Obama administration scientist slams claims of climate ‘emergency’: Heat waves are 'no more common than they were in 1900'

By Lawrence Richard of The Washington Examiner. 

"Climate alarmists are wrong to call perceived drops in temperature and other climate changes an “emergency,” a scientist who worked for the Obama administration argued.

“Both research literature and government reports state clearly that heat waves in the US are now no more common than they were in 1900, and that the warmest temperatures in the US have not risen in the past fifty years,” Steven Koonin, the undersecretary for science at the Department of Energy in the Obama administration, wrote in an op-ed on Saturday.

Dr. Koonin clarified: “Yes, it’s true that the globe is warming, and that humans are exerting a warming influence upon it. But beyond that — to paraphrase the classic movie ‘The Princess Bride’ — I do not think ‘The Science’ says what you think it says.”

The former undersecretary then provided three examples to highlight how the environmentalist narrative differs from these reports.

“Humans have had no detectable impact on hurricanes over the past century,” he wrote, adding that “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,” he said.

Koonin specified that misinformation is not always intentional.

“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 said, describing how “the public gets their climate information almost exclusively from the media.”

“As a result, most people don’t get the whole story,” he added.

In the op-ed, the environmental scientist explained his background and credentials, and he clarified his reason for sharing the climate assessment data.

He said it started in 2013, when he was asked by the American Physical Society to update the organization’s public stance on the changing climate. Over the next year, Koonin said he initiated a workshop to act as a “stress test” for the climate science community.

“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,” he wrote.

He said he discovered that “humans exert a growing, but physically small, warming influence on the climate. The results from many different climate models disagree with, or even contradict, each other and many kinds of observations. In short, the science is insufficient to make useful predictions about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what effect our actions will have on it.”

Since that discovery seven years ago, Koonin explained that the public narrative about the climate has shifted away from any actual scientific data and is, instead, being driven by alarmist phrases, such as “climate emergency,” “climate crisis,” and “climate disaster.”

The scientist said that President Joe Biden has added to this alarmist language by appointing climate envoy John Kerry and announcing that the administration will spend almost $2 trillion to combat the “existential threat to humanity.”"