Climate reality

Physicist who became a climate truth teller


HOLMAN W. JENKINS JR


Barack Obama is one of many who have declared an “epistemological crisis”, in which our society is losing its handle on something called truth. Thus an interesting experiment will be his and other Democrats’ response to a book by Steven Koonin, who was chief scientist of the Obama Energy Department.

Koonin argues not against climate science but that what the media and politicians and activists say about climate science has drifted so far out of touch with the actual science as to be absurdly, demonstrably false.

This is not an altogether innocent drifting, he points out. In 2019 a report by the presidents of the US National Academies of Sciences claimed the “magnitude and frequency of certain extreme events are increasing”. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is deemed to compile the best science, says all such claims should be treated with “low confidence”.

In 2017 the US government’s Climate Science Special Report claimed, in the lower 48 states, the “number of high temperature records set in the past two decades far exceeds the number of low temperature records”. On closer inspection, that’s because there has been no increase in the rate of new record highs since 1900, only a decline in the number of new lows.

Then there was 2018’s US Fourth National Climate Assessment, issued in Donald Trump’s second year, which relied on such overegged worst-case emissions and temperature projections that even climate activists were abashed (a revolt continues to this day). “The report was written more to persuade than to inform,” Koonin says. “It masquerades as objective science but was written as — all right, I’ll use the word — propaganda.”

Koonin is a Brooklyn-born math whiz and theoretical physicist. He taught at the California Institute of Technology for nearly three decades, serving as provost in charge of setting the scientific agenda for one of the country’s premier scientific institutions. In 2004 he joined BP as chief scientist. Using $US500m of BP’s money, Koonin created the Energy Biosciences Institute at Berkeley, which is still going strong. He found his interest in climate science growing, “first of all because it’s wonderful science. It’s the most multidisciplinary thing I know. It goes from the isotopic composition of microfossils in the sea floor all the way through to the regulation of power plants.”

From deeply examining the world’s energy system, he also became convinced the real climate crisis was a crisis of political and scientific candour. He went to his boss and said, “John, the world isn’t going to be able to reduce emissions enough to make much difference.”

His thoughts seem to be governed by an all-embracing realism. Hence his book coming out next month, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.

Any reader would benefit from its deft, lucid tour of climate science. His rigorous parsing of the evidence will have you questioning the political class’s compulsion to manufacture certainty where certainty doesn’t exist. You will come to doubt the usefulness of century-long forecasts claiming to know how 1 per cent shifts in variables will affect a global climate that we don’t understand with anything resembling 1 per cent precision.

His book lands at a crucial moment. In its first new assessment of climate science in eight years, the UN climate panel will rule anew next year on a conundrum that has not advanced in 40 years: how much warming should we expect from a slightly enhanced greenhouse effect?

The panel is expected to consult 40-plus climate computer simulations — testament to its inability to pick out a single trusted one. Worse, the models have been diverging, not coming together as you might hope. Without tweaking, they don’t even agree on current simulated global average surface temperature — varying by 3C, three times the observed change during the past century. (If you wonder why the IPCC expresses itself in terms of a temperature “anomaly” above a baseline, it’s because the models produce different baselines.)

Says Koonin: “There are situations where models do a wonderful job. Nuclear weapons, when we model them because we don’t test them any more. And when Boeing builds an aeroplane, they will model the heck out of it before they bend any metal.

“But these are much more controlled, engineered situations,” he adds, “whereas the climate is a natural phenomenon. It’s going to do whatever it’s going to do. And it’s hard to observe.

“You need long, precise observations to understand its natural variability and how it responds to external influences.”

Yet these models supply most of our insight into how the weather might change when emissions raise the atmosphere’s CO2 component from 0.028 per cent in preindustrial times to 0.056 per cent later in this century.

“I’ve been building models and watching others build models for 45 years,” Koonin says. Climate models “are not to the standard you would trust your life to or even your trillions of dollars to”.

Younger scientists in particular lose sight of the difference between reality and simulation: “They have grown up with the models. They don’t have the kind of mathematical or physical intuition you get when you have to do things by pencil and paper.”

All this you can hear from climate modellers themselves, and from scientists nearer the “consensus” than Koonin is. Yet the caveats seem to fall away when plans to spend trillions of dollars are bruited. For the record, he agrees that the world has warmed by 1C since 1900 and will warm by another 1C this century, placing him near the middle of the consensus.

Neither he nor most economic studies have seen anything in the offing that would justify the rapid and wholesale abandoning of fossil fuels, even if China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and others could be dissuaded from pursuing prosperity. He’s a fan of advanced nuclear power eventually to provide carbon-free baseload power.

He sees a bright future for electric passenger vehicles. “The main reason isn’t emissions. They’re just shifted to the power grid, and transportation anyway is only about 15 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. There are other advantages: local pollution is much less and noise pollution is less. You’re sitting in a traffic jam and all of these six or four-cylinder engines are throbbing up and down burning fuel and just doing no good at all.”

But these are changes it makes no economic sense to force. Let technology and markets work at their own pace. The climate might continue to change, at a pace that’s hard to perceive, but societies will adapt. “As a species, we’re very good at adapting.”

The public now believes CO2 is something that can be turned up and down, but about 40 per cent of the CO2 emitted a century ago remains in the atmosphere. Any warming it causes emerges slowly, so any benefit of reducing emissions would be small and distant. Everything Koonin and others see in the science suggests a slow, modest effect, not a runaway warming. If they’re wrong, we don’t have tools to apply yet anyway. Decades from now, we might have carbon capture — removing CO2 directly from the atmosphere at a manageable cost.

Koonin wants voters, politicians and business leaders to have an accurate account of the science. He doesn’t care where the debate lands. Yet his expectations are ruled by a keen sense of realities.

Even John Kerry, Joe Biden’s climate tsar, recently admitted that Biden’s net-zero climate plan will have zero effect on the climate if developing countries don’t go along (and they have little incentive to do so). Koonin hopes “a graceful out for everybody” will be to see the impulse for global climate regulation “morph into much more impactful local environmental action: smog, plastic, green jobs. Forget the global aspect of this.”

This is a view widely shared and little expressed. First, the mainstream climate community will try to ignore his book, even as his publicists work the TV bookers in hopes of making a splash. Then Koonin knows will come the avalanche of name-calling that befalls anybody trying to inject some practical nuance into political discussions of climate.

He adds with a laugh: “My married daughter is happy that she’s got a different last name.”

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL


‘(Climate models) are not to the standard you would trust your life to’
STEVEN KOONIN
THEORETICAL PHYSICIST