"Steven Koonin’s new book "Unsettled ...
... Koonin is a little bit special because he was a very senior Obama Administration climate official and he has a PhD in nuclear physics.
So of course he’s “not a climate scientist”, just like most of the famous names in climate science.
But he’s well-informed and fed-up with the constant barrage of hysterical misrepresentation, and in Unsettled he delivers the debunking it deserves.
... By way of illustration, Michael Mann, and even people not liable to be invited to join his fan club or to join if invited would say he’s not a climate scientist, holds sub-doctoral degrees in math and physics and geology and a PhD in geology and geophysics.
Phil Jones, formerly of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and again a controversial figure but not on this point, has a PhD in hydrology.
Yet when someone challenges orthodoxy, they are accused of not being a climate scientist because… well, why?
Patrick Moore’s apostasy when he quit the Greenpeace he cofounded because it had become anti-science shook the world of environmentalism before becoming subject to the usual character assassination.
And sometimes he is mocked for having opinions on ecology including climate and a mere PhD in Forestry.
... On the other side Naomi Oreskes’ PhD is in Geological Research and the History of Science.
Which sounds a bit odd.
But it doesn’t make her “not a climate scientist” even if she seems bad at statistical analysis and apparently also attended the University of Paranoia, and has for some years been peddling conspiracy theories about Exxon that are now sufficiently mainstream as to appear in Scientific American.
Or alternatively to demonstrate that Scientific American has left the mainstream and needs to invest in some tin foil.
... We have argued for, and still do argue for, the informed lay person.
And not only because Einstein’s PhD was on “A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions” and then he went and invented relativity.
Because if voters are to choose leaders with responsibility over everything from budgets to national defence to epidemics to, yes, the environment,
it is essential that both the voters and the leaders be capable of forming and acting on sensible, well-informed opinions on subjects in which they do not have a PhD.
For instance by reading Koonin’s book.
... Koonin isn’t some Exxon-funded shill who says the planet isn’t warming or a crank who spends hours every day on line claiming he’s refuted the fundamental physics behind the greenhouse theory.
He’s a guy who thinks humans are contributing to warming the planet and we should be careful.
But he also knows that science doesn’t support alarmist exaggeration nor does engineering or economics support crash decarbonization,
and the constant drumbeat of propaganda about these ideas is leading society down a dangerous path.
He puts the matter fairly bluntly, without descending to personalities.
And what surely needs to happen now is for people of all sorts ... (is) to ask themselves whether Koonin’s factual claims are correct and, if so,
why contrary views are so often and so loudly asserted by people who are not climate scientists but could easily be far better informed than they are.
So what does he say?
Well, before he’s cleared the “Introduction” he’s gotten rid of
the increase in extreme weather,
melting Greenland ice,
economic catastrophe, climate models
and the scientific consensus.
… we could go on.
But the thing (to do) is to read the book. ... "
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Thursday, May 27, 2021
New book: "Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters" is the biggest intellectual event in years in the climate debate.
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