David Henderson Reviews Steven Koonin's Unsettled

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"His [Steven Koonin’s] book is full of important, factual information and insights. One of his main messages is that there is much more uncertainty about where the climate is headed than many climate scientists and even a higher percentage of people in the media are willing to admit. And the good news is that the long-term economic effect of even substantial global warming will be small.

Among the scientific sources Koonin uses to make his case are the very reports by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that reporters draw on. The difference is that Koonin spells out what the reports actually say, whereas reporters tend to draw selectively from the reports in ways that – according to Koonin – mislead the reader. It would probably come as a surprise to most people, for example, that the oceans are still rising slowly, that forest fires have not become more common, and that hurricanes are not more frequent than they were 100 years ago. Koonin, who agrees that the earth has warmed and will likely warm further, considers the various options for slowing global warming. He shows how hard it would be, especially in developing countries, to reach net zero emissions by 2050 or even by 2075. So he considers various alternative ways of slowing global warming and also the idea of adapting to global warming.

This is from David R. Henderson, “Good Reasoning on Global Warming,” Financial and Economic Review, Vol. 21, Issue 2, June 2022.

Another excerpt:

One of people’s biggest worries is that global warming will cause glaciers to melt and, therefore, increase the global average sea level. The CSSR mentioned earlier added to this worry by pointing out that the average had increased much more quickly after 1993 than before, rising by 7 centimetres in the later period. Koonin wondered if one could find other recent 25-year periods in which sea levels also rose quickly. He found one, the period from 1935 to 1960, when the average rose by 6 centimetres. Koonin argues that one should look at the whole period and not “cherry pick” the periods in which sea levels rose particularly quickly. Koonin notes that he sent his criticism to the lead author of the CSSR report, Don Wuebbles of the University of Illinois, and to Robert Kopp of Rutgers University, the main author of the CSSR’s chapter on sea level rise. Both, he writes, agreed with his criticism, though claimed that they would have pointed this out in their report, but that it was too late.

Read the whole thing."