‘Unsettled’ Review: The ‘Consensus’ On Climate

A top Obama scientist looks at the evidence on warming and CO2 emissions and rebuts much of the dominant political narrative.

By Mark P. Mills. He is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Excerpts:

"“Heat waves in the US are now no more common than they were in 1900” and “the warmest temperatures in the US have not risen in the past fifty years. . . . 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 eighty years ago. . . . The net economic impact of human-induced climate change will be minimal through at least the end of this century.”"

"The heart of the science debate, however, isn’t about whether the globe is warmer or whether humanity contributed. The important questions are about the magnitude of civilization’s contribution and the speed of changes; and, derivatively, about the urgency and scale of governmental response. Mr. Koonin thinks most readers will be surprised at what the data show. I dare say they will. 

As Mr Koonin illustrates, tornado frequency and severity are also not trending up; nor are the number and severity of droughts. The extent of global fires has been trending significantly downward. The rate of sea-level rise has not accelerated. Global crop yields are rising, not falling. And while global atmospheric CO₂ levels are obviously higher now than two centuries ago, they’re not at any record planetary high—they’re at a low that has only been seen once before in the past 500 million years."

"When it comes to the vaunted computer models, Mr. Koonin is persuasively skeptical. It’s a big problem, he says, when models can’t retroactively “predict” events that have already happened. And he notes that some of the “tuning” done to models so that they work better amounts to “cooking the books.” He should know, having written one of the first textbooks on using computers to model physics phenomena.

Mr. Koonin’s science credentials are impeccable—unlike, say, those of one well-known Swedish teenager to whom the media affords great attention on climate matters. He has been a professor of physics at Caltech and served as the top scientist in Barack Obama’s Energy Department. The book is copiously referenced and relies on widely accepted government documents."

 

Unsettled

By Steven E. Koonin
BenBella, 306 pages, $24.95