It took 12 climate activist academics to attempt to discredit former Obama scientist Dr. Steve Koonin
That ‘Obama Scientist’ Climate Skeptic You’ve Been Hearing About: By Naomi Oreskes, Michael E. Mann, Gernot Wagner, Don Wuebbles, Andrew Dessler, Andrea Dutton, Geoffrey Supran, Matthew Huber, Thomas Lovejoy, Ilissa Ocko, Peter C. Frumhoff, Joel Clement
Koonin’s full response to the 12 academics in SciAm
Koonin responds to a Scientific American article by Oreskes et al.
Scientific American has published a criticism of me and my recent book, Unsettled. Most of that article’s 1,000 words are scurrilous ad hominem and guilt-by-association aspersions from the twelve co-authors. Only three scientific criticisms are buried within their spluttering; here is my response to each them.
The first criticism concerns rising temperatures:
A recent Washington Post column by conservative contributor Marc Thiessen repeats several points Koonin makes. The first is citing the 2017 National Climate Assessment to downplay rising temperatures—but the report’s very first key finding on the topic says temperatures have risen, rapidly since 1979, and are the warmest in 1,500 years.
In fact, Unsettled explicitly acknowledges a warming globe, but also the problems in comparing instrumental and proxy temperatures that weaken confidence in the “warmest in 1,500 years”. The book’s Chapter 5 criticizes in detail the 2017 report’s misleading and inaccurate representation of a different temperature metric, US extreme temperatures. To the surprise of many, the country’s warmest temperatures have not increased since 1960 and are no higher in recent years than they were in 1900.
The authors go on to offer:
The second is Thiessen quoting Koonin’s use of an outdated 2014 assessment on hurricanes to downplay climate concerns. But the newer 2017 report finds that human activity has “contributed to the observed upward trend in North Atlantic hurricane activity since the 1970s.”
In fact, Unsettled’s Chapter 6 discusses the description of hurricanes in the 2014 report, in the 2017 report, and in more recent research papers through 2020, including an authoritative 2019 assessment by eleven hurricane experts. None of those studies claim any detectable human influences on hurricanes.
A third point downplays sea level rise by portraying it as steady over time, cherry-picking reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the rate of sea-level rise has quadrupled since the industrial revolution, as climate scientists pointed out years ago when Koonin made this same argument.
In no sense does Unsettled portray sea level rise as “steady over time”. Rather, the book’s Chapter 8 does quite the opposite, describing the full decadal variability as portrayed in the IPCC reports and subsequent research literature, but somehow omitted in the 2017 National Climate Assessment. The IPCC statement that rates of rise between 1920 and 1950 were likely similar to those of recent decades complicates attribution of recent trends.
It is telling that these three criticisms cite Thiessen’s column rather than what I’ve written in Unsettled. That they are readily countered suggests the authors haven’t read the book or, if they have, they aren’t acting in good faith. That’s precisely the same unprofessional behavior found in the easily rebutted “fact check” of, again, a review of Unsettled, not the book itself.
Steven E. Koonin is the author of the bestselling book Unsettled: What climate science tells us, what it doesn’t, and why it matters.
Click to access Koonins-response-to-SciAm.pdf
Related Links:
Obama’s Chief Energy Scientist Declares his Climate Dissent: Physicist Dr. Steven Koonin:
Mr. Koonin is a Brooklyn-born math whiz and theoretical physicist, a product of New York’s selective Stuyvesant High School….He would teach at Caltech for nearly three decades, serving as provost in charge of setting the scientific agenda for one of the country’s premier scientific institutions…Served as chief scientist of the Obama Energy Department.
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Fox Business Channel – Broadcast March 19, 2021 – ‘Kudlow’ w/ Larry Kudlow
Physicist Dr. Steve Koonin was undersecretary of energy for science during President Obama’s first term and is director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University.
Physicist Dr. Steve Koonin: “First of all, I think everybody agrees that the globe has warmed about a degree from 1900 until the present. And that warming is due to some combination of human influences and natural influences. But beyond that, almost no severe weather event shows any detectable trend. There are no long-term trends in droughts or floods around the globe — in severe weather events like thunderstorms.
Sea level is rising at the spectacular rate of one foot per century and was doing it at about the same rate 80 years ago. In the US, record high temperatures are no more frequent than they were in the 1900s. I can go on and on. No detectable human influences on hurricanes. This is not Steve talking, this is what’s in those reports often explicitly, but sometimes a little bit obscured and you got to read closely to find it.”
Larry Kudlow: “Actually I want you to go on and on, I’ll give you 45 or 50 minutes on the show because this is so important. All these people, you know they got the memo ‘existential threat’, you’re saying factually it’s not true.”
