Much to the dismay of climate hysterics, the former science advisor to the Barack Obama administration is laying waste to claims that rampant global warming is a death sentence for humanity. Physicist Steve Koonin, former U.S. under secretary for science, and the director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University, has released a new book entitled Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.
Although Dr. Koonin firmly believes that the Earth is warming and that humankind has something to do with it — which even most climate-change skeptics acknowledge — he also believes that fear-mongering is counterproductive, and that trillion dollar spending plans meant to do away with fossil fuels are premature.
In a Saturday New York Post article, which published an adapted excerpt from Koonin’s book, the physicist states, “Yes, it’s true that the globe is warming, and that humans are exerting a warming influence on it. But beyond that — to paraphrase the classic movie ‘The Princess Bride,’ — ‘I do not think ‘The Science’ says what you think it says’”
“What I realized, is that, although you hear people talking about, ‘we’re going to believe in the science, the science is settled, we’ve got an existential crisis — when you actually read the science, it doesn’t support that kind of hysteria at all,” Koonin told Fox News last week.
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The “hysteria” Koonin refers to has helped produce atrocious legislation, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey’s Green New Deal, and President Biden’s $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan, much of which focuses on rebuilding American infrastructure in so-called climate-friendly ways.
“Eventually we will probably need to do something about this, but the scope and scale of what the Biden administration proposed for the U.S., I think is just not there in the data,” Koonin said. “It’s not there in the science.”
Among the research that Koonin cites are these few items sure to upset 18-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg:
- Humans have had no detectable impact on hurricanes over the past century.
- Greenland’s ice sheet isn’t shrinking any more rapidly today than it was 80 years ago.
- The global area burned by wildfires has declined more than 25 percent since 2003 and 2020 was one of the lowest years on record.
Koonin connects much of the hysteria concerning climate to the long trek that scientific data makes from the actual research to assessment reports until it ultimately wends its way into the media, where it is packaged for consumption by people with a fear-inducing agenda.
“There are abundant opportunities to get things wrong — both accidentally and on purpose — as the information goes through filter after filter to be packaged for various audiences,” Koonin writes.
“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,” explains Koonin. “As a result, most people don’t get the whole story.”
According to Koonin, much of the media’s climate reporting “is an effort to persuade rather than inform, and the information presented withholds either essential context or what doesn’t fit.’”
When asked to assist in updating the American Physical Society’s (APS) statement on climate back in 2013, Koonin came away alarmed that climate science, as a whole, was not as close to understanding the Earth’s incredibly complex climate system as it pretended to be. “I came away from the APS workshop not only surprised, but shaken by the realization that climate science was far less mature than I had supposed,” said the physicist.
This is what many skeptics have been saying for a while now. The climate science of today is not yet sophisticated enough to predict climate decades in the future. Increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is not the whole story — not even close.
Also a realist, Koonin points out that much of the Third World is energy-starved. While in America, when we hit a light switch we’re fairly certain to get illumination, the same is not true for wide swaths of the globe. This makes so-called climate change far less of a priority for such nations.
To Fox News, Koonin explained that “40 percent of the world’s population doesn’t have adequate energy. That’s the nub of the problem — because those developing countries account for half the emissions now — who’s going to pay the developing countries not to emit?”
