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This is a positive, if qualified, recommendation of Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t, and Why it Matters by Steven Koonin. Shamefully, Scientific American printed an attack on Koonin by a group of “climate activists” led by Naomi Oreskes and Michael Mann, and when Koonin sent SA a politely devastating response, they refused to publish it. I’ve attached links to each. The politicization of popular science magazines like National Geographic and Scientific American has been going on for a long time, but I was surprised by how blatant this was.
Why the attack? Koonin was Undersecretary for Science in the Department of Energy during the Obama presidency. His scientific credentials are impeccable and it is impossible to portray him either as ignorant of the science or as a politically motivated “denier.” And yet, like the child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” Koonin is asserting openly and in public what the vast majority of climate scientists, electronic and print media and politicians writing and speaking about the topic are denying—the relevant science does not support the idea that there is a “climate crisis” caused by the human use of fossil fuels.
The book is divided into two parts: Part I consists of 11 chapters; the first four explain what is and is not known about how the earth’s climate system works; 5-8 look at the data regarding warming trends, worldwide seasonal storm activity, floods, fires, and sea level changes; and 9-11 discuss the reasons why, as he says near the close of chapter 9, “. . . media, politicians, and often the assessment reports themselves blatantly misrepresent what the science says about climate and catastrophes.” (p. 183) Chapter 10, “Who Broke ‘The Science’ and Why,” demonstrates how the media’s desire to lead with disasters aligns with politicians’ and environmental organizations’ desire to keep the public alarmed. And the scientists involved, for the most part, though they know what is being reported to the public does not accurately reflect their research, are silent, and in some cases complicit. Perhaps the most valuable section of Part I is to be found at the end of chapter 11, “Fixing the Broken Science.” It is a list of six “red flags” that intelligent laymen can look for in deciding whether or not a report about “climate change” can be trusted.
This review is qualified because of Part II. Part II should be a discussion of what individuals, corporations and governments representatives ought to think and do in light of what the reader has been told in Part I. But Dr. Koonin explicitly refuses to go there—as he puts it, “my value judgments in such complex matters were not especially better than anyone else’s, and I’m not a philosopher or ethicist” (p. 209). Instead, he predicts that all government attempts to force a “carbon neutral future” on us will fail, largely because there will be a strongly growing demand for reliable energy, and that “the most likely societal response will be to adapt to a changing climate, and that adaptation will very likely be effective” (p. 210). Much of what he says in this part of the book is still worthwhile and informative—but too much of what he says assumes a kind of honesty and integrity among those pushing the climate catastrophe agenda that Part I has led his readers to doubt. For example:
. . . we need to reduce the hysteria in climate journalism. Journalists themselves need help to better understand the material they are presented with, and the public needs the tools to become more critical consumers of media coverage of climate (and many other topics, for that matter)” (p.252).
But how are “we” going to accomplish this transformation, given the philosophical premises the journalists and “the public” will have learned in university, and given the sort of biases evidenced by the behavior of the editors of Scientific American around Dr. Koonin’s book? Unsettled is a valuable book—but with a better grasp of the importance of philosophy in thinking clearly about this topic, such as one finds in Alex Epstein’s writing, it would have been much more valuable.
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Re: James Lennox’s post 42197 of 12/13/21
What is interesting is that if you search for the book on Amazon, there are 6 free attacks on the book portraying themselves as independent summaries:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=Steven+Koonin&ref=nb_sb_noss_2
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Re: Stephen Grossman’s post 139940 of 12/15/21
Free?!
Fair enough, a Minimally Monetized Midday Meal.
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