Steven E. Koonin > Quotes

“I would have offered a somewhat different statement, based upon my familiarity with the assessment reports and literature: The earth has warmed during the past century, partly because of natural phenomena and partly in response to growing human influences. These human influences (most importantly the accumulation of CO2 from burning fossil fuels) exert a physically small effect on the complex climate system. Unfortunately, our limited observations and understanding are insufficient to usefully quantify either how the climate will respond to human influences or how it varies naturally. However, even as human influences have increased almost fivefold since 1950 and the globe has warmed modestly, most severe weather phenomena remain within past variability. Projections of future climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for the purpose.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“the land is warming more rapidly than the ocean surface, and the high latitudes near the poles are warming faster than the lower latitudes near the equator. More generally, the coldest temperatures (at night, during the winter, and so on) are rising more rapidly than the warmest temperatures—the climate is getting milder as the globe is getting warmer.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“Projections of future climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for the purpose.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The bottom line is that the science says that most extreme weather events show no long-term trends that can be attributed to human influences on the climate.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“Any appeal to the alleged “97 percent consensus” among scientists is another red flag. The study that produced that number has been convincingly debunked.8 And in any event, nobody has ever specified exactly what those 97 percent of scientists are supposed to be agreed upon. That the climate is changing? Sure, count me in! That humans are influencing the climate? Absolutely, I’m there! That we’re already seeing disastrous weather impacts and face an even more catastrophic future? Not at all obvious”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“It’s clear that media, politicians, and often the assessment reports themselves blatantly misrepresent what the science says about climate and catastrophes. Those failures indict the scientists who write and too-casually review the reports, the reporters who uncritically repeat them, the editors who allow that to happen, the activists and their organizations who fan the fires of alarm, and the experts whose public silence endorses the deception. The constant repetition of these and many other climate fallacies turns them into accepted “truths.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“This is not new. H. L. Mencken’s 1918 book In Defense of Women noted: The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“There should be no question about “what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.” It is the height of hubris for a scientist even to consider deliberately misinforming policy discussions in service of what they believe to be ethical. This would seem obvious in other contexts: imagine the outcry if it were discovered that scientists were misrepresenting data on birth control because of their religious beliefs, for instance”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The process of science is less about collecting pieces of knowledge than it is about reducing the uncertainties in what we know.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“human influences on the climate were negligible prior to 1900. There weren’t many people around in 1900 (only one-fifth of today’s count), and they were mostly farming; industrialization was just getting underway for most of the globe. Human influences remained quite small as late as 1950, when they were less than one-quarter of what they are today. Variations in the climate before 1950, then, show that other phenomena must have been at play, if not dominant, since the earth actually cooled a bit between 1940 and 1980 even as warming human influences grew.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The world’s oceans are both the most important and the most problematic piece of the earth’s climate system. They hold more than 90 percent of the climate’s heat and are its long-term memory. Conditions in the atmosphere swing wildly from day to day and year to year in response to any number of influences—that’s part of what makes untangling weather and climate so difficult. The oceans, on the other hand, change—and respond to changes—over decades to centuries.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“There are many ways we might further enhance the albedo, including brightening the land surface with “white roofs” on buildings, engineering crops to be more reflective, brightening the ocean with microbubbles on the surface, and putting up giant reflectors in space, to name a handful. However, creating aerosols in the stratosphere might be the most plausible way to make a significant global impact. The haze in the stratosphere that occurs naturally after major volcanic eruptions demonstrably cools the planet for a few years as the haze particles settle out.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“More bluntly, they’re saying that we’ve no idea what causes this failure of the models. They cannot tell us why the climate changed during those decades. And that’s deeply unsettling, because the observed early twentieth-century warming is comparable to the observed late twentieth-century warming, which the assessment reports attribute with “high confidence” to human influences.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“climate is not the weather—a distinction often missing in popular discussion. The weather anywhere varies constantly in ways both predictable and unexpected—through the day (it’s usually warmer at 4 pm than it is at 4 am), across days (as when a front passes through), with the seasons, and from year to year. On the other hand, a location’s climate is the average of its weather over decades. In fact, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization defines climate as a thirty-year average, although climate researchers will sometimes discuss averages over a period as short as ten years. So changes in the weather from one year to another do not constitute changes in climate.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The could question is very different from the question of “What should we do?” Any discussion of how the world should respond to a changing climate is best informed by scientific certainties and uncertainties. But it’s ultimately a discussion of values—one that weighs development, environment, and intergenerational and geographical equities in light of imperfect projections of future climates. And the could and should questions are different still from asking “What will we do?” Answering that involves assessing the realities of politics, economics, and technology development. Indeed, the simple truth is that there are many things the world could do and perhaps even should do—such as eliminating poverty—but which it will not do for various reasons. Importantly, making a judgment about will is not at all the same as stating an opinion about should.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The implication is that the models generally agree. But that isn’t at all the case. Comparisons among models within any of these ensembles show that, on the scales required to measure the climate’s response to human influences, model results differ dramatically both from each other and from observations. But you wouldn’t know that unless you read deep into the IPCC report. Only then would you discover that the results being presented are “averaging” models that disagree wildly with each other.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The earth formed 4.5 billion years ago with a fixed endowment of carbon. Today, that carbon is found in several different circumstances around the planet—what are called “reservoirs.” The largest reservoir by far is the earth’s crust, which contains almost all of the planet’s carbon, about 1.9 billion gigatons (1 gigaton, abbreviated Gt, is one billion tons).2 The next largest amount, about 40,000 Gt, is in the oceans, almost all of that far below the surface. There are about 2,100 Gt more stored on land in soils and living things, and 5,000–10,000 Gt in fossil fuels underground. The roughly 850 Gt of carbon in the atmosphere, almost all in the form of carbon dioxide, is equal to about 25 percent of the carbon at or near the earth’s surface (in the soils, plants, and shallow ocean) but is only 2 percent of the total carbon in the oceans.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The AR5 says pretty much the same thing for the globe as a whole, expressing—no doubt to the surprise of many—“low confidence in a global-scale trend in drought or dryness since the middle of the 20th century.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“Because the earth is not completely black, it absorbs only 70 percent of the sunlight that reaches it; the other 30 percent is reflected back into space and doesn’t contribute to the planet’s warming. That 30 percent number, corresponding to the earth’s reflectivity, is called the “albedo” (from the Latin word albus, meaning “white”). When the albedo is higher, the earth reflects more sunlight and so is a bit cooler, and conversely when the albedo is lower, the earth absorbs more sunlight and is warmer. While the planet’s average albedo is 0.30, its value at any given moment depends upon which part of the earth is facing the sun (oceans are darker, land is brighter, clouds are brighter still, and snow or ice is very bright),”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“The sun’s energy moves water among these various reservoirs to form what’s termed “the hydrological cycle.” The largest and most dynamic part of this cycle is the flow of water from the earth’s surface into the atmosphere (85 percent of this flow comes from evaporation of the ocean, the other 15 percent from the land, much of it transpired by plants). That water remains aloft for an average of ten days before condensing and falling back to the surface as rain or snow (77 percent falling on the ocean and 23 percent on the land).”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“the annual average temperature in, say, New York City (about 13°C or 55°F) can vary from year to year by more than 2°C (3.6°F), greater than the entire range of the graph.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“As the chair of a highly respected university earth sciences department told me privately, “I agree with pretty much everything you wrote, but I don’t dare say that in public.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“Indeed, as the CSSR notes, there is a pronounced decline in snow cover during the spring (and also, to some extent, in summer) as would be expected in a warming globe—especially one in which low temperatures are increasing, as discussed in Chapter 5—while snow cover during the fall and winter has been increasing modestly.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“was increasingly convinced that The Science needed a Red Team exercise, a concept I’d already been refining for a few years. In such an exercise, a group of scientists (the “Red Team”) would be charged with rigorously questioning one of the assessment reports, trying to identify and evaluate its weak spots. In essence, a qualified adversarial group would be asked “What’s wrong with this argument?” And, of course, the “Blue Team” (presumably the report’s authors) would have the opportunity to rebut the Red Team’s findings. Red Team exercises are commonly used to inform high-consequence decisions such as testing national intelligence findings or validating complex engineering projects like aircraft or spacecraft; they’re also common in cybersecurity.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“But scientists are trained to explore all possible solutions to a problem, and an important part of science advising is to lay out the full spectrum of options, along with the advantages and drawbacks of each.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“Methane, the second most important human-caused greenhouse gas, has also been increasing over the past century and so also exerts a growing warming influence on the climate.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“Precipitation is also expected to become “lumpier,” with dry areas becoming drier and wet areas wetter with more periods of intense rainfall. This could lead to an increase in flooding in some areas, but since higher temperatures would also increase evaporation from land, droughts might also increase. There is little consensus among models about exactly how, where, and when these changes would play out.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“insulation provided by the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which raises our planet’s surface temperature to its observed value. How that insulation”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“eventually we were able to determine annual average albedos accurate to ± 0.003 from 1999 to 2014 that showed no significant trend, in agreement with the satellite values.5 That uncertainty is about twice that of the satellite-derived values, but at one-thousandth the cost.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters

“An actual “climate denier” would be, say, an antiscience politician who refuses to accept the evidence of the data—quite the opposite of my position.”
― Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters