Thread by @docrussjackson

The unhinged grifting anti-expert, anti-animal, anti-protest, anti-Left anti-everything COVID-sceptic Libertarian cranks at #Spiked - who have received funding from Koch & other climate-change deniers - continue to pump out climate-change denial from fellow discredited cranks. 🥱

The latest climate-change-downplaying grifter is Steven E. Koonin, who became publicly involved in the policy debate about climate change starting with a Wall Street Journal opinion piece in 2017.

In 2019, Trump proposed a "Presidential Committee on Climate Security" to conduct an "adversarial" review of the scientific consensus on climate change. Koonin helped recruit but it was scrapped in favor of an initiative not "subject to the same level of public disclosure."

In 2021, Koonin published the book 'Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, & Why It Matters.'

It was widely & firmly condemned as outdated & misleading.

Physicist Raymond Pierrehumbert criticized Koonin's 2014 commentary in The WSJ, "Climate Science Is Not Settled," as "a litany of discredited arguments" with nuggets of truth... buried beneath a rubble of false or misleading claims from the standard climate skeptics’ canon."

To pick a few examples:

He claims that the rate of sea level rise now is no greater than it was early in the 20th century, but this is a conclusion one could draw only through the most shameless cherry-picking...

He claims that the human imprint on climate is only "comparable" to natural variability, whereas multiple lines of research confirm that the climate signature of human-caused greenhouse gas increases has already risen well above the background noise level...

A large part of the natural greenhouse effect is due to substances (mainly water vapor, and consequent cloudiness) that are in the atmosphere only because carbon dioxide keeps the Earth warm enough to prevent them from condensing out...

He states that the effects of carbon dioxide will last "several centuries," whereas "several millennia" would be closer, & he doesn’t appreciate that oceans cannot be a cause of long-term warming because almost all of the mass of the oceans is colder than the lower atmosphere.

His 2021 book "Unsettled" was also panned.

In a review in respected journal Scientific American, economist Gary Yohe wrote that Koonin "falsely suggest[s] that we don’t understand the risks well enough to take action":

"The science is stronger than ever around findings that speak to the likelihood & consequences of climate impacts, & has been growing stronger for decades. In the early days of research, the uncertainty was wide; but with each subsequent step that uncertainty has narrowed".

"This is how science works, & in the case of climate, the early indications detected & attributed in the 1980s & 1990s, have come true, over & over again & sooner than anticipated... [Decision makers] are using the best & most honest science to inform prospective investments...

...in abatement (reducing greenhouse gas emissions to diminish the estimated likelihoods of dangerous climate change impacts) and adaptation (reducing vulnerabilities to diminish their current and projected consequences)."

scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-…

Physicist Mark Boslough posted a critical review: "Koonin makes use of an old strawman concocted by opponents of climate science in the 1990s to create an illusion of arrogant scientists, biased media, & lying politicians – making them easier to attack."
yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/05/a-crit…

Nonprofit news organization InsideClimate News reported that climate scientists call Koonin's conclusions "fatally out of date... and based on the 2013 physical science report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)."

web.archive.org/web/2021050512…

Mark P. Mills, a venture capitalist in the nuclear power & fossil fuel extraction industries lauded the article as "rebut[ing] much of the dominant political narrative." Leading scientists said Mills merely repeated Koonin’s incorrect & misleading claims.

climatefeedback.org/evaluation/wal…