terrible at science reporting, and we all behave like we have the attention span of goldfish. I notice that “scientists” used to never claim any individual storm could be tied to climate change, then the claim was that climate change causes increased numbers intensity and or number of storms and that those storms will be wetter, to now mostly agreeing individual storms are worse because of climate change. I figure that is just because that’s what the people want to hear. I guess I just ignore it. I think higher temp -> more water fits in the air-> more moisture means more precipitation and maybe more intense storms (we know warm water “feeds” hurricanes). What is “more”? 1%? 5%? With weather variation that would be hard to prove. If you are the type who would think, say, a 2% increase is negligible then you’d be upset with the reporting, and that would be fair enough.
I had not heard of The drama with Mann. Bad science makes the good science less credible. I can’t remember that data being used by scientists I knew, just in popular media. When my nine year old builds his time machine, it’ll help a lot that he’ll be able to go back and get good standardized data. Alas, in the meantime we will have to make due with modelers making sometimes questionable choices. They kind of tip you off by admitting the data is “smoothed” though. Sometimes when you read the methodology it’s clear that the model probably doesn’t mean much.
My problem primarily with Kooning’s analysis, as he presented it, is that he seems to assert that small temperature increases don’t matter that much and I’m not sure I buy that. On average the planet is rising 0.2 degrees per decade. That doesn’t sound like a lot. But we know averages can either make things more clear or obfuscate them. We have known there was warming at this rate since the 1970s (it was broadly reported, but I like this for being a quick read: https://www.axios.com/2023/01/12/exxon-climate-research-predicted-global-warming) and have spent that 50 years bickering about if there is warming? how much? is it man made? what is the best solution? Do we even need to do anything about it? Won’t my God just fix it? And so on.
In my life, there have been two other environmental crises that were quickly addressed and are not even mentioned anymore (ie acid rain, and the ozone hole). My training is in chemical engineering. My preference is to fix problems, not quibble about getting the right measurements of the problem. To me it’s like a water line bursting and someone needing to measure the exact flow rate before they turn off the water supply! Just fix it! There are easy things we can do, we should do them. We should put up more wind turbines where they make sense, and solar where it makes sense, and lots of nuclear. We probably need to improve electricity distribution (last I heard we loose about half! Of the power produced in transmission). We should incentivize consumers making more energy efficient choices. It just seems exceedingly prudent to me. The temperature/weather/climate changes, we have to live with that. We don’t have to make it worse.
An economic example: the deficit is small on a percent basis. The Debt is huge. People also bicker and quibble about how much and when these debts/deficits will matter. I don’t want to find out. I’d rather we slowly, steadily and thoughtfully decrease that debt…
That was a good interview, Glenn. Listening to this guest was exhausting. Just as he critiques the media for preventing a distorted reality, he goes on to do the same. I’m not going to defend the media, as they do a terrible job of science reporting overall.
1) the world will not end because of global warming. As the temperature increases and weather/climate changes, populations of people will move. Other animals will maybe not be able to adapt, already many population have dropped substantially (not global warming primarily, probably other man made causes). At some point we will suffocate, but that won’t be until 40,000 ppm. Health effects like sleepiness and lack of concentration start at 1000 ppm, but an increase of 200ppm is related to increased level of asthma (data from indoor air quality). We are currently at about 400 ppm, increasing at about 24 ppm per decade. Prior to the industrial revolution atmospheric carbon dioxide was consistently about 280 ppm. End of the world? No. Something real, yes.
2) modeling. Koonin describes the complexities of modeling the earth. People are terrible at dealing with that level of complexity, which is exactly why modelers make different assumptions, take different approaches, and why the results are reported in aggregate, usual as an average or worst case/best case/highest probability. Contrary to his assertion, modeling is approached many other ways than his “cubes” description. For example, ice samples deep into ice can be used to approximate atmospheric carbon for much longer than 150 years. Data from tree rings and sediment can be used to learn about local weather over time. These can be combined to estimate atmospheric conditions over time. These data can further be combined to form a picture of how things are changing. We know the last time there was this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, people didn’t exist. We also know that, and have known that, the world was increasing in an average global temperature of 0.2c per decade since the 1970s. But Koonin doesn’t seem to deny this, he just shrugs.
3) water rise. Koonin indicated the rate of water rise goes up and down. Just be clear,, that means water level is increasing, just some decades it increases by less than other decades. I didn’t think that was clear, and those sorts of comments are exactly of the type that lead people to be confused about what is really happening. He cited Manhattan, but I cite Virginia’s Bay Area, https://chesapeakebaymagazine.com/norfolks-super-king-tide-exceeds-flooding-predictions/. The problem on the whole is that the consequences are not evenly distributed, as you might expect based on the prolific use of “average”.
4) the fossil fuel transition. There is clearly a stupid way to this. Doing it the stupid way, doesn’t mean it wasn’t a worthwhile goal, it just means we did it stupidly. Using natural gas as a transition when you are wholly dependent of Russia for it, as Germany has done, is stupid. Closing down your nuclear power without something to replace it is, I would argue, stupid. The US is not centralized like Germany, so that is not going to happen here. Wind farms, like the giant one in northern Indiana (liberal bastion that Indiana is), are great for places that have lots of wind and open land. Solar is great for places with lots of sun. Yes, you need base load electricity (like nuclear) or better electricity storage schemes. (They are working on cool storage schemes, so we’ll see if any of them prove economically feasible). Let’s consider the third world for a minute… what makes more sense for a mountain village in Nepal, a central plant that needs to distribute power/ fossil fuel through the mountains… or a solar panel or wind turbine, scalable for your needs, where you are? I just saw a rebuilt house in Pakistan made of mud and thatch with solar panel on the roof! In that way, a transition to more green (no, not 100%) energy may well be easier in the third world than it is here.
5) does a few degrees matter? I don’t know, and as Koonin freely admitted, neither does he. Some things he did not mention while taking the “probably not really” position:
- the “tipping point” previously the earth was buffering out emissions so that we experienced an environment that would be predicted at a lower carbon emissions level, the difference was 50 years… so in 2000 we experienced the carbon levels in the atmosphere that you would expect from emissions in around 1950. Weird, right? They weren’t sure what was responsible for that (seems like the best guess was the ocean) but whatever it was, the capacity of the earth to do that” buffering” seems to be over, so we effective have moved into a new regime of carbon behavior, we’ll see how that goes.
- there are feedback loops that Koonin fails to acknowledge. Yes, ice is melting from Greenland and Antarctica. That will increase water levels. It is also the case that currently the ice is melting from underneath, so the surface is still white. White is reflective. Once the ice is gone, warming will increase faster because the ground will absorb more heat. Also the poles are warming faster than where most people live, so this is happening faster than it may seem to us. Permafrost is melting as well. Permafrost has captured a lot of carbon (decaying of plants can’t happen in ice) and that may well be a large carbon release. How much? I don’t know, though I am not especially eager to find out.
-water, as anyone who has taken chemistry knows, is a weird chemical. The ocean is most of the surface of our planet. I have yet to see any calculations about how temperature changing could decrease the density of water and increase water levels just right there. A big chunk of carbon has been absorbed by the ocean (causing ocean acidification, coral bleaching, etc). I don’t think people are smart enough to think of all the impacts that increased temperatures will have on water sea level, humidity, precipitation, drought, storms, glacial melting, snow pack, etc. As Koonin reminds us, modeling is hard. Perhaps it calls us to be a little humble.
-hurricanes are powered by warm water, as evidenced by the number that start in the warm, shallow waters of the Caribbean. It defies logic that warming that water won’t impact the hurricanes. More? More powerful? Koonin acknowledged that they held/released more water, while making that seem like not a big deal. I guess we shall see.
4) contrarians. I am contrarian. It’s great to keep an open mind and avoid group think. Science is a field chock full of contrarians. Koonin describes his friend workin on a paper where the question was “how do we write this?” Of course it was! We know atmospheric carbon, temperatures, and sea level are increasing. Clearly the questions are how much? How fast? What do we recommend? These could well be described as “how do we write this?” The purpose of those meetings is to write the report, not to, as would inevitably be scientists inclinations, to bicker amongst themselves about minutia of energy balances, equilibrium conditions, and who’s research is most compelling. This page seems to be filled with people who think scientists with contrarian views are silenced. People are encouraged to stick to analyzing work within their field of expertise. Individual researchers must present their works to groups that always include cranks and contrarians questioning their analysis, data collection, assumptions etc. The stuff you hear in the media is not the best science, it’s just the loudest.
Well, that was quite a rant. On the whole I heard Koonin say he’s not convinced the changes that are coming are coming quick enough to worry about and supported that argument with as much as he could correct information, while hand waving at the worst scenarios. I’m not claiming the worst is coming, that the world is burning… but there are risks and my risk-averse conservative nature wants to try to mitigate any risks I can and work to keep things as predictable as is in my control (which is severely limited). I think it’s just as important not to wave away real risks, as it is to exaggerate low probability ones. If we had really taken this problem seriously 50 years ago when it was identified, it would have been much easier to thoughtfully and responsibly make these changes/transitions. Consider that the hysteria may be a reaction to our collective lack of response, as much it is to the issue itself.
You might like reading the attached article by Roger Pielke Jr. on what scenarios for the future are plausible and which are implausible.
https://open.substack.com/pub/rogerpielkejr/p/is-the-world-ready-for-good-news?r=2jvin&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Interesting, thanks for the link. I hope that we do in fact stick to that level of warming, and that at that level of warming we continue to have relatively small changes to the environment/climate/weather. I was at some of those meetings in 2005, and consistently the increases in atmospheric carbon were higher than many people had modeled (because they had been excessively optimistic that emissions would go down).
Thank you for doing and posting this interview with Steve Koonin. He is a great source of knowledge and sound judgement on issues related to climate change hysteria. Glenn, while this is not your area of expertise, your background in Economics gives you exposure to statistics and analysis of data as well as differential equations and mathematical modeling. A month or 2 of study could probably get you to the point of being able to develop your own views on the subject.
One of the things that wasn't discussed is that a few years ago, Koonin was selected by the American Physical Society (APS) to lead a review of the state of knowledge on climate change with the idea of revising the Society's position statement on the topic. A number of prominent members had resigned because of the lack of consultation with members on the statement. He gathered 4 or 5 experts on each side of the issue and spent 2 days at NYU discussing the issues. This led to a recommendation to modify APS' position statement to a more neutral and less alarmist one. The APS ignored this recommendation.
If anyone is interested, Jordan Peterson recently did separate interviews with Koonin and Richard Lindzen (a world renowned atmospheric physicist). These are available on YouTube (links below). These interviews are considerably longer and more detail oriented (and a bit rambling as is sometimes the case with Peterson).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LVSrTZDopM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reaABJ5HpLk
Given all the recent discussion about group identity, I beg indulgence so that I can kvell a bit about both Lindzen and Koonin as NYC raised, public school educated members of my tribe.
I recommend listening to Peterson interviews with those you mentioned, plus Lomberg, Shallenburger, and Alex Epstein.
This is a bipartisan issue and I'm glad it's beginning to get a little more nuanced. The IPCC itself says they don't know with precision the ECS (Climate Sensitivity to Carbon). Which I find it difficult to understand how someone can have so much confidence that the climate change is at least 50% human caused. (I am genuinely open to someone giving me better data on this)
It seems odd that we don't know how sensitive the climate is to CO2 emissions. In my terms CO2 either has an R2 of 1% or 100% as a predictor of warming above the mean and lord only knows what the p-value is... It also rings odd that we know we have a highly complex system in climate. However, we are to believe that a univariate analysis explains it all...?
Then we are asked to slow global GDP by around $1trln each year to optimize for something that has an R2 of between 1-100. Thus it'll either have an impact or it will have a very very small impact. If all we are going to do is delay "the end of the world" by 3 weeks I supposed I'd rather have low income nations spend this last 100 years making advances.
Maybe we create a global fund of a few trillion dollars (a fraction of the annual GDP cost globally) to create incentives for businesses to produce ideas that reduce CO2 emissions even if they aren't profitable businesses. Something other than a completely unworkable solution that will result in exploding cost and likely food shortages and starvation...
When I depart this planet I will not miss those who adhere to the squeaky wheel school of thought. Climate alarmists (and "green" lobbyists) are members in good standing.
The two best questions by far -- my opinion, of course -- concerned nuclear power and the magical alignment of political party with climate catastrophe views. It seems to me, if climate change presents the peril so many suggest, that we should be building nuclear power plants like our planet depended on it. That we're not speaks volumes.
I don't understand why the majority of our (non-renewable) energy isn't from nuclear power. On the other hand, third-grade-Weekly-Reader-me (I'm now 40) also expected electric cars and solar panels on all buildings as defaults, by now.
Most electrical energy in France comes from nuclear power. The obstacles to more nuclear power in the US and Europe are primarily political and cultural, not technical.
Indeed! I don't imagine that the US will at any point in my lifetime switch to nuclear, but I sure wish that we had transitioned to nuclear during the 70s and 80s. Imagine how much lower our emissions would be, if we'd done so!
The US is the largest producer of commercial nuclear power and 20% of US electrical generation is nuclear. This is good, but it could be much better.
No-one wants to deal with the waste. We know how to recycle it, but an unavoidable byproduct of the recycling process is weapons-grade plutonium (which we obviously don't want to leave laying around). Alternatively, we could just seal up all the waste in a central repository deep underground in a place just about no-one goes - this was the Yucca Mountain project - but no other state wanted to have the waste getting trucked/transported through their territory both for security and health/environmental reasons. So we're left with the each plant storing their own waste on-site, which is costly, inefficient, and a security problem.
Another problem is that fission reactors are really big, and all the time-tested designs pose a potential catastrophic environmental risk in the event of natural disaster (e.g. Fukushima) or operator incompetence (e.g. Chernobyl). Thus, there's an understandable leeriness of average people to greenlight big nuke plants near the major cities which need the power the most. More advanced designs like pebble-bed or molten-salt reactors claim to get around the worst of the environmental risks, but have not been deployed in commercial production (not least of which because the prospect of anything going wrong is too hard to swallow).
Lastly, U.S. nuclear companies are primarily defense contractors (providing reactors for ships and research) and thus too accustomed to working with huge amounts of bureaucratic red tape (and are inefficient and hidebound themselves). There's no real disruption in an industry that deals in thousands of tons of concrete and massive engineering projects.
How is storing waste on site costly and inefficient? It just sits there in dry casks. The misapprehension that it's a security problem comes from confusion between high and low-level waste. https://www.nei.org/news/2019/what-happens-nuclear-waste-us
It is a serious problem that so many people seem unwilling to accept any risk from nuclear plants while accepting greater risk from other types of power plants. The Germans and Japanese seem fine with the massive pollution from coal plants as long as they can shut down their nuclear plants.
Nuclear power makes too much sense for the Democrat Party (or the Germans for that matter) as does relatively clean burning natural gas. They would rather continue to cover the earth's surface with windmills and solar panels and make believe that cost effective reliable battery backup is just around the corner.
Spoiler alert.........................it ain't gonna happen. You can't ignore the laws of physics and of supply and demand.
Thank you for having Dr. Koonin on. Like the interview, his book, UNSETTLED, was informative and insightful. I highly recommend it.
Thank you for putting on Dr. Koonin, who along with Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Shellenberger try to bring some reason to this discussion. Now, please get John McWhorter to listen to this. More than once, in defense of his liberal “bona fides”, he has cited the climate apocalypse, and his approval thereof, as a reason to not brand him as a conservative despite his anti-woke tenets. Most liberal policies are disasters, whether it be affirmative action, the welfare state, or climate apocalypse. Good intentions and narcissistic compassion do not a better society make. Hopefully he will come around to this “conservative” truth.
I just wish I could like your post more than once.
Get a more mainstream Climate Scientist too so as not to be blamed of only platforming dissenters.
Hear out their criticisms of people like Koonin and why they believe the mainstream narrative.
You might be interested in watching this debate between Koonin and Andrew Dessler (A highly credentialed alarmist tenured professor at Texas A&M and an IPCC contributor).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gICW2VL434
I'll check it out. Thank you for the link 👍🏾
Koonin is as mainstream and credentialed as it gets. He uses the IPCC reports and papers as his source of data and explains what they say. He was an early advocate of open debate between scientists with various views on climate change and has been stonewalled on this for years.
This is not a subject that you watch a couple of 1 hour interviews of people with differing views and you make up your mind which one to believe. It takes a little work to dig into the subject enough to make up your own mind.
It's because of the stonewalling that I'm worried about. He's already seen as at best a heterodox figure in this debate and at worst a quack. So it's easy for people to say "ofcourse you spoke to Koonin, you just want material to bolster your climate skepticism..."
Excellent!
I read Koonin’s book and two facts stuck out to me.
The first is the divergence of the models presented by different agencies from one IPCC report to the next. Models should converge over time.
The second is the sensitivity of the models to minor factors.
It looks to this outsider like they are trying to solve the “n body problem” using finer and finer grids with more and more variables. If that’s the case then this modeling approach is an exercise in futility.
You've summed it up really well.
Beware though, they can always make the models converge by fudging the input data which are largely initial and boundary conditions.