"Oooh! Obama Science Advisor Slams Climate Action!" Yes, It's Another Lomborg Piece Of Shit

[hatrack]

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But in a new book, “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t and Why it Matters,” the architect of the red team/blue team idea has resurrected it in a new form. The book, by physicist Steven Koonin, a former chief scientist at BP who did a two-year stint in the Obama Administration, already has won praise from anti-climate-action bloggers, columnists and The Wall Street Journal. “Any reader would benefit from its deft, lucid tour of climate science, the best I’ve seen,” wrote Journal columnist Holman W. Jenkins Jr. about the book, which is scheduled for publication Tuesday. In “Unsettled,” Koonin describes himself as a scientist who focused on alternative energy—first at BP, and later, as part of President Barack Obama’s team—but who began to have doubts about climate science after leaving the Obama administration. Beginning in 2013, when Koonin was selected to lead the American Physical Society’s review of its statement on climate change, Koonin writes, he became “not only surprised, but shaken by the realization that climate science was far less mature than I had supposed.”

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Scientists who have spent their careers studying climate science said that Koonin’s critiques are superficial, misleading and marred by overgeneralization. The science at the core of “Unsettled” is fatally out of date, they say, and is based on the 2013 physical science report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Since then, climate scientists have continued to learn more about the intensity and potentially catastrophic disruption of a warming climate. And while a decade ago, the effects of climate change still seemed a future threat, its impacts—sea level rise; shrinking glaciers; more extreme and frequent storms; drought and wildfire—already are being felt around the world.

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“The bottom line is that despite uncertainties in the magnitude and patterns of natural climate variability, human-caused climate change fingerprints have been identified in pretty much every aspect of climate change scientists have looked at,” said Benjamin Santer, an atmospheric scientist and leading climate modeler at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Climate scientists also noted that Koonin, a theoretical physicist, was skeptical of consensus climate science long before the American Physical Society review. “What he does is he just takes potshots,” said Don Wuebbles, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois, who has helped lead the National Climate Assessment, which Koonin’s book criticizes roundly. “He pulls one figure out of context, and then makes a whole chapter on it.”

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Koonin, who did not respond to a request for an interview, writes that his book is an effort to increase understanding of scientific uncertainties at a time when the government is making “trillion-dollar decisions about reducing human influences on the climate.” “The impact of human influences on the climate is too uncertain (and very likely too small) compared to the daunting amount of change required to actually achieve the goal of eliminating net global emissions by, say, 2075,” Koonin writes. (The net-zero target of many of the largest of the 197 nations that have signed the Paris climate agreement, including the United States, is 2050.)

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04052021/a-new-book-feeds-climate-doubters-but-scientists-say-the-conclusions-are-misleading-and-out-of-date/

[-misanthroptimist]

1. Somehow these anti-climate change clowns...

...rarely, if ever, note the fact that uncertainty runs in both directions. Things can be worse than projected. If I had to bet, I'd lay my money down on things being worse rather than better.