Koonin

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ANOTHER PHYSICIST EMERITUS GOES CRANK?

BP OIL

merri ok

HACKADEMIC WRIGHT ZELDIN bs 8 25 W 4 HACKS CWG CURRY

In 2025, with John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven E. Koonin, and Roy Spencer, McKitrick was a member of the United States Department of Energy's Climate Working Group and a co-author of its A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate (23 July 2025)^[7]

see prager U

fig leaf?

book penguin random house 2021 bella bella?

BP jasons

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yt 8 26

Is Climate Science "Unsettled"? This guy wants you to believe it is.

channel Just Have a Think

Oh..and me... Dave Borlace. Born 1969. BSc in Technology from the Open University in the UK. After a 30 year career in People and Project Management, I now work full time on the channel thanks to the amazing folks who support me on Patreon at patreon.com/justhaveathink

108,666 views Aug 9, 2026

For more than four years, Steve Koonin's book 'Unsettled' has been cited by politicians, commentators and climate sceptics as evidence that the scientific consensus on climate change has been exaggerated. Koonin recently gave a 15 minute summary lecture of his views at the UK 'Alliance for Responsible Citizenship'. But are his arguments a fair interpretation of the evidence, or is he simply relying on carefully selected facts, cherry-picked statistics and misleading comparisons? Help support this channel's independence at / justhaveathink

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How Chris Wright recruited a team to upend climate science

:{by Benjamin Storrow | 08/11/2025

Climatewire

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Climatewire

How Chris Wright recruited a team to upend climate science

:{By Benjamin Storrow | 08/11/2025

The Energy secretary handpicked climate contrarians to write a report that EPA is using to undermine U.S. regulation of greenhouse gases.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright addresses members of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee during a May 21 hearing.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright addresses members of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee during a May 21 hearing. Mark Schiefelbein/AP

It started with a call from Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

In late March, a little over a month into his job leading the Department of Energy, Wright phoned a research scientist named Roy Spencer at his home. Wright wanted to know if Spencer, a former NASA scientist, would be interested in contributing to a climate study.

Spencer said yes.

Other scientists received similar calls from Wright. They included Judith Curry, a climatologist and professor emerita at the Georgia Institute of Technology; John Christy, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville; and Steven Koonin, a former chief scientist for BP who also served as an undersecretary at the Energy Department during the Obama administration.

All the researchers had one thing in common: Each had spent years questioning the mainstream consensus around climate science. Most have worked with conservative activists and fossil fuel interests to cast doubt over the dangers of a warming planet.

“He had been following my research for many years,” Spencer said, recalling his conversation with Wright in a recent blog post.

The end result of Wright’s hand-picked team was a 141-page DOE report released last month that questioned the basic tenets of climate science, including the accuracy of climate models, the threats posed by sea-level rise and the links between extreme weather events and humanity’s use of fossil fuels.

The document could serve as a legal battering ram for President Donald Trump’s efforts to eliminate climate regulations; EPA cited the study 16 times when it released a proposal last month to rescind the legal designation underpinning climate regulations.

The study also represents a personal triumph for Wright, a former executive at fracking services company who has spent years arguing that the benefits of burning fossil fuels outweigh the costs. In an interview on CNN, Wright said the study was intended to promote “a real debate and discussion about climate change, and get away from the cancel culture.”

He told a Wall Street Journal podcast that “these claims of disaster and impending meltdowns, they’re just at odds with the actual facts.”

Such assertions have attracted fierce criticism from many climate scientists, with some going as far to label the study “fossil fuel propaganda” and accusing its authors of cherry-picking scientific evidence to suit their narrative.

John Nielsen-Gammon, the Texas state climatologist and a professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M University, struck a less strident tone.

Advocates and opponents of climate policy are both prone to making exaggerated claims about the science. But climate science itself is sound while the dangers posed by a warming planet are real, he said.

“There’s a risk that has real consequences in lives and property if society as a whole ignores the changes that are taking place,” Nielsen-Gammon said.

A priority for Wright

Vice President JD Vance (left) listens to Energy Secretary Chris Wright speak during a March 28 visit to the U.S. military's Pituffik Space Base in Greenland.

Just how much Wright personally invested in DOE’s study has become clear in his media appearances over the last week and in public comments by the report’s authors.

“Only one of the executive-level appointees in the Administration had the background knowledge and interest to invest in making this science report happen: Energy Secretary Chris Wright,” Spencer wrote on his blog.

In an email, Curry said she spoke with Wright three times, once when he invited her to participate, once regarding the White House vetting process and a third time with the wider group.

“He invited me because he regarded me as objective, and willing to listen to and consider a broad range of perspectives,” she wrote.

Wright also tapped Travis Fisher, an energy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, to coordinate the study.

“The secretary’s plan was simple,” Fisher wrote in a blog post on Cato’s website. “We would reorient the debate about climate science and climate policy by confronting the gatekeepers head-on.”

Fisher and Spencer did not respond to requests for comment.

DOE’s study comes at a time when the Trump administration has launched an attack on climate science, pulling down the National Climate Assessment from its government webpage, proposing deep cuts in scientific research and exploring a plan to end the mission of a pair of satellite’s used to measure carbon dioxide levels around the world.

DOE did not respond to a request to interview Wright or a list of written questions. But Wright told the Wall Street Journal he was seeking “honest, true scientists” who were “really driven by the data” to lead the study. In a forward to the study, Wright wrote that he had sought “a diverse team of independent experts” to review climate science.

“I exerted no control over their conclusions,” he wrote.

Yet all the researchers he selected were well known as outliers in the field of climate science with a reputation for questioning the dangers of a warming planet.

In 2017, when then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt proposed the idea of pitting climate contrarians against their mainstream counterparts in a “red team, blue team” exercise, the conservative Heartland Institute sent EPA a list of skeptics who could fill out the red team.

Four of the DOE study’s authors — Christy, Curry, Koonin and Spencer — were on it. The work of the fifth DOE researcher, the Canadian environmental economist Ross McKitrick, is cited on that list, but his name wasn’t put forth by Heartland for a red team position.

The decision to select a handful of scientists known for their skepticism of climate science fit a pattern for Wright, who over the years has pressed the idea that fossil fuels are key to human prosperity and that efforts to curtail their use is harmful.

Liberty Energy, the fracking services company Wright ran until becoming Energy secretary, released a report last year that argued climate policy threatened to slow human progress unleashed by fossil fuels. It listed 10 key takeaways.

No. 9 read, “Climate change is a global challenge but is far from the world’s greatest threat to human life.”

No. 10 said, “Zero Energy Poverty by 2050 is a superior goal compared to Net Zero 2050.”

The forward Wright penned to DOE’s study hits on those same points.

“Climate change is real, and it deserves attention. But it is not the greatest threat facing humanity,” it reads. “That distinction belongs to global energy poverty.”

Critics: It’s about advancing an agenda

(From left) Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin pose for a photo with the Trans-Alaska pipeline in the background after a June 2 news conference in Alaska.

Scott Denning, a climate scientist who recently retired from Colorado State University and who debated Wright on a Denver television show in 2015, said he recognized many of Wright’s talking points.

It is telling that the secretary had personally phoned the report’s authors and asked them to conduct a study, he said.

“He has this shtick about how fossil fuels have made the world much better,” said Denning, who then paraphrased what he sees as Wright’s viewpoint: “Everything uses fossil fuels. If we don’t have fossil fuels, we’re going back to pre-modern times.”

But Denning said, “I think that’s just such a false choice.”

Nielsen-Gammon said there is “sensitivity” within the community of climate scientists about publishing results that might be viewed negatively.

But he said that feeling is counteracted by the sheer amount of scrutiny climate science receives and the “extraordinary process” used by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “where international communities of scientists get together regularly and hash through the evidence and figure out what’s well supported and what isn’t.”

Nielsen-Gammon said he disagreed with the DOE report’s finding that extreme rainfall events were not increasing in frequency and intensity — his area of expertise — noting that the report did not cite a number of studies on the subject, including one he published last year.

Others have been even more strident in their criticism.

In a recent Substack post, the climate scientist Zeke Hausfather said the DOE study incorrectly cited his 2019 paper on the performance of climate models. That study compared climate models’ past emissions projections to observed emissions. DOE used it to bolster a claim that climate models had tended to overestimate emissions.

The only problem: the paper concluded just the opposite, Hausfather wrote.

“They scoured my paper on the performance of climate models to find the one figure (deep in the supplementary materials) to reinforce the point they were trying to make, and never actually referred to the broader conclusion of the paper that old models had by-and-large performed quite well,” he said.

The study’s authors largely have dismissed such criticisms. In an interview on the Heartland Institute’s ”The Climate Realism Show,” Curry called such critiques ”petty.”

“If we’re going to reference their paper, they would have liked us to make a different point,” she said, referring specifically to Hausfather. “Well, no, that’s not the point we’re making, but we do think that your graph is particularly informative, and we’re going to use that as part of our narrative.”

In her email, Curry called the cherry-picking claim “rather bizarre.”

“All of the issues that we supposedly ‘cherry picked’ were somehow not included in previous assessment reports (which were also arguably cherry picked),” she wrote.

Several prominent climate researchers argue the goal of DOE’s climate study is not to advance a scientific debate. Rather, it’s about advancing the Trump administration’s political agenda.

Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M, wrote on X that the study “should be thought of as a law brief from attorneys defending their client, carbon dioxide.”

The study figures prominently in EPA’s recent proposal to revoke the endangerment finding, the legal designation obligating the agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

DOE sent the study to EPA on May 27, after which it was reviewed by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin as part of his deliberations over whether to repeal the endangerment finding, according to a copy of the proposal posted in the Federal Register.

EPA’s proposal cites DOE’s study 16 times, according to a review by POLITICO’s E&E News, using its conclusion to bolster the agency’s case that the endangerment finding should be repealed.

They include claims that “recent data and analyses suggest that aggregate sea level rise has been minimal,” that climate models “may be based on inaccurate assumptions, and that attributing anthropogenic emissions to extreme weather events “is more difficult than previously believed and demand additional analysis.”

In the Heartland interview, Curry said the DOE researchers were aware EPA was interested in their study. She said the report was completed in May, but its publication was delayed to coincide with the release of EPA’s proposal.

But she added: “We were not, you know, instructed in any way to deal with endangerment finding related issues. We figured these were on the table, but we didn’t focus on that at all.”

This story also appears in Energywire.

Trump team readies more attacks on mainstream climate science

:{:{by Scott Waldman | 08/18/2025}:

One author of a recent Department of Energy report that assailed established climate science said the 141-page document is only the beginning — and that the Trump administration plans to do more to undercut research that shows humanity’s use of fossil fuels is warming the planet and endangering its inhabitants.

Steve Koonin, one of the report’s five main contributors, told POLITICO’s E&E News last week that the document likely is a precursor to a sustained assault on mainstream global warming research. Under discussion are plans to hold a public debate about climate science, write a line-by-line rebuttal of the National Climate Assessment and ready a counterattack against climate scientists critical of last month’s Energy Department report.

A key next step, Koonin said, is to expand the Trump administration’s team of climate contrarians beyond the five scientists who wrote the initial report. The document already has attracted hundreds of responses through the Federal Register, and Koonin said they need the reinforcements to push back against the criticism.

“It can’t be five against the world,” said Koonin, a former chief scientist for BP. “We will have to enlist other scientists.”

But that may be easier said than done — as there is only a small pool of credentialed researchers who back the claims of the DOE report.

The document, for example, questions the link between climate change and humanity’s output of carbon dioxide. And it suggests that “CO2-induced warming might be less damaging economically than commonly believed.”

The claims run counter to the findings of tens of thousands of scientists from around the world who have spent decades studying climate change. The overwhelming consensus from these researchers is that the modern world’s burning of oil, gas and coal is pumping planet-warming gases such as carbon dioxide into atmosphere, creating a greenhouse effect. And with a hotter planet comes a cascade of consequences, from rising sea levels to more intense hurricanes and wildfires.

Numerous researchers cited in the DOE report said their work had been cherry-picked and presented in a misleading way — and that it recycled arguments that had long been debunked.

“If you are a sophisticated academic — which I would put all of them in that category — you know how to basically torture the data long enough so it’ll tell you what you want to hear,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University who is leading an academic response to the DOE report.

But Koonin, a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, said that kind of pushback was expected — and in fact plays into a long-running plan to conduct a “red team vs. blue team” exercise for climate science.

The term is a nod to a type of military planning that uses adversarial reviews to identify potential weaknesses. The report is, in effect, the red team’s opening move and Koonin said the criticism will start to make up a blue-team response.

“What we do is a more accurate depiction of climate science for the general public,” he said.

Koonin was preparing a similar effort during the first Trump administration, but it was blocked by White House aides preparing for the 2020 election. At that time, Trump had personally considered a televised prime-time climate debate.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who recruited Koonin and the other four researchers to write the DOE report, told CNN last week that he wants to “update” the National Climate Assessment but did not provide any details. He also endorsed the idea of climate debates.

“We’ll probably have public events here in D.C. this fall,” Wright said. “We want to have an honest dialogue with the American people about climate change.”

Koonin said he expects to carefully scrutinize and challenge every paragraph of the National Climate Assessment, a long-running report mandated by Congress that identifies the threats that global warming poses to the United States.

Judith Curry, one of the other five authors of the DOE report, said she wants a debate — but also wants the chance to recast the National Climate Assessment and other government science reports by emphasizing uncertainty. She envisions a release of a new report infused with disagreements and disputes.

“A public debate is one approach, but I would like to see a broadening of the tent for the ‘official’ assessments to include disagreement, debate, uncertainty,” she wrote in an email.

Curry is a former climatologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In addition to Curry and Koonin, the report’s five authors include Canadian environmental economist Ross McKitrick, as well as John Christy and Roy Spencer, atmospheric scientists at the University of Alabama, Huntsville.

A DOE spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

2014: Red team, blue team

If there is a climate debate, Koonin said he wants to structure it much like a 2014 event at New York University that pitted a team of climate scientists against some of the DOE report authors, including Curry and Christy.

It was a daylong effort organized by Koonin, in which the two teams presented their case to a panel of distinguished physicists from the American Physical Society. For the upcoming debate he now envisions, Koonin said both sides would exchange research notes and talking points ahead of time.

“Healthy debate, challenge response is just the way you do science, and that has been sorely absent from this business for far too long,” Koonin said. “If you can show that it’s wrong, we’ll change it.”

Exaggerating uncertainty in science while downplaying broad-based findings long has been a strategy of conservative groups and lawmakers opposed to fossil fuel regulations, scientists say. The current Trump administration has made it a priority to slash climate regulations and boost U.S. production of fossil fuels.

Ben Santer, a climate scientist who worked at DOE for 30 years before retiring in 2021, participated in Koonin’s 2014 debate at New York University — and he remembers it differently.

He said the red team failed to make a compelling case to the panel of physicists, who ultimately rejected their argument and did not issue a statement that questioned climate science findings. The red team has refused to acknowledge any weakness to their arguments, which have long been rejected by the vast majority of climate scientists, he said.

After the debate, Koonin resigned from the effort he organized and soon after dismissed the field of climate science in the conservative *Wall Street Journal* editorial page for being “not yet mature enough to usefully answer the difficult and important questions being asked of it,” Santer noted.

In response, Koonin acknowledged that he resigned but disputed the notion that the red team “lost” and said a transcript of the event shows a strong response by the red team.

Santer also pointed out that debate — and the weighing of disparate hypotheses — long has been an essential part of science. He said the scientific community for years has accounted for the arguments of Koonin’s team.

“The notion that they have not been part of the community and have not had the opportunity to convince others of the correctness of their arguments is just plain wrong,” Santer said. “The bottom line is, they haven’t succeeded in defending the arguments that they now present in the DOE report.”

The report is not a genuine effort to gain a new understanding, he said, but rather “provide political cover for rescinding the endangerment finding.”

The report was released the same day the Trump administration announced it was trying to overturn the finding, which gives EPA the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Santer said the claims by Koonin and Energy Secretary Wright that the small group of fringe researchers had been silenced by the larger scientific community were not true.

Their arguments have been explored and debunked already, he said, by years of good science.

“These are questions,” he said, “that we’ve been adjudicating for decades in thousands of peer-reviewed publications.”

This story also appears in*Energywire.

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Climatewire

EPA attacks climate science. Here are the facts.

by Chelsea Harvey, Scott Waldman | 07/30/2025 06:20 AM EDT

EXPERIENCE E&E NEWS FIRSTHAND

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Environmental Groups Sue Over D.O.E. Report Downplaying Climate Change

The lawsuit seeks to block the Trump administration from repealing the legal foundation for regulating climate pollution.

By Lisa Friedman

Aug. 15, 2025

A new lawsuit in federal court alleges that the Trump administration violated the law by secretly recruiting a group of people who reject the scientific consensus on climate change to write a report downplaying global warming.

The Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists, both environmental groups, accused the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency of “flagrant violations” of a law that governs advisory committees.

The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts on Tuesday. It alleges that in March Chris Wright, the energy secretary, “quietly arranged for five handpicked skeptics of the effects of climate change” to form a committee called the Climate Working Group that then wrote a report downplaying the threat of rising greenhouse gas emissions. Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, cited the report to justify a plan to repeal the legal foundation for regulating climate pollution.

But the Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972 does not allow federal agencies to recruit or rely on secret groups when engaging in policymaking, according to the lawsuit. The law requires that any groups developed to advise federal policy must be disclosed and that meetings, emails and other records be made public.

“This is one of the most brazen violations of federal law on one of the single most consequential issues to the lives of millions of Americans,” said Vickie Patton, general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund.

The lawsuit alleges that the agencies “have sought to manufacture a basis to reject” widespread scientific agreement that the burning of fossil fuels is the primary contributor to global warming, and that swift action is needed to avoid the worst consequences.

On Thursday the environmental groups filed a separate motion asking the court to block the E.P.A. from moving forward with a plan to repeal a scientific determination made by the government in 2009 that climate pollution harms public health and welfare. That assessment, known as the endangerment finding, is the basis for regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.

Officials with the Department of Energy did not respond to a request for comment. An E.P.A. official said the agency does not comment on current or pending litigation.

The authors of the Department of Energy report were Steven E. Koonin, a physicist and author of a best-selling book that calls climate science “unsettled”; Judith Curry, a climatologist who has cautioned of alarmism about warming; John Christy, an atmospheric scientist who doubts the extent to which human activity has caused global warming; Roy Spencer, a meteorologist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville; and Ross McKitrick, an economics professor at the University of Guelph in Canada.

Dr. Koonin said in an email that he is not an attorney and not qualified to offer an opinion on the lawsuit. Dr. Curry said in an email that the Climate Working Group “provided technical information to the DOE, not policy advice.” Dr. Christy and Mr. McKitrick declined to comment, and Dr. Spencer did not respond to a request for comment.

Documents obtained by the Environmental Defense Fund under public records laws show that Dr. Koonin began contacting Trump administration officials within weeks of President Trump’s inauguration. In one email exchange, Dr. Koonin reached out in February to Mr. Zeldin’s chief of staff, Eric Amidon.

“I was told (through a mutual friend of mine and the Administrator’s) that I should contact you to set up a meeting with Mr. Zeldin,” Dr. Koonin wrote. “The subject is to offer technical assistance from me and colleagues in the review of the Endangerment Finding.”

Mr. Amidon replied that the agency was “moving right along on this topic” and said he would set up a call for Dr. Koonin with E.P.A. officials. On Friday Dr. Koonin said the call never occurred, writing in an email, “A search of my records shows no further contact with the EPA (whether by phone, video, or in person)” after the Feb. 16 email exchange.

Dr. Koonin did send Mr. Amidon a memo of what he called “inconvenient truths” on climate change, including a claim widely rejected by mainstream scientists that “there is no basis to conclude that human emissions enhance natural ‘greenhouse’ warming in any amount.”

Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 16, 2025, Section A, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: Suit Says U.S. Used Skeptics for Report Dismissing Climate Change. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

See more on: U.S. Politics, Environmental Defense Fund, Union of Concerned Scientists

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MMA

Under the leadership of Bari Weiss, The Free Press’ climate change coverage mirrors that of right-wing media outlets like Fox News

As the editor-in-chief of CBS News, Weiss will oversee the broadcast news leader in climate coverage

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Allison Fisher

Published 11/04/25

In early October, Paramount Skydance bought the The Free Press and hired its founder, Bari Weiss, as the editor-in-chief of CBS News, a newly created position which will shape how the newsroom covers major stories which could include the climate crisis.

Notably, among the national broadcast networks, CBS has led coverage of climate change for at least the past four years, airing the most coverage, the most climate scientist guest appearances, and the most segments that discussed climate solutions as compared to ABC and NBC. But its role as network leader is already under threat. Reported by HEATED, as part of a series of layoffs at the network, the “majority of the five person team supporting CBS News’s climate coverage” were fired. In the memo announcing the layoffs, the new chief executive David Ellison said “he was ‘phasing out roles that are no longer aligned with our evolving priorities.’”

And there are other changes that could compound this threat: On October 24, it was reported that Weiss was interested in poaching Fox News anchor Bret Baier, who has a troubling record on climate reporting to “potentially helm the *CBS Evening News.” Additional reporting suggests that she may also be interested in bringing on board another conservative voice, CNN contributor Scott Jennings. And on October 27, *CBS Evening News co-anchor John Dickerson announced he was leaving the network at the end of the year.

Though Weiss infrequently focused her contrarian opinions on climate-related issues in her pieces for The New York Times and on her podcast, under her leadership as founder and editor-in-chief, The Free Press has published a number of articles undermining climate science and promoting contrarian views that mirror commentary from right-wing media outlets like Fox News.

The Free Press has undermined climate science

On August 19, The Free Press reported on a widely criticized climate study from the Department of Energy through an interview with one of its authors, Steven Koonin, a climate contrarian who has appeared on several right-wing media programs including several appearances on Fox. The interview included questions such as “what about climate change is real?” and provided a platform for Koonin to misrepresent a report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that affirmed the link between climate change and extreme weather events.

Koonin has made the same false claims on Fox, including on the August 10, 2021, edition of Special Report with Bret Baier, where he downplayed the findings of the IPCC’s sixth climate assessment. Koonin dismissed the connection between extreme weather and climate change, a key finding of the report, claiming that natural disasters are “on the face of it, weather. If they were climate, we would see trends over several decades in those phenomena, and we don't.”

In fact, climate scientists have been able to estimate how much climate change affects any given extreme weather event for years. Notably, researchers found that the heat wave that sent temperatures in the Pacific Northwest and Canada into triple digits just six weeks before the release of the 2021 report would have been “virtually impossible” without global warming.

In January of this year, The Free Press interviewed Koonin to downplay the role of climate change in intensifying the LA wildfires. Similar to right-wing media outlets like Fox, The Free Press misleadingly suggested that then-President Joe Biden and many climate scientists claimed climate change was the cause of the fires rather than a contributing factor to the intensity of the blazes.

In 2023, The Free Press published one of its signature contrarian pieces – titled “I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published” by Patrick T Brown. In the piece, the author, who works for Breakthrough Institute, which was founded by anti-renewable advocate Michael Shellenberger, claims to have purposely limited his research paper showing warming temperatures increased the likelihood of wildfire growth in California in order to prove that articles in scientific journals were “distorting the scientific process by focusing too narrowly on climate change.” As reported by The Washington Post, “The opinion piece quickly provoked backlash from scientists and the editor of Nature herself.”

The stunt by Brown reflects the decades-old right-wing media narrative that climate scientists are “cooking the books” or playing “fast and loose” with data in order to manufacture a climate crisis.

The Free Press elevates contrarian and conservative voices to disparage climate activism and action

In February of this year, The Free Press published a piece by Doomberg, an independent publication focused on energy, finance and geopolitics, titled “Everybody Freeze! It’s the Climate Police,” which used a proposed policy in the the city of Ottawa “limiting residents from using remote car starters to warm up their vehicles for more than one minute before driving” and reporting that a “Washington Democrat hopes to study the impact of medical anesthesia on climate change” as proof that efforts to address climate change have gone too far – and as a result caused a “global popular revolt” against climate action.

It is the kind of cherry-picked reporting Fox News does to paint the climate movement as out of touch and radical. And like with Fox’s coverage, it feels disingenuous in its failure to either acknowledge the severity of the climate crisis or present the mainstream efforts to decarbonize the economy through policies, like renewable energy deployment, that are both popular and effective.

:{In March, The Free Press published a story on the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to claw back $20 billion of congressionally appropriated climate funds titled “A $20 Billion Slush Fund—Paid by You to Progressive Nonprofits.” The piece largely represents the position of EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin that the funds were somehow fraudulent. It also pushes the Fox News narrative that the funding is a slush fund for the left, including Democratic politicians, that was rushed out the door before Biden’s term ended like “gold bars” tossed “off the Titanic.”

The “gold bars” which Fox News has repeatedly mentioned are a reference to a video from Project Veritas — an organization built on deceitful tactics — in which a purported EPA employee was filmed with a hidden camera saying the Biden administration tried to quickly spend federal money before Donald Trump resumed office. He said, “We’re just trying to get the money out as fast as possible before they come in and stop it all,” comparing the effort to “throwing gold bars off the Titanic.”}:

But, as Politico noted, the “EPA had already obligated the $20 billion in climate grants months before a conservative activist group shot that video.” In fact, the climate funds were not hastily approved as Biden left office – the funding was legally appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act passed by Congress in 2022, and grants were awarded through established procedures, with public announcements made months before the election.

Additionally, as The New York Times reported, a lawyer for the EPA staffer who appeared in the video “has since said he was not referring to the $20 billion grant program.” The Washington Post also reported that the former employee “had ‘nothing to do with the evaluation and selection’ of the recipients, said a former EPA official briefed on the matter.” These facts were largely absent from the Free Press piece.

In 2024, The Free Press published a contrarian piece by a “retired sustainability influencer” who is also the social media editor for the outlet: “I Helped Make Standing Rock Go Viral. Now I Regret It.”

The author lamented that as an early social media influencer she presented the Native American-led protest against an oil pipeline as “black and white” or “good versus evil.” She claimed her opinion on the Dakota Access Pipeline and fossil fuels changed after she “began reading books and news sources that strayed from the progressive party line, titles like Unsettled by Steve Koonin, Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger, and Fossil Future by Alex Epstein. I realized that the environmental causes I had so breathlessly championed were much more complicated than good versus evil.”

Notably, the titles that she cited and their authors – Koonin, Shellenberger and Epstein – frequently appear across right-wing media to downplay the climate crisis, disparage renewable energy, and/or promote fossil fuel use.

Similarly, in 2023, a former member of Extinction Rebellion UK penned a piece for The Free Press, “Climate Activism Has a Cult Problem,” in which the author argued that the climate action organization, known for controversial direct actions, is run by a cult leader.

The piece was published at a time when right-wing media hostility against climate activists was at a fever pitch and some right-wing media personalities were cheering on calls for violence against climate groups.

Conservative journalists like Bret Baier could undermine CBS’ leadership in climate coverage

For at least the last four years, CBS has led its broadcast counterparts in volume of climate coverage. In 2024, the network accounted for 50% of total broadcast TV news climate reporting – 381 minutes of 771 minutes across all three national broadcast networks. The network also led in the number of climate scientist guest appearances it aired and the number of segments it ran that discussed climate solutions.

Meanwhile, the climate denial that has for decades been a staple of Fox News opinion shows has also appeared on the so-called straight news program anchored by Bret Baier. Fox’s flagship Special Report has repeatedly softened or distorted the stakes of global warming and climate action. From 2009 through May 2021, more than 87%of its climate segments contained misinformation or misleading narratives.

More recently, Baier conducted a nearly 10-minute interview with Trump EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in which Baier promised a “fair” and “balanced” conversation. Instead, he helped the administration justify repealing the endangerment finding — potentially the most consequential climate rollback in modern history.

While Americans may be changing how they consume the news, legacy media and broadcast journalism at networks like CBS still matter, as the entire media landscape still relies on traditional journalism as part of the beginning of the information food chain. This includes how anchors report on extreme weather events, climate action, and scientific reports and findings. If CBS under Weiss approaches this reporting like the outlet she founded or like the anchor she seeks to poach, the network will risk becoming another cog in the machinery of climate denial and delay.

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1. ### Trump celebrates CBS News’ new leadership as “the greatest thing that’s happened in a long time to a free and open and good press”

:{11/03/25

2. ### CBS Evening News fails to cover Trump's pardon of cryptocurrency executive with ties to Trump business venture

:{10/24/25

3. ### Bret Baier touts CBS News’ move toward “more balance” and “coverage that’s fair”

10/24/2

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Meet the scientists Trump could tap to undermine climate regulations

:{By Scott Waldman, Zack Colman | 03/19/2025 :

Some downplay the threat of global warming. Others question the efficacy of climate policy. All could be of interest to the new administration.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has made it his mission to destroy what he calls the “holy grail” of U.S. climate policy.

But President Donald Trump’s EPA chief can’t do it alone. To smash the holy grail, Zeldin needs help from a rare kind of scientist — the kind who believes climate change isn’t that bad or might even be good for humanity.

Those scientists aren’t easy to find. The overwhelming scientific consensus is that the burning of fossil fuels is heating up Earth, and the planet’s rapid change is putting people at risk for a wide range of calamities — from more extreme storms to rising sea levels to more intense heat waves.

Those threats underpin what’s known as the “endangerment finding” — Zeldin’s holy grail. The 2009 declaration by EPA made clear that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are the root cause of climate change, and that EPA has the authority to regulate them under the Clean Air Act because they can harm human health.

The endangerment finding has empowered EPA to establish landmark climate regulations, including limits on the emissions produced by cars or power plants. Rolling back these regulations — and the endangerment finding itself — would require an attack on the climate science that serves as their foundation.

Enter the climate naysayers.

The Trump administration is looking to recruit scientists who could cast doubt on climate science or climate policy, or who view global warming as either a small inconvenience or a boon to humankind.

Once selected, these scientists could add their perspective to a bedrock climate report that comes out every few years, known as the National Climate Assessment. Their contributions to the report, in turn, could be cited as evidence in future efforts to undermine the endangerment finding — all of which would make it easier to quash climate regulations.

The scientists even could help author a second endangerment finding. A Trump-era endangerment finding might, for example, selectively highlight areas of doubt in climate science or tout the perceived benefits of global warming.

To do that, a Trump-approved body of climate findings would center around future scenarios based on lower carbon scenarios than the world is currently experiencing.

It also could emphasize less severe climate trajectories than those envisioned in the original finding, said Roger Pielke Jr., a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

“Being able to tease out signals of human-caused climate change in extreme weather — which everybody cares about — are going to be much more challenging with a lower emissions trajectory than a higher one,” said Pielke Jr., who is not involved in any of the efforts and has questioned how scientists can link human-driven warming to specific extreme weather events.

There is a relatively small pool of researchers who could — or would be willing to — engage in such an effort because it would misrepresent decades of climate science by the world’s top science agencies.

“It’s a very small group of people. It’s the same people who have been there for the last 20 years,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University. “It’s this endlessly recycled group of people who have been making the same arguments that are unable to convince anybody in the scientific community.”

The White House has not announced its plan yet nor the researchers who might be involved, and it did not respond to a request for comment.

In a statement, an EPA spokesperson said that as “part of this reconsideration process, EPA will leverage the expertise of the White House Budget Office, including the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other relevant agencies.”

Here are some of the scientists who have spent years downplaying climate risks or criticizing climate regulations, and could be tapped by the Trump administration to help Zeldin destroy the “holy grail” of U.S. climate policy.

David Legates

David Legates (second from right) appears at a 2016 event in Washington. | Kris Connor/AFP via Getty Images MORANO

Legates likely would be a key leader. He has worked with Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought on a series of proposals to tear down NOAA and to recruit industry and think tank researchers that oppose climate rules to write a government science report.

The two men authored a key chapter outlining their plans in the Project 2025 conservative policy playbook.

Legates, who was the former state climatologist for Delaware until he was asked to step down, served as a top NOAA official in Trump’s first term. He was also detailed to the Office of Science and Technology Policy, but was later removed from that position after attempting to publish a series of research memos that distorted climate science.

For years, Legates has turned a partisan lens to research, claiming that climate change will benefit humanity while climate policy will hurt people. He is affiliated with the Cornwall Alliance, a group of conservative Christian scholars “dedicated to educating the public and policymakers about Biblical earth stewardship.”

Legates declined to comment for this story.

Steve KooniN

Koonin, a New York University physicist and former top scientist at BP, has long pushed to conduct a “red team, blue team” review of climate science, which would pit two groups of scientists against each other to debate a scientific report, such as the National Climate Assessment.

One group would defend the report while the other would highlight its alleged scientific weaknesses. Koonin worked on putting together the effort during the first Trump administration, but the project was eventually scuttled by the White House because some officials were concerned about Trump’s reelection chances.

Koonin said he would prefer to take on the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to highlight areas of doubt.

“Anything that I can do to help make the science more transparent, you know, that’s been my goal, and remains my goal, for a long time,” he said.

Richard Lindzen

The retired Massachusetts Institute of Technology atmospheric scientist told POLITICO that he would “of course” help the Trump administration challenge the endangerment finding. Lindzen was dismayed that the red team, blue team exercise to publicly debate established climate science never took off during Trump’s first term.

A longtime critic of accepted climate science, Lindzen applauded Zeldin for calling “bullshit” on a “fake issue” of the severity of rising temperatures. But he acknowledged there may be little upside given how much the scientific community has supported the conclusion that human activity is driving climate change, even if he disagrees with it.

Lindzen argued the courts may offer the most direct route, where he said EPA should argue there “was never any evidence in the first place” to suggest greenhouse gases meet a legally defined standard of dangerous.

“I have no idea what they’re going to do,” he said. “But I think it’s pretty obvious when Trump is running on the issue of ‘Drill, baby drill,’ that he is not going to pay any attention to what is claimed to be the science.”

Ryan Maue

Maue has not had any communication with the Trump administration about serving in any science advisory or agency role, he wrote in a text message. But the libertarian meteorologist would be a natural fit: He served at NOAA and the Office of Science and Technology Policy in Trump’s first term.

Maue agrees that humans are warming the planet, but he has pushed back against stringent government policies to rein in greenhouse gases.

He has often used his large social media following on X to dispute the connections between climate change and specific extreme weather events. He has repeatedly cautioned that the world is not following the worst-case scenario climate trajectory, calling it “highly implausible” — a view that could align with Trump administration thinking to emphasize less dire forecasts.

Judith Curry

Curry said she would help the Trump administration reconsider the endangerment finding if she could work from home, but noted there’s been no outreach from Trump’s team.

The Georgia Tech professor emerita argued the original endangerment finding was “politically driven,” and that its reliance on worst-case climate scenarios compelled more drastic policy than necessary. Despite U.S. greenhouse gas reductions falling 17 percent below 2005 levels, the nation is still off-track of the U.S. share of reductions needed to stabilize global temperatures.

An additional 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit of warming by 2100 — which is aligned with current trajectories — “isn’t a big deal because it’s what we’ve seen over the last 100 years, and we’re doing just fine,” said Curry, who is now president of consulting firm Climate Forecast Applications Network.

Scientists have said such increases have brought and would bring massive biodiversity loss, more intense extreme weather events, deadlier heat waves and economic harm through natural disaster damage, lost labor productivity, food insecurity and deteriorating health.

While Curry said there are “plenty of reasons not to like fossil fuels” and that clean energy investment is needed, she claimed “policy isn’t going to help here.” An endangerment finding that reflected less severe consequences for failing to deal with climate change “takes away the urgency for doing all of this” through government policy, she said.

John Christy

Christy is a climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a former lead IPCC author. He has questioned whether humans are driving the observed warming trends in recent decades — something the world’s top science agencies have long confirmed.

He opposed the endangerment finding in 2009 and has questioned the climate models on which it was based in congressional testimony. He is also a longtime proponent of applying a red team, blue team exercise to climate science.

Christy said he believed he could identify weaknesses in the first endangerment finding and that he could use research from the last 15 years to further his argument if the Trump administration pursued a second endangerment finding.

“I would like to see a very clear demonstration that climate models are not capable of telling us about the future of climate to the level of the CO2 forcing that is occurring in the atmosphere,” he said.

In fact, climate scientists have tested the models on which they rely and have found a notable amount of accuracy, particularly the latest versions, which are far more sophisticated than the models of the past.

Will Happer

Happer was part of Trump’s National Security Council in the first term, who mostly worked on classified military projects. He is a professor emeritus of physics at Princeton University, though not a climate scientist.

Happer is one of the few scientists who have given Trump a briefing on climate research, though his views are not supported by the world’s leading science agencies. Happer has long cast doubt on the role humans play in driving global warming and has been a vociferous opponent of climate policy.

In Trump’s first term, Happer worked on the effort to conduct an adversarial review of climate science with Koonin. After that effort was torpedoed by White House officials, Trump told Happer that he wanted to bring him back for a red team, blue team effort in his second term. Trump even discussed a potential nationally televised science “debate,” Happer told POLITICO.

“If I see an opportunity to help, I will,” Happer said. “I think it’s long overdue.”

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August 19, 2025, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show SALEM

CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): You've taken on the entire kind of climate science world. Energy department attacks climate science in contentious report. By the way, you're in safe company here. We think this is all politicized. This is driven towards a environmentalist agenda that is trying to weaken American energy dominance. The agency asked five client skeptics to write a report criticizing the consensus on global warming.

First of all, science does not have consensus. This is a very important thing. Right? Science says nothing. Scientists say things. Okay? Science never talks. Science is silent. This is a good thing that could apply to everything. Scientists say things. And scientists, like we learned during COVID, we learned during the lockdowns, learned during the vaccines, can say a lot of different things with the data.

Now, again, global warming does not have consensus like the second law of thermodynamics. Global warming does not have consensus like a object at rest will stay at rest. Your reaction, Mr. Secretary, and how you think about this because they — again, let me read this New York Times article, The consensus on global warming. What an outrageous claim. Your thoughts, sir.

CHRIS WRIGHT (GUEST): Yeah. I always give the contrast between the science, which is what the left likes, which is the opposite of science. Science is a process of challenge and engagement and debate and wrestling with data. And if the data doesn't agree with your model, your model is wrong. Where the science is this top-down, authority-driven thing used with COVID to me was the climate movement in fast forward. The science told you what to do.

But as you said, Charlie, look at those critics. They critique the authors. Five skeptics. Well, skeptical of what? They presented — these are five highly distinguished scientists. One of them was undersecretary for science in the Obama administration, provost at Caltech, PhD from MIT. All of those scientists were accomplished scientists that are also tired of this censorship of the science, censoring real science and real process of engagement. But even on my CNN interview a couple weeks ago, I went on to talk about the climate report. There are zero questions about climate change. Zero. They want to impugn the writers or impugn the way we reference people. They want to find little things. What we want to talk about is the data.

Let's talk about climate science. Like, it's a real phenomenon. It's a slow-moving phenomenon, not even remotely close to the world's biggest problem, but it's used by the left to justify big government and top-down control of everything. Let's be honest. Let's engage in real science, as you said. That's what we're about. And I'm excited to have that debate over four years. We're going to end a lot of children's nightmares. We're going to end a lot of people trying to be pushed around and bullied by people that don't know what they're talking about. Like, I've spent twenty years studying climate science as physical data, and the people who were passionate about it never want to debate me because they don't know anything about it. But we're going to have that debate whether they want it or not.

KIRK: Science is a process. It doesn't tell you anything. People tell you. Science is a method. It's a methodology. And good science, which again is a verb, they they act as if, well, science, you know, puts something out. No. You do science. You go in exploration of truth. And then once you have a conclusion, you have to measure it, you have to analyze it, you have to inquire it, you have to cross-reference it. And by the way, we're bringing back that methodology to our government, RFK at HHS, and you at the Department of Energy.

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The Trump administration's “critical review” of climate science is authored by some of Fox News’ favorite climate deniers

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Allison Fisher

Published 08/14/25

• On July 23, the Department of Energy released a so-called “critical review” of climate science to serve as a basis for the Environmental Protection Agency to stop regulating climate pollution. The New York Times reported:

• > Sea level rise is not accelerating. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be good for plant growth. The computer models used to predict global warming tend to exaggerate future temperature increases.

These arguments, routinely made by people who reject the scientific consensus on climate change, were included in an unusual report released by the Energy Department on Tuesday. The report, which is meant to support the Trump administration’s sweeping efforts to roll back climate regulations, contends that the mainstream scientific view on climate change is too dire and overlooks the positive effects of a warming planet.

• The conclusions in the DOE report have been widely criticized by climate scientists. From The Washington Post:

• > Scientists argue that the new report, composed in less than two months by five authors known to have skeptical views on climate science, would not pass any peer review process. “If almost any other group of scientists had been chosen, the report would have been dramatically different,” Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said in a statement.

“There is a history of some of the authors of this document cherry-picking dates to show that there is no change, but they’re not providing the evidence to support that,” said Kristie Ebi, a professor of global health at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington.

• To author its new report, the Department of Energy tapped climate contrarians, including several who have been on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry and whose discredited and debunked arguments have been promoted by right-wing media to manufacture doubt about the science that compels climate action. In fact, four of the five authors of the report — Judith Curry, John Cristy, Steven Koonin, and Roy Spencer — have appeared on Fox News during key moments to dismiss climate science and deny the link between our warming planet and extreme weather.

• ## Climate deniers behind the Trump administration’s new climate report have appeared on Fox News to dismiss climate science during key moments

• Judith Curry

Judith Curry, former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, consulted for oil and gas companies during her time in academia. She resigned from Georgia Tech in 2017 citing climate “craziness” and has been called out by other scientists for promoting debunked climate denial arguments.

As climate-fueled Hurricane Idalia barreled toward Florida in August 2023, Curry appeared on Jesse Watters Primetime to argue that scientists have “seriously mischaracterized” the threat of climate change. She claimed that the “dominant factor” in climate change is “far and away” the “natural climate variability” of the Earth. (Earlier that same month, Curry published an op-edin the New York Post, another Murdoch property, where she falsely claimed that the “overwhelming scientific consensus” on climate change is “manufactured” and suggested that scientists are incentivized by “fame and fortune” to push the idea that climate change is caused by human activity.)

John Christy

John Christy is “an atmospheric scientist who doubts the extent to which human activity has caused global warming,” according to The New York Times. (In reality, “more than 99.9% of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree that climate change is mainly caused by humans.”) He has regularly downplayed the link between climate change and extreme weather and has also pushed the false narrative — central to the Trump DOE climate report — that “CO2 is not the problem” because “carbon dioxide makes things grow. The world used to have five times as much carbon dioxide as it does now. Plants love this stuff. It creates more food.”

During a deadly global heat wave in July 2022, Christy appeared on The Ingraham Angle to falsely claim that extreme heat and other disasters are not “increasing in intensity or frequency.” He also repeated the common climate denial argument that “deaths from weather disasters and so on has gone down about 95% in the last hundred years.” But Reuters points out that the decrease in deaths since 1920 is largely due to “better forecasting and preparedness,” even while “the number, intensity, and cost of climatic and meteorological hazards have all increased over the last hundred years.”

Steven Koonin

Physicist Steve Koonin, a former scientist for the oil and gas giant BP who wrote a book chock-full of errors about climate change, appeared on the August 10, 2021, edition of Fox Business’ Kudlow to downplay the release of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth climate assessment. Koonin stated that “it is kind of absurd to think that another one degree over a century is going to create catastrophe.” But this would put the planet at over 2 degrees Celsius of warming, which climate scientists have long urged policymakers to prevent because it will be catastrophic for large parts of the globe.

Koonin also appeared on the August 10, 2021, edition of Special Report with Bret Baier to dismiss the connection between extreme weather and climate change, claiming that natural disasters were “on the face of it, weather. If they were climate, we would see trends over several decades in those phenomena, and we don't.”

In fact, climate scientists have been able to estimate how much climate change affects any given extreme weather event for years. Notably, researchers found that the heat wave that sent temperatures in the Pacific Northwest into triple digits just two months before the release of the 2021 report would have been “virtually impossible” without global warming.

Roy Spencer

Roy Spencer is a research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, an adviser to the Heartland Institute, and a former visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation who was known as Rush Limbaugh's “official climatologist.” Politico reported that even while he has written that “climate change is big business” driven by a “marching army of climate scientists whose careers now depend on a steady stream of funding from governments” (a frequent claim among climate deniers), Spencer himself “has worked with organizations that have received funding from an interlinked network of fossil fuel companies — a multitrillion-dollar global industry — as well as wealthy foundations with billions of dollars in holdings that support groups opposing climate and energy regulations.”

After Hurricane Irma devastated parts of the U.S. in 2017, Fox & Friends hosted Spencer to undermine the science linking more intense storms to a warming planet. Spencer claimed: “As you go through time, there has been no increase in the number of major land-falling hurricanes in Florida, and there's been no increase in their intensity.” While climate scientists predict that “storm frequency will either decrease or remain unchanged” due to climate change and studies consistently show “no discernible trend in the global number of tropical cyclones,” data has confirmed that warmer temperatures have increased their intensity — including stronger wind speeds and greater precipitation.

• ## Energy Secretary Chris Wright has appeared on Fox and CNN to defend the report and its authors

• On August 5, CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins summarized the Trump DOE report’s conclusions “that more carbon dioxide in the air is good for plant growth, that [rising] sea levels are not accelerating,” and asked Secretary of Energy Chris Wright how the authors were selected. Wright responded:

“I've been in the climate debate and discussion for over 20 years, so I know certainly a lot of people in that world and I just made a list of who I think are the true, honest scientists,” Wright responded. “They follow the data and the facts where they lead them. They don't have a political agenda or a desired policy or a desired thing. They're just honest scientists. There's plenty of those. But I made a list of about a dozen of them that I thought were very senior and very well-respected. I called the top five and everyone said yes.”

Collins noted that “some people have criticized the report saying the information was cherry-picked by people who had already predetermined what they wanted to say in this report.” Notably, “some people” includes climate scientists whose work is cited in the report.

Wright also claimed that “the report references the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports over 100 times,” but it is worth noting that the well-known climate contrarians behind the Trump administration’s “critical review” contradict the findings of the hundreds of scientists who spent eight years developing the IPCC report.

On the August 7 edition of Morning with Maria, host Maria Bartiromo asked Wright to respond to The New York Times’ “pushback” from the article headlined “Energy Department attacks climate science in contentious report.”

“What a crazy headline, but I guess that’s par for the course for The New York Times — in fact we are doing the exact opposite,” Wright responded. “We are exposing the American people and the broader scientific community to what is actually in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, not the hyperbolic summaries for policymakers or media headlines that claim all sorts of crazy stuff. This is what we actually know.”

“How often do you hear that the planet is getting greener because there’s more carbon dioxide in the air that contributes to increased crop productivity and greener wilderness?” he continued. “How often do you hear that deaths from extreme weather have been falling like stone for a century? And that insured losses from extreme weather events have been on a multidecadal decline — those are just facts.”

All of these climate denial arguments have been debunked for years. Increasing CO2 is far more harmful to plants and farmers than any short-term benefit. Extreme weather deaths are falling because of better forecasting even while weather events are more intense due to our warming planet. And we are currently facing an insurance crisis because of climate-fueled events making some locations economically unviable and dangerously uninhabitable. But these stark realities were abandoned in the Trump administration’s climate report in favor of debunked arguments that support the fossil fuel industry’s campaign against climate action.

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MMA 7 25

Fox News’ America Reports hosted Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin and Energy Secretary Chris Wright to discuss the Trump administration's proposal to repeal the EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding, which affirmed that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare and which has served as the legal foundation for regulating emissions under the Clean Air Act.

Zeldin and Wright used the appearance to frame the repeal as a return to scientific integrity and regulatory restraint, ignoring the harms that this repeal would have on vulnerable communities. Fox anchor Sandra Smith did not challenge the claims and made no mention of the public health implications or regulatory consequences of revoking the finding. The exchange typified Fox’s pattern of amplifying Trump administration narratives about climate and energy while downplaying their real-world impacts.

Video

Citation

From the July 29, 2025, episode of Fox News' America Reports

The segment typified Fox’s role in obscuring the consequences of climate deregulation

During their appearance, Zeldin and Wright were not pressed on the public health, environmental, or legal implications of the proposal to reverse the endangerment finding. Instead, the host framed the discussion around economic themes and legal processes, asking whether repeal would make it easier to “undo a lot more of the Biden-Obama era climate rules.” Viewers heard nothing about the policy’s real-world impacts, but they did hear climate advocates characterized as ideological or extreme. Zeldin referred to them as “climate zealots,” while Wright framed the repeal as a return to “rationalism” — signaling to Fox’s audience that those who defend public protections are unserious.

This approach mirrors Fox’s longstanding pattern of covering regulatory actions through the lens of efficiency, growth, and personal freedom, while sidelining the communities most affected by the Trump administration's harmful actions. The result is a consistent minimization of climate risk and a distorted narrative in which climate and environmental outcomes are treated primarily as a political liability rather than a public necessity.

By allowing unchallenged repetition of misleading claims, and by omitting the central consequences of the policy under discussion, Fox News once again advanced a message strategy that serves to normalize and obscure the dismantling of basic climate and environmental protections.

Zeldin and Wright advanced a series of unsupported or misleading claims

During their appearance on the July 29 episode of Fox News' America Reports, Zeldin and Wright made a series of unsupported or misleading claims about the endangerment finding and what its repeal would mean for Americans.

Zeldin, for example, asserted that repealing the endangerment finding would yield “$1 trillion in savings”—a figure with no grounding in published EPA analyses or historical regulatory assessments. In contrast, EPA data has consistently shown that rules issued under the endangerment finding and the broader Clean Air Act generate substantial net benefits.

The agency’s Second Prospective Study of the Clean Air Act found that “the central benefits estimate exceeds costs by a factor of more than 30 to one," with most benefits stemming from reduced mortality linked to particulate pollution. By 2020, Clean Air Act programs were projected to prevent over 230,000 premature deaths, as well as millions of asthma attacks, heart attacks, and lost workdays annually.

More recently, the EPA’s Regulatory Impact Analysis for vehicle greenhouse gas standards projected net societal benefits of $272.7 billion between 2022 and 2050, with annualized gains of more than $14 billion, driven by fuel savings, reduced emissions, and avoidance of climate damages. These figures underscore that, far from being a financial burden, regulations grounded in the endangerment finding generate substantial and enduring public and economic value.

Similarly, Wright’s claim that the repeal reflects a return to scientific rigor collapses under scrutiny, relying on a report authored by a small group of contrarian scientists, including Steven Koonin and John Christy, who reject the well-established conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions from human activity are driving global warming and endangering public health. Their views stand in opposition to the broader scientific community, which includes the consensus positions of federal agencies such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as the Fifth National Climate Assessment, which was produced by the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

Beyond economic distortions and scientific misrepresentation, Zeldin and Wright also ignored the far-reaching legal consequences of repeal — including for the fossil fuel industry itself.

As Grist reported, rescinding the endangerment finding would not only eliminate the federal government’s core authority to regulate greenhouse gases, it could also expose fossil fuel companies to a wave of climate liability lawsuits previously blocked by federal preemption. Some industry groups have reportedly urged the administration not to proceed, warning that repeal could unravel their legal defenses and leave them vulnerable to a patchwork of state regulations and courtroom challenges.

Fox viewers heard nothing about how repeal would harm the very communities most at risk

Zeldin and Wright also failed to mention what rescinding the endangerment finding would mean for public health, environmental protection, or the EPA’s ability to respond to pollution that threatens the air we breathe, the water we rely on, and the land we depend on to live and work. Viewers were not told that the standards targeted for repeal are central to reducing industrial emissions that worsen heat, flooding, and wildfire risk — or that dismantling these protections would increase illness, displacement, and hardship for older adults, children, low-income households, and rural communities, including many in Fox’s own audience.

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NO LNX

In Game-Changing Climate Rollback, E.P.A. Aims to Kill a Bedrock Scientific Finding

The proposal is President Trump’s most consequential step yet to derail federal climate efforts and appears to represent a shift toward outright denial of the scientific consensus.

By Maxine Joselow and Lisa Friedman

Reporting from Washington

July 29, 2025

Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said on Tuesday the Trump administration would revoke the scientific determination that underpins the government’s legal authority to combat climate change.

Speaking at a truck dealership in Indianapolis, Mr. Zeldin said the E.P.A. planned to rescind the 2009 declaration, known as the endangerment finding, which concluded that planet-warming greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health. The Obama and Biden administrations used that determination to set strict limits on greenhouse gas emissions from cars, power plants and other industrial sources of pollution.

“The proposal would, if finalized, amount to the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States,” Mr. Zeldin said. He said the proposal would also erase limits on greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks on the nation’s roads.

Without the endangerment finding, the E.P.A. would be left with no authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate the greenhouse gas emissions that are accumulating in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels.

The proposal is President Trump’s most consequential step yet to derail federal climate efforts. It marks a notable shift in the administration’s position from one that had downplayed the threat of global warming to one that essentially flatly denies the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change.

It would not only reverse current regulations, but, if the move is upheld in court, it could make it significantly harder for future administrations to rein in climate pollution from the burning of coal, oil and gas.

Without the United States working to reduce emissions, it becomes far tougher for the world to collectively prevent average global temperatures from rising by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels. That is the threshold beyond which climate scientists say there is significantly greater risk from increasingly destructive storms, droughts, wildfires and heat waves, as well as from species extinction.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has also moved to scrap restrictions on pollution from power plants, halt key measurements of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and delay approvals of wind and solar energy projects on federal lands.

“Today’s E.P.A. announcement ignores the blindingly obvious reality of the climate crisis and sidelines the E.P.A.’s own scientists and lawyers in favor of the interests and profits of the fossil fuel industry,” former Vice President Al Gore said in a statement.

To justify the proposal, the E.P.A. cited a report that the Energy Department commissioned from five scientists known for their rejection of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, namely that it is being driven by the burning of fossil fuels, which releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The New York Times first reported that the Energy Department had hired these scientists, including Steven E. Koonin, a physicist and author of a best-selling book that calls climate science “unsettled,” and John Christy, an atmospheric scientist who doubts the extent to which human activity has caused global warming.

In their report, the scientists criticized the computer models used to predict climate change, saying they tend to overestimate warming. They also wrote that carbon dioxide, the most prevalent greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, has positive effects by helping plants grow and increasing agricultural productivity. And they asserted that overall, government climate regulations have a limited effect on global temperature rise.

The E.P.A. echoed this last argument in the proposed rule, saying greenhouse gases from cars on American roads do not contribute significantly to climate change because they are a small share of global emissions. Reducing these emissions to zero “would not have a scientifically measurable impact” on global climate trends or on public health and welfare, the agency said. Instead, the agency said, climate regulations are what pose the true threat to public health and welfare, because they increase the price of new vehicles and leave fewer choices for car buyers.

Many environmental activists and lawyers criticized those arguments, noting that transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gases in the United States. If the U.S. motor vehicle sector were a country, it would be the fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, according to the E.P.A.’s own data.

“If vehicle emissions don’t pass muster as a contribution to climate change, it’s hard to imagine what would,” said Dena Adler, a senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

Dan Becker, who leads transportation policy for the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group, called the E.P.A. proposal a “cynical one-two punch” that will lead to more gasoline-burning vehicles on the road and fewer tools to reduce tailpipe pollution. He said that the auto-emissions rules being rescinded were projected to prevent 7 billion metric tons of emissions from entering the atmosphere while saving the average American driver about $6,000 in fuel and maintenance over the lifetime of vehicles built under the standards.

“The E.P.A. is revoking the biggest single step any nation has taken to save oil, save consumers money at the pump and combat global warming,” Mr. Becker said.

The administration’s plan has its backers. Daren Bakst, who directs the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market research organization, said, “It is unreasonable to claim that pollutants contribute to endangerment if emissions are de minimis.”

Mike Braun, the governor of Indiana, said at the event in Indianapolis that the Biden administration’s vehicle emissions rules had burdened the auto industry in the state. “As a lifelong entrepreneur for 37 years actually in the automotive business, I think I know a thing or two about it, and you can count on Indiana being for common sense and reining in government,” he said.

John Bozzella, chief executive of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a lobbying group for most major carmakers, said in a statement that he was still reviewing the E.P.A.’s announcement. “At the same time, there’s no question the vehicle emissions regulations finalized under the previous administration aren’t achievable and should be revised to reflect current market conditions, to keep the auto industry in America competitive,” he said.

While the Chamber of Commerce and fossil fuel groups had fought the endangerment finding when it was first written, none have been clamoring in recent years for its reversal. This year Marty Durbin, who leads the chamber’s energy institute, called the finding “settled law” and said his group, which is a major business lobbying organization, was not seeking its repeal.

“I’m not aware of anyone in industry who has been pushing for it,” said Jeffrey Holmstead, an energy attorney with the law firm Bracewell who served in the E.P.A. during the administration of the first President George Bush and, later, that of President George W. Bush.

The plan to eliminate the endangerment finding showcases the political evolution of Mr. Zeldin, who for years took moderate positions on climate change and other environmental issues.

A former congressman from a coastal community on Long Island that is struggling with rising sea levels linked to global warming, Mr. Zeldin once joined a bipartisan caucus to address climate change. In 2019 he broke with fellow Republicans to vote against an amendment that would have prohibited the E.P.A. from reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

An ally of Mr. Trump who prominently defended him during House impeachment hearings, Mr. Zeldin moved to the right on energy and other issues during his unsuccessful bid for governor of New York in 2022. Just weeks after his nomination to lead the E.P.A., Mr. Zeldin declared that he would be “driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion” by repealing regulations on greenhouse gas emissions

“There are people who, in the name of climate change, are willing to bankrupt the country,” Mr. Zeldin said on the conservative podcast “Ruthless” earlier on Tuesday. One of the co-hosts of the program called the endangerment finding “the left’s tent pole to begin the whole climate grift,” to which Mr. Zeldin agreed.

The proposed repeal of the endangerment finding is all but certain to draw legal challenges, and David Doniger, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, said he expected that it would eventually be struck down in court. He noted that climate science has advanced significantly since 2009, when the finding was issued.

After the proposal is published in the Federal Register, the E.P.A. will solicit comments from the public for 45 days, Mr. Zeldin said. The agency will then finalize the rule, most likely in the next year.

Maxine Joselow reports on climate policy for The Times.

Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.

A version of this article appears in print on July 30, 2025, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: E.P.A. To Retract Bedrock Finding On Climate Crisis. Order Reprints

---

REF ALSO NYT

Trump Hires Scientists Who Doubt the Consensus on Climate Change

The three scientists joined the administration after it dismissed hundreds of experts who were assessing how global warming is affecting the country.

Steven E. Koonin, dressed in a dark suit and yellow tie, gestures as he speaks while sitting on a stage.

Steven E. Koonin, a physicist and author, was hired by the Energy Department. He previously worked as a physicist at New York University, as a scientist for the oil and gas company BP and as an under secretary at the Energy Department during the Obama administration.Credit...Aaron M. Sprecher/Bloomberg

By Maxine Joselow

Reporting from Washington

July 8, 2025

The Energy Department has hired at least three scientists who are well-known for their rejection of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, according to records reviewed by The New York Times.

The scientists are listed in the Energy Department’s internal email system as current employees of the agency, the records show. They are Steven E. Koonin, a physicist and author of a best-selling book that calls climate science “unsettled”; John Christy, an atmospheric scientist who doubts the extent to which human activity has caused global warming; and Roy Spencer, a meteorologist who believes that clouds have had a greater influence on warming than humans have.

Their hiring comes after the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship report on how climate change is affecting the country. The administration has also systematically removed mentions of climate change from government websites while slashing federal funding for research on global warming.

In addition, Trump officials have been recruiting scientists to help them repeal the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which determined that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare, and which now underpins much of the government’s legal authority to slow global warming, according to two people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.

It was not immediately clear what the three scientists were working on or whether they were being paid. Representatives for Dr. Koonin, Dr. Spencer and the Energy Department did not respond to requests for comment.

In a brief phone interview and follow-up email, Dr. Christy said he was not working on the endangerment finding nor collecting a government salary. He declined to comment further.

A vast majority of scientists around the world agree that human activities — primarily the burning of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal — are dangerously heating the Earth. That has increased the frequency and intensity of heat waves, droughts and colossal bursts of rain like the storm that caused the deadly flooding now devastating central Texas.

A small minority of scientists, however, rejects this consensus. Dr. Koonin, who has said he is a friend of Energy Secretary Chris Wright, has been one of the loudest critics.

During President Trump’s first term, Dr. Koonin proposed that the Environmental Protection Agency conduct a “red-team, blue-team” exercise to challenge mainstream climate science. A “red team” of climate skeptics would critique major scientific reports on global warming, and a “blue team” of climate scientists would then rebut these claims. At the time, mainstream climate scientists said the proposal would make a mockery of scientific research and create a platform for marginal views that had already been disproved in the normal course of scientific debate.

Image

Roy Spencer, in a dark suit, blue shirt and tie, holds a microphone in one hand and points to a projection on a screen with the other hand.

Roy Spencer, a former NASA scientist and researcher at the University of Alabama, in 2012. He has argued that while human activity has caused some warming, its influence has been smaller than that of natural variations in global cloud cover.

Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator at the time, told coal industry executives that he planned to conduct the exercise. But John F. Kelly, then the White House chief of staff, ultimately blocked the effort.

Now, Dr. Koonin is listed as a “special government employee” in the Energy Department’s internal email system, the records show. Federal law says special government employees are executive branch appointees named to “perform important, but limited, services to the government, with or without compensation, for a period not to exceed 130 days” during a one-year period. Elon Musk had that classification when he began Mr. Trump’s cost cutting initiative, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Dr. Koonin also serves as a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative-leaning research organization on Stanford University’s campus. He previously worked as a physicist at New York University, a scientist for the oil and gas company BP and an under secretary at the Energy Department during the Obama administration.

In his 2021 book, “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t and Why It Matters,” Dr. Koonin argued that while the planet was warming and human activities had played a role, the scientific consensus was not as certain or as dire as it was frequently portrayed.

In a phone interview in November, Dr. Koonin said that the book had made an impression on Mr. Wright, who ran the oil and gas company Liberty Energy before he was confirmed as energy secretary in February.

“He reached out when I wrote the book and said, ‘This is great,’” Dr. Koonin recalled. “He asked me to come talk to his company at one point — it was a couple years ago — and we got to know each other.”

He added, “Chris and I have talked quite a bit over the last couple years, and I think he is well aligned with what I wrote in the book.”

Dr. Spencer, a research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, also has a connection to Mr. Wright. In a report published last year by Liberty Energy, Mr. Wright cited atmospheric temperature records that Dr. Spencer had collected. (The overall report, titled “Bettering Human Lives,” made the case that fossil fuels were “essential” to solving global poverty, a claim that some experts have called misleading.)

In addition to his role at the University of Alabama, Dr. Spencer is a policy adviser at the Heartland Institute, a conservative group that rejects mainstream climate science. He previously served as a scientist at NASA and as a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing group responsible for creating Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for the new administration.

Dr. Spencer has argued that while human activity has caused some warming, its influence has been smaller than that of natural variations in global cloud cover. While some of Dr. Spencer’s past work has been funded by the government, he has accused federal climate researchers of being biased because they receive taxpayer money.

“The popular opinion that government-funded research is unbiased must be considered quite naïve,” he wrote in his 2010 book “The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists.”

Image

John Christy, dressed in khaki shorts, sneakers and a blue polo shirt, sits on a chair in front of a large wall map of the world.

:{John Christy, an atmospheric scientist who doubts that human activity has caused global warming, in 2014

Dr. Christy has worked closely with Dr. Spencer to maintain atmospheric temperature records at the University of Alabama. He has also served as Alabama’s state climatologist since 2000. A vocal critic of climate models, he championed the “red-team, blue-team” exercise and served on an E.P.A. scientific advisory board during the first Trump administration.

When asked about his Energy Department role in a brief phone interview, Dr. Christy said he was an “unpaid person who’s available to them if they need it.”

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, expressed alarm that the Energy Department had hired the three scientists.

“What this says is that the administration has no respect for the actual science, which overwhelmingly points in the direction of a growing crisis as we continue to warm the planet through fossil-fuel burning, the consequences of which we’ve seen play out in recent weeks in the form of deadly heat domes and floods here in the U.S.,” Dr. Mann wrote in an email.

Dr. Mann added that the Trump administration appeared to have fired hundreds of “actual government science experts” and replaced them with “a small number of reliable foot soldiers.”

Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said it would be troubling if these three scientists were involved in repealing the 2009 endangerment finding, which cleared the way for the government to regulate the planet-warming gases emitted by cars, power plants and other industrial sources.

On his first day back in the White House, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that charged the E.P.A. with reviewing the “legality and continuing applicability of” the endangerment finding. And last week, the agency sent a proposal to reconsider the finding to the White House budget office, a first step in repealing it.

An E.P.A. spokesman, Mike Bastasch, declined to comment on the proposal before its public release.

Brad Plumer contributed reporting from Washington.

Maxine Joselow reports on climate policy for The Times.

A version of this article appears in print on July 9, 2025, Section A, Page 16 of the New York edition with the headline: Energy Department Hires Skeptics of Climate Change

===

mma 4 24

google is profiting from PragerU’s climate denial ads on its search engine

Special PROGRAMSCLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ILANA BERGER

PUBLISHED 04/16/24

Google is allowing right-wing propaganda organization PragerU to run climate-denying ads on its search engine even though the tech giant previously committed to prohibiting ads that feature claims that contradict the “well-established scientific consensus” about climate change.

In 2021, Google updated its ad policy to prohibit ads for or on content that “contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.”

Yet, nearly three years later, Google is still profiting from ads that contain climate change misinformation.

When Media Matters searched for phrases like “climate change,” “global warming,” and “climate crisis” on Google Search, the search engine returned PragerU ads that promised its website reveals “the truth about climate change” — or what it calls the “fake climate catastrophe.”

“Climate policies are causing inflation and keeping poor countries trapped in poverty,” the ad-description text read. “Get the facts with our Climate Change and Energy playlist.”

[ggl screenshots see monetize ads]

When clicked on, the ads lead Google Search users to a video on PragerU’s website titled “Do We Have to Destroy the Earth to Save It?” In the video, anti-renewable energy activist Michael Shellenberger tells the audience that “pushing the planet toward wind and solar energy would actually cause more harm to the environment than good.” (While all extractive processes have environmental impacts, scientists agree that the consequencesof burning fossil fuels on the climate along with the declining costs of both renewable energy and renewable-energy storage make those cleaner technologies essential to a sustainable energy future.)

Shellenberger is known for spreading misinformation about wind energy and downplaying the impacts of climate change. In 2020, Shellenberger wrote an article in which he claimed that “climate change is not making natural disasters worse.” A 2022 report produced by hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists argued that climate change has increased the intensity — and in some cases the frequency — of extreme weather events.” Shellenberger has also defended former President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that “windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before” and “driving them [whales] crazy.” In 2023, he produced a documentary that alleged — again, without concrete evidence — that “government officials have been lying” about the role offshore wind turbine construction has played in causing whale deaths.

The video featuring Shellenberger is one of 30 videos on PragerU’s “Get The Truth About The Climate” playlist.

Other videos on the playlist feature an assortment of well-known climate deniers, including former BP chief scientist Steve Koonin and nuclear energy consultant Patrick Moore, who has repeatedly and falsely claimed that he co-founded Greenpeace.

In a video titled “Is there really a climate emergency?” Koonin claims that climate change is not settled science, an argument he also detailed in a 2021 book called Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.

Another video on the playlist called “The truth about CO2” features Moore, who claims that rising CO2 levels in the Earth’s atmosphere do not present a danger to humans and that “we're already seeing the positive effects of increased carbon dioxide now.” “We should celebrate CO2 as the giver of life that it is,” Moore adds.

Video

CitationPragerU ad in Google's search engine, accessed April 4, 2024

PragerU is deeply rooted in climate change denial

Along with the Daily Wire, PragerU is financially dependent on generous donations from fossil fuel billionaire Farris Wilks.

Recently, PragerU Kids, a PragerU offshoot that produces conservative “educational” content targeted at school age children, has partnered with five different states to bring right-wing propaganda into public school classrooms.

Media Matters reviewed PragerU Kids’ ”educational” content and found it was rife with misinformation about climate change. In one video, a cartoon narrator explains why embracing climate denialism is akin to participating in the Warsaw uprising, when Polish Jews attempted to liberate Warsaw from German occupation during WWII.

Since 2021, researchers have demonstrated that Google has failed to follow through on its promise to address climate denial. One study found 100 monetized YouTube videos that seemingly violated Google’s climate change misinformation policy. The videos had accrued more than 18 million views. Despite those seeming policy violations, only eight of the hundreds of climate-denying videos studied were eventually demonetized. Google has also profited significantly from ads placed by fossil fuel companies attempting to “greenwash” their reputations as drivers of the climate crisis.

5. ### Climate solutions coverage on broadcast news programs declined in 2023

04/16/24

===

8 25

GGL

[### Former Caltech Provost Steven Koonin Nominated for ...

Caltech

https://www.caltech.edu › about › news › former-caltec...](https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/former-caltech-provost-steven-koonin-nominated-under-secretary-science-1521)

Mar 25, 2009 — President Barack Obama recently announced his intention to nominate Steven E. Koonin, former provost and professor of theoretical physics at the California ...

[### Steven E. Koonin

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Steven_E._Koonin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_E._Koonin)

From 2009 to 2011, he was Under Secretary for Science, Department of Energy, in the Obama administration. He later became known as a climate change skeptic, ...

[### Steven Koonin

Hoover Institution

https://www.hoover.org › profiles › steven-koonin](https://www.hoover.org/profiles/steven-koonin)

For almost 30 years, Koonin was a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech. He also served for nine years as Caltech's vice president and provost, ...

[### Steven E. Koonin, PhD - Authors

Sonoma Valley Authors Festival

https://svauthorsfest.org › Authors](https://svauthorsfest.org/authors/dr-steven-e-koonin/)

He was Under Secretary for Science in the Obama Administration's Department ... Koonin has a BS in Physics from Caltech and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from MIT.

[### The Atlas Society Asks Steve Koonin Transcript

The Atlas Society

https://www.atlassociety.org › post › the-atlas-society-as...](https://www.atlassociety.org/post/the-atlas-society-asks-steve-koonin-transcript)

Feb 8, 2024 — Steven Koonin served as an undersecretary for science in the US Department of Energy under President Obama. He was a professor of theoretical ...

[### President Obama Announces More Key Administration ...

National Archives (.gov)

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov › the-press-office](https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/realitycheck/the-press-office/president-obama-announces-more-key-administration-posts-32009)

He did his undergraduate work at Caltech and has a PhD from MIT. David Sandalow, Nominee for Assistant Secretary for Policy and International Affairs, ...

[### Mid-Coast Forum on Foreign Relations | Steven Koonin

Midcoast Forum on Foreign Relations

https://www.midcoastforum.org › speakers › steven-ko...](https://www.midcoastforum.org/speakers/steven-koonin/)

Professor Koonin received his B.S. in Physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1972 and his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from MIT in 1975.

[### Dr. Steven E. Koonin

The Federalist Society

https://fedsoc.org › contributors › steven-koonin](https://fedsoc.org/contributors/steven-koonin)

Jun 30, 2021 — Dr. Koonin served as Undersecretary for Science in the US Department of Energy under President Obama from 2009 to 2011, where his portfolio ...

[### THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (.gov)

https://fire.pppl.gov › koonin_doe_032009](https://fire.pppl.gov/koonin_doe_032009.pdf)

PDF

Mar 20, 2009 — WASHINGTON, DC – Today, President Barack Obama announced his intent to nominate Dr. Steven E. Koonin, Under Secretary for Science, Department ...

Missing: administration, ‎| Show results with: administration,

[### Steven Koonin (BS '72), Physicist and Former Provost

Caltech

https://heritageproject.caltech.edu › interviews-updates](https://heritageproject.caltech.edu/interviews-updates/steven-koonin)

Jul 6, 2022 — He describes his administrative accomplishments as vice president at provost at Caltech and the institutional advancements that he fostered in ...

===

bait and switch fox BS

zinger in quiver // MTG?

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/heritage-foundation-economist-turns-tables-180831936.html

4 23

heritage Foundation scholar Diana Furchtgott-Roth called out Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., for his membership at a reported all-White beach club and his family fortune's ties to the fossil fuel industry in response to the senator's attacks.

6 in freq flyer always gop

cap gains, roberts on women, ed reform paycheck fair medical nakt, samoan fishery ACA, ACA, dereg coal, keystone xl ccs, tax, am rescue plan tell employ not show up for work

6 bks 100's artl chif econ labor ...api, 4 yrs aei 4 yrs, all funded by FF minnesota gas biz united gas herit is a club anyone not just white ppl every state of US

2021 indiv 82% 5 mil koch fdn since 96

donors trust and donors 2 m$, 75oK exxon since 98

19 if 117 other 98 mill

renewable forbes increase plants coal fired plants in china wind turbine, pro nuke dense emission nuke pwr;

humans not cause of climate 2015 wsj stand by it? yes un settled by steve koonin BO MIT  holds up bk uncertain how much hu end hearing this is what gop stands by

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===

bradley mster res BS

Climate Science Is A Lot Less Than It Appears in Some Cases

Robert Bradley, Jr.

Founder and CEO of the Institute for Energy Research

Principal, MasterResource: A Free-Market Energy Blog

[Editor’s Note: Climate science is real but some who claim to be climate scientists appear to be less than they would have us believe, more interested in causes than learning.]

Andrew Dessler, a climatologist at Texas A&M University, will have nothing to do with any critics of climate alarm. This activist has pure scorn toward his intellectual and scientific doubters. “Angry Andy” is certain that climate science is settled and drop-everything alarming.

Climate Science

Andrew Dessler’s profile page at Texas A&M – his choice of photo says it all.

A deep ecologist (nature is optimal and fragile; human interference cannot be good), Dessler has long concluded that we are headed for (or already in) a climate dystopia. Any fair hearing of the less extreme view of global lukewarming/CO2 benefits would be a leak in the dike, one that could expand and take down the Wall of Climate Gloom.

But, for now, the cancel culture is at work with climate science in particular. Michael Mann (Dessler’s colleague in arms) put it this way:

All of the noise right now from the climate change denial machine, the bots & trolls, the calls for fake ‘debates’, etc. Ignore it all. Deniers are desperate for oxygen in a mainstream media environment that thankfully is no longer giving it to them. Report, block. Don’t engage.

Imagine an open-minded young person considering a career in climatology. He or she wants to really wants to probe the look-the-other-way areas of uncertainty with climate-feedback physics and with climate models. Seek and expand the frontiers of knowledge under the highest standards of the scientific method. Show professionalism and respect for the views of colleagues and others. Experience politeness and social skills, given and received.

That person best not enter into a profession where an Andrew Dessler or a Michael Mann or a John Holdren would sneer and blackball. Remember what Mann said about Judith Curry in Climategate: “I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but it’s not helping the cause, or her professional credibility.” Cancel Culture 101.

Steven Koonin

Enter Steven E. Koonin, University Professor at New York University. This noted theoretical physicist is author of the best-seller: Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters (2021). Having taught theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology for most of his career, Koonin went on to work for BP (new technologies) and then asObama’s Undersecretary for Science in the U.S. Department of Energy. In this position, Koonin oversaw climate research and energy technology work.

Climate Science

Some of Steven Koonin’s profile at NYU.

Koonin has a BS in Physics from Caltech and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from MIT.A specialist in modelling complexity, Koonin wrote the classic 1985 textbook Computational Physics.

Koonin is author of 200 peer-reviewed papers in the fields of physics and astrophysics, scientific computation, energy technology and policy, and climate science, as well as having been lead author on multiple book-length reports, including two National Academies studies.

In short, Steve Koonin is a leader in his field and well respected. And, it turns out, he is honest and of an age and tenure where he can speak truth to power.

Dessler’s Smears

Here is Dessler on Koonin:

I actually hate to weigh in on Koonin’s book …. Here are a few thoughts. First, Koonin has a track record of making dumb, over the top, exaggerated arguments. Second, his facts are carefully cherry picked to present a specific narrative. For example, he says heat waves in the U.S. were more severe in the 1930s than today. OK, but the U.S. covers 2% of the planet. Globally, heat waves are more severe today. Also, his belief in models is quite selective. We can’t trust climate models at all — the climate is too complicated!! — but we can have 100% confidence in absurd economic models of GDP growth.

And:

It is important to realize that virtually all experts in the area ARE convinced by the data that humans are ~100% responsible for modern warming. So you can believe Koonin or you can believe the 99.9% of scientists.

And:

Koonin’s arguments are 1) cherry picking of factoids and 2) value judgements about his interpretation of the data and his interpretation of risk. His judgements of the data disagree with virtually all expert scientific opinion. His risk assessment is based on his values.

And:

I typically don’t believe in conspiracy theories, but the fact that Steve Koonin continues to get high-profiles endorsements of his dumb arguments suggests that some powerful media agents have decided that he’s their best bet for trying to cast doubt on climate science. Thoughts?

Dessler likes to use other words against Koonin’s views such as “idiotic complaint” and “denier shuffle.”

Andrew Dessler pretty much embarrasses himself, his department, and his university with such vitriol. Why?

Part of it is Dessler’s certainty that the science has reached certainty on what is known and not known. No shades of grey on the very pessimistic, alarmist black-and-white conclusion: humankind is on the road to doom.

So hyper-emotionally invested. Anything less than alarm–even by a scientist every bit as credentialed as himself–and Dessler must turn emotional and angry.

Second is old-fashioned envy. Koonin’s Unsettled — with sales exceeding 100,000–has outsold all of Dessler’s books put together. Koonin, moreover, has a reputation that Dessler does not. And Koonin is a go-to for a lot of organizations that are trying to cut through a lot of politicized science.

Little wonder that Andrew Dessler will not dare debate Koonin at Texas A&M.(I have offered to underwrite such a campus-wide event to no avail.) The climate alarmist, arguing a speculative position, cannot get away with a lot with the bright lights on. [1]

Appendix: Wrong Again?

Regarding Koonin’s major points against settled, alarmist climate science, Dessler states:

I don’t see that these are the kinds of arguments that get traction with the broad public anymore…. Most people, they look out their window and they can see climate change is real. Given the fact that what’s happening is exactly what was predicted by scientists decades ago. I think that people understand that climate science is real, as described by the scientific community.

Really? Is this a ‘settled’ fact, Professor Dessler?

Actually, it is panic time for climate alarmism among the political and intellectual elite. Citizens are protesting, and voters are voting against the forced energy transformation, itself the flip side of climate exaggeration.

Better yet, with the problems of wind/solar out in the open (and at an early stage of the transition!), the open-minded are looking anew at the science and false climate prognostications of years and decades past. They are not very impressed. Expect sales of Koonin’s Unsettled to grow and another edition to appear in the next years.

[1] My email exchange with Professor Dessler (11/09/2021) follows. I stated:

Let’s have a debate between you and Steven Koonin or even David Friedman with a full house at Texas A&M to put you on record–will you consider that?  I’ll make a $5,000 contribution to the university to help make it happen. Put the bright lights on where the statements will be on the record. Televise it. But it has to have a fair moderator and set-up.

He answered that day:

Add a zero ($50,000, donated to the Texas Center for Climate Studies at Texas A&M) and you have a deal.  You can even moderate the event and handle all of the logistics. I’ll find a room on campus.

I answered (11/14/2021):

No thanks for the invitation to increase my contribution from $5,000 to $50,000. And for me to moderate, etc. I want a real debate with me in the audience or watching it on TV. It deserves prime time with physical climate science on trial. No reason to relegate a climate discussion/debate to the ‘back of the bus,’ right? That is an insult to you, your opponent, and science itself. So work on a serious budget, and let’s give it the attention it deserves. I will increase my donation appropriately…. A fair debate between the alarmists and the optimists is prime-time important. Why have it in some basement? Let’s put the lights on and have a marque event….

Professor Dessler did not respond….

Please share this post and get the word out everywhere!

This post appeared first on Natural Gas Now.

}}:

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12 21

a massive outbreak of tornadoes left scores dead across eight states this weekend, and given that this weather arose in a warmer, changed climate, President Biden, his FEMA Administrator, numerous news outlets:{, }:{ }:scientists:{ and }:meteorologists:{ }:discussed:{ how such an extreme event could be influenced by climate change.}:

Despite all that qualified nuance, the right (predictably) went nuts. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post and Fox News were very mad but didn’t exactly have anyone on hand who knew the science well enough to offer any science to the contrary

For their attempted refutation, Breitbart cited Steven Koonin, who in turn cited now-quite-outdated reports and their wishy-washy trend observations (which aren’t the point!). Town Hall cited Steve Milloy, as did the Daily Caller, because apparently defending Big Tobacco gives you climate expertise to answer questions actual scientists are still working out.

In an email to supporters, Climate Depot’s headline claimed a “Meteorologist calls Biden’s tornado climate link ‘utter bullsh*t,’” quoting and linking to Chris Martz, who is in fact not only not a meteorologist, but not even a college graduate, having just completed his first semester at Millersville University. (Though Chris did note that geophysics PhD and American Meteorological Fellow Michael Mann “oversimplifies the issue” and “isn’t a trained meteorologist.”)

Marc Morano’s email also cites an old post by climate satellite mistake-maker Roy Spencer, followed by a reference to Roger Pielke Jr., who is making good use of his cramped office by tweeting quotes from the IPCC as though the consensus view of tornado trends has a bearing on this specific event’s conditions. (Generous of Jr. to stop publicly airing his weird daddy issues long enough to give his opinion on tornadogenesis!)

After Pielke is our favorite climate-, covid-, Sandy Hook- and Obama birther-conspiracytheorist: Tony Heller. He excerpted a bunch of old newspaper clippings to prove that, since tornadoes happened in the past before climate change, that means climate change must not be changing the climate in which they form now. (Makes sense, right?)

But Pielke Jr.’s appearance in Morano’s email alongside his apparent peers Chris Martz (class of ‘25) and Tony Heller (no class at all) is just the warm-up, the paltering of what past trends may or may not mean for a current situation.

And others in conspiracy-land are offering their opinions and asking some “legitimate” questions, and it’s pretty entertaining, in the dark and depressing way this sort of thing is amusing.

As Media Matters reported, Alex Jones, fresh off his court losses regarding aforementioned Sandy Hook school shooting conspiracy theories, told his InfoWars audience that the Biden administration “officially” ordered Texas to turn off the power last February. Which means “the question is did [President Biden] use weather weapons to cause the tornadoes? That’s a legitimate question to ask.”

It’s not like this is the first time an InfoWarrior has offered some creative explanations for extreme weather. Remember back in 2018 when Jones’s co-conspiracy-theory-conspirator suggested thatJohn Kerry saved Hawaii from a hurricane with an energy beam fired from Antarctica? (Or is that not a legitimate question to ask? We’re unsure of the meaning of the phrase at this point.)

Even that’s not the craziest take though! Remember the Wobble prediction that aliens are controlling the Earth’s movement — the real cause of climate change — and are soon going to wobble us so hard it reveals the mystery planet Nibiru?

Well, since Tony Heller’s banned from Twitter he’s taken to Gab, and his fellow poster there ROGTruth1 has an update for us on The Wobble we discussed the other day: It’s what actually caused the tornadoes, and a bunch of other events!

“The temporary wobble in the earth’s axis has been superseded by a severe wobble. So, the regular disturbances which have been a true cause of climate change are now manifesting as more significant events.” From an earthquake in Peru on November 28th, to cold in Europe, earthquakes in Japan, windstorm in Turkey and tornadoes in the US, the wobble’s just getting started.

Apparently “soon” in December, a “Massive New Madrid Adjustment (unzipping) will occur over a period of 3 weeks” leading to the “entire region west of the Mississippi” to “sink” and “shift Southwest,” causing “major disruption through the Ohio valley and up through the St. Lawrence Seaway.” After that 3 week cataclysm but also still in “December soon” will be a 150 foot tsunami that “will hit the UK and Western Europe,” while “backwash of up to 50’ will hit the Eastern seaboard of the USA.”

If you’re as concerned as we are, rest assured that while there will be “no warnings from the elite that are fully briefed and aware,” the good news is that “half of humanity has been subliminally contacted.”

Those of you who have been contacted already, you know the plan. Those that haven’t? Sorry, we can’t say anything further, but you should consider listening to the “experts” cited here if you’re worried, they seem to have things pretty well figured out.

duck

yale climate ~

4 24 https://www.scientificamerican.com › article › a-new-book-manages-to-get-climate-science-badly-wrong

A New Book Manages to Get Climate Science Badly Wrong

A New Book Manages to Get Climate Science Badly Wrong. In Unsettled, Steven Koonin deploys that highly misleading label to falsely suggest that we don't understand the risks well enough to take ...

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mma

PUBLISHED 05/11/21

On May 6, theoretical physicist and former Obama administration energy official Steve Koonin appeared on two Fox programs to discuss his recently released book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.

In a nearly 13-minute appearance on Fox Business’ Kudlow, Koonin pushed a number of claims from his book that contradict the established scientific consensus on climate change. Among other things, he stated that “we've seen hardly any change in most severe weather events”; that “in the U.S., the highest temperatures haven't gone up in 60 years and are the same as they were in 1900”; and that there’s been “no detectable human influences on hurricanes over the last many decades.” He also questioned why “somehow people don’t want to use” fracking and said the current situation around climate change is “misleading panic.”

Later that evening on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight, Koonin repeated the same statement on humans and hurricanes, and on hotter temperatures, he stated that “the incidence of heat waves across the 48 states is no greater now than it was in 1900, and the highest temperatures haven’t gone up in 60 years.” He also called climate models uncertain and claimed that climate science has become “immoral,” as “it's being used as a tool to scare young people, create depression.”

Koonin, who is not a climate scientist, has a controversial history within the scientific and political climate change community. He formerly served as chief scientist for BP (a company that has played an outsized role in both worsening climate change and delaying climate action). In 2017, he advocated for a “red team-blue team” approach to climate science, which would “put the ‘consensus’ to a test” and illuminate “differing perceptions of climate science.” This idea apparently caught the attention of then-EPA Administrator (and notorious climate change denier) Scott Pruitt. And in 2019, he reportedly tried to help former President Donald Trump create a “climate contrarians” panel with longtime climate denier Will Happer.

Given the content of his new book, it’s no surprise that Koonin appeared on Fox to discuss its key points. While those points are wrong and easily debunkable, they have been spreading across the vast right-wing media ecosystem.

Real climate scientists and experts have lambasted Koonin’s book

Some of the major claims Koonin made in his May 6 Fox appearances came directly from his book, which was reviewed in an April 25 Wall Street Journal piece that repeated a number of its claims. Climate Feedback, a website featuring climate scientists who review dubious climate pieces in the media, reviewed the article and estimated “its overall scientific credibility to be very low.”

Regarding Koonin’s misleading statement on human impacts on hurricanes, MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel said the “most up-to-date research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrates an increase in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes (Category 3-5) globally, supporting theoretical predictions that date back to 1987.” University of California, Los Angeles climate scientist Daniel Swain echoed this point, noting that “the most intense tropical cyclones are indeed becoming stronger in terms of maximum wind speeds and minimum central pressure and are producing more extreme rainfall.”

In his Kudlow interview, Koonin also downplayed the threat of melting ice and rising sea levels, stating that “people worry about the melting of the ice sheets, but that’s gonna take hundreds of years, if it happens.” This statement is remarkably wrong. Twila Moon of the University of Colorado stated that “over the last 20 years, ice loss has been rapid and large, creating measurable sea level rise.” Postdoctoral researcher Thomas Frederikse agreed, saying that “tide-gauge observations show that sea levels are persistently accelerating since the 1960s, and overall, the observed sea-level rise during the 20th century is higher than during any other century over the last 3000 years.”

Koonin’s claims downplaying the effectiveness of climate models are also wrong. Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather states that Koonin’s criticism “ignores the fact that climate models published since the 1970s were quite accurate in projecting the warming that actually occurred in the years after they were published, as we discuss in our recent paper.” (In fact, climate models have been so correct that even fossil-fuel giant Exxon’s own scientists accurately predicted the rate of global warming in the 1980s.)

The Climate Feedback piece also addressed other misleading claims from Koonin’s book that he did not repeat in his Fox interviews, including misleading statements on global wildfires, the severity of droughts, global crop yields, and the economic impact of climate change. Overall, says Twila Moon, “many conclusions highlighted in this article are examples of cherry-picking information and failing to provide the context of change. In other instances, statements are fully wrong and unsupported by scientific research.”

Marianna Lavelle of Inside Climate News also addressed some of the claims Koonin made in his new book, including rebutting the statement he made on his Fox appearances about hot temperatures and heat waves in the U.S.:

The average annual temperature in the contiguous U.S. has increased from 0.7 degrees to 1.0 degrees Celsius (1.2 to 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since the start of the 20th century. The year 2020 was the fifth-warmest year in the 126-year record for the contiguous U.S. And the five warmest years on record have occurred since 2012, NOAA reports. There is a more marked increase in nighttime lows than in daytime highs (the “warmest” temperatures) because of factors like the cooling effect of daytime aerosol pollution and soil moisture evaporation.

She also countered his claim about a future minimal economic impact of climate change by noting 2019 research that found that “global warming has very likely exacerbated global economic inequality, including ∼25% increase in population-weighted between-country inequality over the past half century.” Multiple scientific studies have showed that the cost of climate inaction far outweighs the cost of climate action. Indeed, one analysis finds that climate change could cost nearly $70 trillion by 2100.

In the past several weeks, Koonin has been featured in numerous right-wing media outlets

In addition to his May 6 appearances on Kudlow and Tucker Carlson Tonight, Koonin has made a number of other television appearances, written op-eds, and given interviews promoting his book. The vast majority of these have been with right-wing media outlets, including sources that are climate deniers.

He appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s The First on May 6, Andrew Bolt’s show on Australia’s Sky News on May 5, CNBC’s *Squawk Box* on May 4, and Kudlow on March 19. O’Reilly, Bolt, Kudlow, and Squawk Box’s Joe Kernan are all climate deniers. He also appeared on the * program on Sky News Australia on May 8. Here, he claimed that “modest” global warming will be beneficial for the planet, without noting that the negative impacts of climate change will far outweigh any positive ones. Sky News Australia, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, has a history of climate denial.

He has written pieces promoting his book for The National Review and the New York Post, given a print interview to The Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins (who has a history of being wrong about climate issues), given interviews to conservative radio personalities John Gormley and Ross Kaminsky, and spoken to fossil fuel industry shill Alex Epstein, climate misinformer Rich Lowry of The National Review, and conservative Daily Beast writer Matt Lewis. His book and its climate misinformation have also been the basis of articles in Townhall and The Federalist. And along the way, he’s been promoted by notorious climate deniers Marc Morano and Steve Milloy.

Right-wing media propping up books that are skeptical of climate change is an all-too-familiar occurrence

If this all sounds familiar, that’s because it is -- this sort of thing happened just last summer, when climate contrarians Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Shellenberger both released books downplaying the seriousness of climate change within a month of each other. Like Koonin, they both appeared across the right-wing media ecosystem to promote their books. There are other similarities between these individuals as well -- all are highly controversial within the climate science community, while their major works have been fact-checked and discredited by actual climate scientists and experts. Additionally, none of them are climate scientists.

As the realities of worsening climate change become more and more apparent, it’s become more difficult for right-wing media outlets to continue unequivocally denying that climate change is even happening. This new type of climate denial espoused by people like Koonin -- who say climate change is happening but it’s not that big of a problem -- provides perfect cover for right-wing media outlets to act like they care about the issue while they continue helping polluting companies kick climate action down the road.

Koonin’s misinformation-filled book won’t be the last one to downplay the threat of climate change, but it’s becoming easier to spot books like these when right-wing media take an exclusive interest in promoting their false claims.

===

booktv 5/21

Unsettled

**Steven Koonin, undersecretary for science at the Department of Energy during the Obama administration**, argued that the science behind climate change is not settled and said that a…

===

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**BJorn Lomborg**:{ :(style="background-color:#ffffff;;white-space:pre"):}::{pres of cop consensus visit fellow hoover}:

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About the Author

Dr. Steven E. Koonin is a leader in science policy in the United States. He served as Undersecretary for Science in the US Department of Energy under President Obama, where he was the lead author of the Department’s Strategic Plan and the inaugural Quadrennial Technology Review (2011). With more than 200 peer-reviewed papers in the fields of physics and astrophysics, scientific computation, energy technology and policy, and climate science, Dr. Koonin was a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech, also serving as Caltech’s Vice President and Provost for almost a decade.

He is currently a University Professor at New York University, with appointments in the Stern School of Business, the Tandon School of Engineering, and the Department of Physics. Dr. Koonin’s memberships include US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the JASON groupof scientists who solve technical problems for the US government. Since 2014, he has been a trustee of the Institute for Defense Analyses and chaired the National Academies’ Divisional Committee for Engineering and Physical Sciences from 2014-2019. He is currently an independent governor of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and has served in similar roles for the Los Alamos, Sandia, Brookhaven, and Argonne National Laboratories.

--This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Product details

ASIN : B08JQKQGD5

Publisher :BenBella Books (May 4, 2021)

===

4/24

Editorial Reviews

Review

“The book is no polemic. It’s a plea for understanding how scientists extract clarity from complexity. And, as Mr. Koonin makes clear, few areas of science are as complex and multidisciplinary as the planet’s climate.”

—Wall Street Journal

"Unsettled teaches that we need to follow scientific knowledge as it develops, and carefully to consider the costs and benefits of different alternatives."

—Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Forbes

"Koonin . . . is an authority, in the best academic sense of the word . . . Unsettled will be a mainstay of reference sections in heterodox critiques of the climate-catastrophe-industrial complex for years to come."

—Commentary

“We have too many global warming books—but this one is needed. Steven Koonin has the credentials, expertise, and experience to ask the right questions and to give realistic answers.”

—Vaclav Smil, distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba

“Essential reading and a timely breath of fresh air for climate policy. The science of climate is neither settled nor sufficient to dictate policy. Rather than an existential crisis, we face a wicked problem that requires a pragmatic balancing of costs and benefits.”

—William W. Hogan, professor of Global Energy Policy at Harvard Kennedy School

“Tough talk about climate politics from a statesman scientist—and a vision of what will actually come to pass.”

—Robert B. Laughlin, Stanford University

“Unsettled will definitely and rightly unsettle your climate thoughts, and all for the better. If we are to make trillion dollar investments, we deserve to be as well informed as possible.”

—Bjorn Lomborg, president of Copenhagen Consensus and visiting fellow at The Hoover Institution at Stanford University

"In a carefully researched and insightful book, Steven Koonin highlights the significant uncertainty underlying climate models and statistics, the limits of technical and political responses, and the need to reassert the core values of scientific independence and integrity that drive social progress."

—William van Wijngaarden, The Journal of the Witherspoon Institute and professor of physics at York University

“The most important book on climate science in decades.”

—Rupert Darwall, RealClearPolitics

“Fascinating and informative reading, and one hopes it will improve the climate for honest and open discussion.”

—Jonathan Tennenbaum, Asia Times

"Koonin takes his fellow scientists to task for withholding the information he presents in this book. Ironically, most of the data he reports comes directly from the very reports that are used to exaggerate the problems we face. This scientific malpractice seems mainly driven by self-interest . . . Because of this, it is time confront the true climate deniers."

—Robert M. Whaples, The Independent Review

“Koonin takes deliberate, explicit care to write dispassionately and factually . . . This book should be read by every journalist, pundit, and environmental activist, and by all politicians, policymakers, as well as their staffs.”

—Henry Bauer, Journal of Scientific Exploration

“Unsettled is an excellent case study on climate science, its inherent complexity and uncertainty, and a cautionary tale on how interpretive filters in the policymaking process have shaped, and sometimes misinformed, the climate policy debate. It should on be the reading list of scientists and engineers whose responsibility, as citizens, extends beyond the laboratory to communicating to a larger public often overwhelmed and confused by the media. Policymakers and politicians will find it a source of reflection for their arguments, positions, and decisions.”

—Jean-Lou Chameau, President Emeritus, Caltech

Review

"In a carefully researched and insightful book, Steven Koonin highlights the significant uncertainty underlying climate models and statistics, the limits of technical and political responses, and the need to reassert the core values of scientific independence and integrity that drive social progress."

—William van Wijngaarden, The Journal of the Witherspoon Institute and professor of physics at York University

“The most important book on climate science in decades.”

—Rupert Darwall, RealClearPolitics

“The book is no polemic. It’s a plea for understanding how scientists extract clarity from complexity. And, as Mr. Koonin makes clear, few areas of science are as complex and multidisciplinary as the planet’s climate.”

—Mark P. Mills, Wall Street Journal

“Any reader would benefit from its deft, lucid tour of climate science, the best I’ve seen.”

—Holman W. Jenkins, Wall Street Journal

“Fascinating and informative reading, and one hopes it will improve the climate for honest and open discussion.”

—Jonathan Tennenbaum, Asia Times

“Koonin points out scientific facts supported by hard data and the peer-reviewed literature.”

—Tilak Doshi, Forbes

"Koonin takes his fellow scientists to task for withholding the information he presents in this book. Ironically, most of the data he reports comes directly from the very reports that are used to exaggerate the problems we face. This scientific malpractice seems mainly driven by self-interest . . . Because of this, it is time confront the true climate deniers."

—Robert M. Whaples, The Independent Review

“Koonin takes deliberate, explicit care to write dispassionately and factually . . . This book should be read by every journalist, pundit, and environmental activist, and by all politicians, policymakers, as well as their staffs.”

—Henry Bauer, Journal of Scientific Exploration

"Koonin . . . is an authority, in the best academic sense of the word . . . Unsettled will be a mainstay of reference sections in heterodox critiques of the climate-catastrophe-industrial complex for years to come."

—Commentary

“We have too many global warming books―but this one is needed. Steven Koonin has the credentials, expertise, and experience to ask the right questions and to give realistic answers.”

—Vaclav Smil, distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba

“Unsettled is an excellent case study on climate science, its inherent complexity and uncertainty, and a cautionary tale on how interpretive filters in the policymaking process have shaped, and sometimes misinformed, the climate policy debate. It should on be the reading list of scientists and engineers whose responsibility, as citizens, extends beyond the laboratory to communicating to a larger public often overwhelmed and confused by the media. Policymakers and politicians will find it a source of reflection for their arguments, positions, and decisions.”

—Jean-Lou Chameau, President Emeritus, Caltech

“Essential reading and a timely breath of fresh air for climate policy. The science of climate is neither settled nor sufficient to dictate policy. Rather than an existential crisis, we face a wicked problem that requires a pragmatic balancing of costs and benefits.”

—William W. Hogan, professor of global energy policy at Harvard Kennedy School

“Tough talk about climate politics from a statesman scientist―and a vision of what will actually come to pass.”

— Robert B. Laughlin, professor of physics at Stanford University

“Steve Koonin, the undersecretary for science under Obama, has written a very interesting and thoughtful book on climate. He documents how much of what you think you know about climate just ain’t so. Did you know that while the United States is now seeing many fewer cold records, absolute heat records are not increasing? Unsettled will definitely and rightly unsettle your climate thoughts, and all for the better. If we are to make trillion dollar investments, we deserve to be as well informed as possible.”

—Bjørn Lomborg, president of Copenhagen Consensus and visiting fellow at The Hoover Institution at Stanford University

Read more

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ppl kindle highlights

Just to stabilize the CO2 concentration, and hence its warming influence, global emissions would have to vanish.

1700

Projections of future climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for the purpose.

An aphorism traceable to 1901 captures it well: Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.

--

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ BenBella Books (April 27, 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages

===

BenBella Books is an independent publishing house based in Dallas, Texas. BenBella was founded by Glenn Yeffeth in 2001. It specializes in nonfiction books on popular culture, business, health, and nutrition, along with books on science, politics, psychology, and other topics.^[1]

BenBella Books has four imprints. The BenBella Books imprint publishes broadly in non-fiction.

The Smart Pop imprint, now headed by Robb Pearlman, originally focused on essay anthologies on popular culture,^[2][3] but now focuses more broadly on fan-friendly titles.

The BenBella Vegan imprint focuses on plant-based cookbooks and lifestyle titles.

The Matt Holt imprint, launched in 2020, focuses on business, finance, and professional development titles.

Selected works[

BenBella published the nutrition book The China Study by T. Colin Campbell in 2005,^[4] which has gone on to sell over 3 million copies.

The company published NYT bestseller Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story, written by defense attorney Jose Baez about the Casey Anthony trial, in 2013.^[5]

The company published Traction, which has sold over 300,000 copies.

The company published Strange Beautiful Music: A Musical Memoir by guitarist Joe Satriani in May 2014,^[6][7] the Francis J. Greenburger autobiography Risk Game: Self-Portrait of an Entrepreneur in 2016,^[8][9] and In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World, the memoirs of former NAACP chapter president Rachel Dolezal, in 2017.^[10][11] In 2018, BenBella announced they will be publishing Nicole Lapin's third book, Becoming Super Woman.^[12]

The company published Murder in the Courthouse, a legal thriller by Nancy Grace, in 2016.^[13]

Titles include The Psychology of Harry Potter (2007),^[14] Grey's Anatomy 101 (2007),^[15] The Science of Dune (2008),^[16] and The Science of Michael Crichton (2008).^[17]

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/2021-fox-news-still-spreading-dangerous-climate-denial

no vids

on a near-daily basis, Fox News hosts, anchors, and guests spew misinformation and false narratives aimed at tanking efforts to address the climate crisis. These tactics to delay climate action or downplay the seriousness of our warming planet have often been referred to as the new climate denial -- since the actual denial of the scientific consensus that climate change is happening has mostly been pushed to the fringes of both politics and the traditional media landscape.

Fox deploys the new denial so often, it’s easy to forget that the network is one of the few highly influential media outlets that still promote one of the most dangerous lies of our time: Human activity is not overheating our climate.

This lie has existed for over five decades and for five decades has been repeatedly debunked. Its origins and merchants have been exposed; those who have continued to perpetuate it have been discredited; and our own experience during each unprecedented storm, historical heat wave, and apocalyptic wildfire has proven again and again what science has told us to expect from a warming world.

But in 2021, you can turn on Fox News and watch prime-time host Tucker Carlson quip that “not even climate experts understand the climate” or watchFox contributor Dagen MacDowell suggest that climate change is a hoax because it is cold in April.

And in 2021, there is still no federal response to the climate crisis on the books, despite decades of warnings from scientists and with mounting support for climate action even among the largest companies and businesses in the U.S.

Fox is still fueling the lie that our planet is not warming

From insisting the science on climate change is not settled to deliberately misconstruing weather with climate, Fox News is still pushing the idea that human-made climate change is not real, despite overwhelming evidence and consensus in the scientific community.

In a segment on the April 28 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, host Tucker Carlson and Fox News contributor Sean Duffy discussed how the “critical environmental movement has infiltrated” schools and colleges, is scaring children about the climate crisis, and is convincing them to not have children. At the end of the segment, Duffy claimed that climate change is a “political movement, not a scientific movement” and that it is wrong to assume “the science is settled in climate”.

the segment aired just a week after Carlson and ultra-conservative political commentator and Fox contributor Mark Steyn mocked comments made by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) linking climate change and racism. (For the record, experts say the two are “inexorably” linked.) Steyn, not satisfied with mocking the relationship between climate and racism, went on to attack the scientific consensus that warming is human-made, by invoking a defamation suit filed against him by climate scientist Michael Mann:

MARK STEYN (GUEST): This is supposed to be science. I've been in a 10-year lawsuit in Washington, D.C., up against the guy who invented the climate change hockey stick, and he is a scientist and his position is that in the last millennium -- nothing happened for nine centuries and then you, Tucker, got into your SUV and fried the planet. And that is a completely idiotic theory. But at least he's not trying to sell the world on the idea that somehow climate change correlates to racism.

[vid]

not to be outdone, the following night, prime-time hostLaura Ingraham focused her April 22 monologue on “the big climate con.” Ingraham’s “climate con” list included misleading arguments against the benefits of climate action like job creation; attempts to discredit the role of -- and the need for -- global cooperation in dealing with the crisis; and false claims that the scientific warnings on climate are not sound or well understood. For good measure, Ingraham closed her monologue by mocking and attacking young climate activists.

in back-to-back shows on April 29 and April 30, Ingraham suggested that the climate crisis along with other pressing issues have been manufactured to “justify the left’s brazen efforts to take more of our money and more of our liberty” and they “only exist in the minds of leftists ideologues who hate America anyway.”

Denial paired with fear-mongering about the “left’s radical agenda” exemplifies the brand of climate denial Fox has peddled for years, and some network figures disingenuously equate weather with climate to push that narrative.

On the April 21 edition ofThe Five, Fox News contributor Dagen McDowell ended a rant against the Paris Climate Agreement by suggesting that abnormally cold April weather from Texas to the Great Lakes somehow disproves that global warming is occurring.

DAGEN MCDOWELL (CO-HOST): Here is your forecast today and why they stopped calling it global warming. April 21, 2021: Freeze warnings from Texas to the Great Lakes. Record low temperatures engulfing the heartland. Oh, and Indians/White Sox game in Cleveland had to be postponed for snow and cold.

This bit by MacDowell is both painfully stupid and reminiscent of a body of tweets by then-President Donald Trump, who conflated weather with global warming while suggesting that the term “climate change” was adopted by scientists and advocates to hide the incongruity between major winter storms and the idea of warming.

Interestingly, the term “climate change” was promoted by the Republican strategist Frank Luntz as part of the infamous 2002 memo advising the GOP on how to cast doubt on the scientific consensus that human activity was warming the planet.

Fox Nation host Lara Logan made the same inane claim on the February 19 edition of :{Outnumbered:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, in a segment about the winter storm that caused the deadly power failure in Texas:

“It's time for us to have an honest conversation about renewable energy and about global warming, climate change, whatever you want to call it,” said Logan. “This is the first time in Texas’ history that it has had a winter storm warning. So this is — this means that it is not getting warmer and warmer and warmer, simply.”

Fox has long been a platform for climate deniers

Fox News hosts and contributors not only push climate denial but regularly feature discredited deniers on their programs. Notorious climate denier Marc Morano -- who has no scientific background -- andBjorn Lomborg -- whose spiel is dangerously claiming that climate change is happening, but not a big deal -- have both appeared on Fox for more than a decade. Just this year, both have appeared across Fox programming at least six times from January through April. Notably, Fox hosted both the day after President Joe Biden took office to attack his agenda on climate change.

Larry Kudlow, a long-time climate denier who formerly served as economic adviser to Trump and now hosts a show on Fox Business, has also been one of Fox’s go-to commentators on policies related to climate change across both the network’s so-called “news” and “opinion” programs.

But Morano, Lomborg, and Kudlow are far from the only climate deniers and contrarians on Fox’s roster. Over the past several yearsRush Limbaugh, Joe Bastardi, Steve Milloy, and Patrick Moore all appeared regularly on Fox to push climate denial and misinformation. (In 2019, Moore said on Fox & Friends that “the climate crisis ... is not only fake news, it’s fake science”, and the line was picked up by Trump and tweeted to his millions of followers.)

Importantly, like Morano and Lomborg, none of these commentators are climate scientists, many have strong financial ties to the fossil fuel industry, and all have made a living out of obstructing efforts to address the climate crisis. With the exception of the late Rush Limbaugh, none would have had a megaphone to spread their lies absent Fox News.

Supported by advertisers, Fox runs cover for climate inaction

Climate scientists have repeatedly warned that if immediate and bold actions are not taken, then we will face dire climate disruption -- ever-increasing extreme and abnormal weather that threatens our homes, our food, our livelihoods, our economy, and our lives.

The stakes could not be higher.

The purpose of Fox hosts’ and contributors’ climate denial is to maintain an air of doubt about the existence and reality of our dangerously changing climate to provide cover for Republicans, who actively work to do nothing to stop the climate crisis, and the Big Polluters that bankroll their campaigns. This climate denial is also the foundation of the network’s persistent attacks -- across “opinion” and “straight news” programming -- on any proposed actions to reduce our carbon emissions and transition to a clean-energy economy. By extension, companies that advertise on Fox are party to climate inaction.

Publicly, many of these companies that run ads on Fox, including big insurers Allstate and Liberty Mutual have acknowledged the severe threat of the climate crisis. While others like General Motors, which is also among the network’s biggest advertisers, are actively calling for significant reduction in climate pollution. On the same day Dagen McDowell mocked global warming because it was cold in Texas, General Motors, along with 407 other corporations and businesses, issued a press release for an open letter to Biden supporting his goal of reducing carbon emissions by 50% by 2030. By continuing to sponsor Fox, these brands expose the cavern between their words and actions and associate themselves with a dangerous hostility to facts and science.

To be sure, Fox News is an accomplice to the impending climate emergency we face as a country and as part of the global community -- and so are those that support its programming with ads.

mma

How broadcast TV news covered environmental justice over the past four years

05/06/21 11:10 AM EDT

Buoyed by Biden’s climate summit, broadcast and cable TV networks provided strong Earth Day coverage

04/28/21 12:24 PM EDT

How broadcast TV networks covered climate change in 2020

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/climate-deniers/right-wing-media-are-having-field-day-physicist-steve-koonins-new-book-climate

on May 6, theoretical physicist and former Obama administration energy official Steve Koonin appeared on two Fox programs to discuss his recently released book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.

In a nearly 13-minute appearance on Fox Business’ Kudlow, Koonin pushed a number of claims from his book that contradict the established scientific consensus on climate change. Among other things, he stated that “we've seen hardly any change in most severe weather events”; that “in the U.S., the highest temperatures haven't gone up in 60 years and are the same as they were in 1900”; and that there’s been “no detectable human influences on hurricanes over the last many decades.” He also questioned why “somehow people don’t want to use” fracking and said the current situation around climate change is “misleading panic.”

Later that evening on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight,Koonin repeated the same statement on humans and hurricanes, and on hotter temperatures, he stated that “the incidence of heat waves across the 48 states is no greater now than it was in 1900, and the highest temperatures haven’t gone up in 60 years.” He also called climate models uncertain and claimed that climate science has become “immoral,” as “it's being used as a tool to scare young people, create depression.”

Koonin, who is not a climate scientist, has a controversial history within the scientific and political climate change community.He formerly served as chief scientist for BP (a company that has played an outsized role in both worsening climate change and delaying climate action).In 2017, he advocated for a “red team-blue team” approach to climate science, which would “put the ‘consensus’ to a test” and illuminate “differing perceptions of climate science.” This idea apparently caught the attention of then-EPA Administrator (and notorious climate change denier) Scott Pruitt. And in 2019, he reportedly tried to help former President Donald Trump create a “climate contrarians” panel with longtime climate denier Will Happer.

Given the content of his new book, it’s no surprise that Koonin appeared on Fox to discuss its key points. While those points are wrong and easily debunkable, they have been spreading across the vast right-wing media ecosystem.

Real climate scientists and experts have lambasted Koonin’s book

Some of the major claims Koonin made in his May 6 Fox appearances came directly from his book, which was reviewed in an April 25 Wall Street Journal piece that repeated a number of its claims. Climate Feedback, a website featuring climate scientists who review dubious climate pieces in the media, reviewed the article and estimated “its overall scientific credibility to be very low.”

Regarding Koonin’s misleading statement on human impacts on hurricanes, MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel said the “most up-to-date research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrates an increase in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes (Category 3-5) globally, supporting theoretical predictions that date back to 1987.” University of California, Los Angeles climate scientist Daniel Swain echoed this point, noting that “the most intense tropical cyclones are indeed becoming stronger in terms of maximum wind speeds and minimum central pressure and are producing more extreme rainfall.”

In his Kudlow interview, Koonin also downplayed the threat of melting ice and rising sea levels, stating that “people worry about the melting of the ice sheets, but that’s gonna take hundreds of years, if it happens.” This statement is remarkably wrong. Twila Moon of the University of Colorado stated that “over the last 20 years, ice loss has been rapid and large, creating measurable sea level rise.” Postdoctoral researcher Thomas Frederikse agreed, saying that “tide-gauge observations show that sea levels are persistently accelerating since the 1960s, and overall, the observed sea-level rise during the 20th century is higher than during any other century over the last 3000 years.”

Koonin’s claims downplaying the effectiveness of climate models are also wrong. Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather states that Koonin’s criticism “ignores the fact that climate models published since the 1970s were quite accurate in projecting the warming that actually occurred in the years after they were published, as we discuss in our recent paper.” (In fact, climate models have been so correct that even fossil-fuel giant Exxon’s own scientists accurately predicted the rate of global warming in the 1980s.)

The Climate Feedback piece also addressed other misleading claims from Koonin’s book that he did not repeat in his Fox interviews, including misleading statements on global wildfires, the severity of droughts, global crop yields, and the economic impact of climate change. Overall, says Twila Moon, “many conclusions highlighted in this article are examples of cherry-picking information and failing to provide the context of change. In other instances, statements are fully wrong and unsupported by scientific research.”

Marianna Lavelle of Inside Climate News also addressed some of the claims Koonin made in his new book, including rebutting the statement he made on his Fox appearances about hot temperatures and heat waves in the U.S.:

The average annual temperature in the contiguous U.S. has increased from 0.7 degrees to 1.0 degrees Celsius (1.2 to 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since the start of the 20th century. The year 2020 was the fifth-warmest year in the 126-year record for the contiguous U.S. And the five warmest years on record have occurred since 2012, NOAA reports. There is a more marked increase in nighttime lows than in daytime highs (the “warmest” temperatures) because of factors like the cooling effect of daytime aerosol pollution and soil moisture evaporation.

She also countered his claim about a future minimal economic impact of climate change by noting 2019 research that found that “global warming has very likely exacerbated global economic inequality, including ∼25% increase in population-weighted between-country inequality over the past half century.”Multiple scientific studies have showed that the cost of climate inaction far outweighs the cost of climate action. Indeed, one analysis finds that climate change could cost nearly $70 trillion by 2100.

In the past several weeks, Koonin has been featured in numerous right-wing media outlets

In addition to his May 6 appearances on Kudlow and Tucker Carlson Tonight, Koonin has made a number of other television appearances, written op-eds, and given interviews promoting his book. The vast majority of these have been with right-wing media outlets, including sources that are climate deniers.

He appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s The First on May 6, Andrew Bolt’s show onAustralia’s Sky Newson May 5, CNBC’s *Squawk Box* on May 4, and Kudlow on March 19. O’Reilly, Bolt, Kudlow, and Squawk Box’s Joe Kernan are all climate deniers. He also appeared on the * program on Sky News Australia on May 8. Here, he claimed that “modest” global warming will be beneficial for the planet, without noting that the negative impacts of climate change will far outweigh any positive ones. Sky News Australia, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, has a history of climate denial.

He has written pieces promoting his book for The National Review and the New York Post, given a print interview to The Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins (who has a history of being wrong about climate issues), given interviews to conservative radio personalities John Gormley and Ross Kaminsky, and spoken to fossil fuel industry shill Alex Epstein, climate misinformer Rich Lowry of The National Review,and conservative Daily Beast writer Matt Lewis. His book and its climate misinformation have also been the basis of articles in Townhall and The Federalist. And along the way, he’s been promoted by notorious climate deniers Marc Morano and Steve Milloy.

Right-wing media propping up books that are skeptical of climate change is an all-too-familiar occurrence

If this all sounds familiar, that’s because it is -- this sort of thing happened just last summer, when climate contrarians Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Shellenberger both released books downplaying the seriousness of climate change within a month of each other. Like Koonin, they both appeared across the right-wing media ecosystem to promote their books. There are other similarities between these individuals as well -- all are highly controversial within the climate science community, while their major works have been fact-checked and discredited by actual climate scientists and experts. Additionally, none of them are climate scientists.

As the realities of worsening climate change become more and more apparent, it’s become more difficult for right-wing media outlets to continue unequivocally denying that climate change is even happening. This new type of climate denial espoused by people like Koonin -- who say climate change is happening but it’s not that big of a problem -- provides perfect cover for right-wing media outlets to act like they care about the issue while they continue helping polluting companies kick climate action down the road.

Koonin’s misinformation-filled book won’t be the last one to downplay the threat of climate change, but it’s becoming easier to spot books like these when right-wing media take an exclusive interest in promoting their false claims.

===

The thrust of Boutrous’ presentation wasn’t that climate science was wrong — he, too, took a turn running through graphs showing the precipitous rise in global temperatures and sea levels — but he also took care to show the rate of emissions in China and India, lingering particularly on a graph that said that China’s emissions currently exceed the United States. He said that this was largely due to the burning of coal, which is being reduced in the US. In fact, Boutrous even credited hydraulic fracking with reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the US.

Boutrous seemed to say that fossil fuel companies aren’t responsible for how people use their products. “IPCC doesn’t say that the extraction or production of fossil fuels leads to emissions,” Boutrous said. “It’s energy use, the economic activity, that drives the demand for fuel that leads to emissions.”

“WE’RE JUST MAKING THE CIGARETTES, PEOPLE ARE CHOOSING TO SMOKE.”

It’s an argument we’ve heard before from tobacco companies, says Peter Frumhoff, chief climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Tobacco companies for years said that ‘We’re just making the cigarettes; people are choosing to smoke,’” Frumhoff says.And for years, courts sided with the companies, he says — until public opinion began to change. “It was the consequence of their efforts to disinform that led juries and judges — who are members of the public — to say, ‘Wait a minute,’” Frumhoff says. The lawsuit itself says bluntly that the defendants “borrowed the Big Tobacco playbook in order to promote their products.” The complaint accuses the oil companies of “promoting massive use of fossil fuels by misleading the public about global warming by emphasizing the uncertainties of climate science.”

In response, Boutrous’ presentation on the history of climate science focused on the controversy around the theory that climate change was caused by humans. Chevron may be willing to say nowthat climate change was caused by humans, but surely it wasn’t wrong to say otherwise then. For example, both Boutrous and Allen mentioned Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius who, at the turn of the 20th century, grew increasingly concerned that anthropogenic carbon emissions could increase global temperatures.

But Boutrous took time to emphasize that, until about the 1960s, most scientists didn’t believe him. This isn’t strictly wrong — although Judge Alsup himself noted that in 1938, Guy Callendar linked climate change to anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. Even NASA’s Earth Observatory agrees that Arrhenius was largely disregarded until the second half of the century. “It’s trial and error. Scientists debating each other,” Boutrous said in court. “Questioning other scientists’ views is part of the scientific process.” (Boutrous did not call any scientific experts on behalf of the oil companies to speak before Judge Alsup Wednesday about how the scientific process is conducted or anything else.)

“WHAT’S ACTUALLY SAID IS NOT NEARLY AS IMPORTANT AS WHAT THE EVIDENCE IS TO SUPPORT IT.”

Boutrous drew quotes from IPCC reports across the years, showing the increasingly strong language that was used to characterize its conclusions about climate change. In 1995, the IPCC said that “the balance of evidence suggests” human-caused climate change, the 2007 report goes with the phrase “very likely,” and by 2013, it becomes “extremely likely.” In other words, the oil companies are emphasizing that it’s taken time for scientists to reach a consensus on climate change. It’s a strategy that climate law expert Jessica Wentz at Columbia Law School was expecting. “Not directly attacking the science, but undermining it by emphasizing uncertainty,” she says.

The legalistic reading of the IPCC’s statements was frustrating to Allen, he said in an interview with The Vergeafter the tutorial concluded, because to scientists, the evidence and context are more important than the language. “The question of whether somebody writing a scientific paper uses the word ‘likely’ or ‘very likely’ is kind of neither here nor there,” Allen says. “What’s actually said is not nearly as important as what the evidence is to support it.”

Still, on the basic facts, the two sides agreed more than they disagreed — which kept arguments over whether or not climate change was real from derailing the hearing. This wasn’t for lack of trying on the part of the deniers: academics William Happer, Richard S. Lindzen, andSteven E. Kooninrequested leave to file their own scientific presentation, which questions anthropogenic climate change. Happer and Lindzen are climate deniers; Koonin claims climate science is “not settled.” Another group of deniers, led by a British viscount with a degree in classical architecture, asked to file an amicus brief in the case. Neither group has yet received permission to contribute to the case, but the judge has asked both to disclose their funding sources and any links to either of the parties in the case. Notably, Koonin disclosed that he had “some money vested in a BP pension plan arising from his employment that ended nine years ago.” (He was chief scientist at BP for five years, according to his NYU bio.)

==

ee

In the fall of 2014, Steven Koonin was finishing up an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal. The theme was a contentious one, especially for a former Obama administration energy official: How certain is climate science?

Koonin sent a draft around to about a dozen people he considers "friendly critics." He wanted their feedback. They included Michael Lubell, Koonin's longtime friend, who was then director of public affairs at the American Physical Society.

Lubell warned him: "You're going to be used."

He told Koonin that it's virtually impossible to have a nuanced position in the climate change debate. "You're either going to be put in one box or the other; you're either a climate denier or you're not. ... Watch, they're going to put a headline on your piece that says you don't think that the science is settled."

Lubell was right. The headline for Koonin's piece: "Climate Science Is Not Settled."

Koonin said of that headline, "I would have chosen something more nuanced." He thinks the working title when he handed it to the Journal was "Climate Clarity." But he noted, "I don't have to sell newspapers."

The op-ed earned Koonin, a theoretical physicist, the ire of many in the climate science world, including his former colleagues in the Obama administration.

John Holdren, who was then President Obama's science adviser, sent Koonin a note saying, more or less: "Dear Steve, I don't think you have this right, and it's not helpful," Holdren said in a recent interview.

Now, Koonin is again in the middle of a controversy.

He advocated for a "red team"approach to climate science in another Wall Street Journal op-edin April. The exercise would allow critics to test the "consensus" around climate science. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has publicly expressed interest in the idea, and he's rumored to be considering hiring Koonin to lead the process.

Koonin has met with Pruitt and other Trump administration officials to discuss the idea of a "red team," he told E&E News on Friday. He declined to comment on whether he's in talks about running such an operation, but he said he'd consider it if certain conditions were met.

"I would convene such an exercise only if I felt I could do it with the integrity, thoroughness and transparency that characterizes the best of science advising," he said.

Koonin doesn't like the idea of televising the potential climate debates, despite Pruitt's suggestion that it might be in the public's interest.

"I do not support a televised red team debate," Koonin said. He said he wants an "honest discussion about what the risks are and the certainties and uncertainties, what the efficacy is of various mitigation measures and responses."

EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman declined to say whether Koonin is in the running for such a job.

She said of a broader effort to assess climate science: "It is essential that certainties and uncertainties in the science are accurately presented to the public and to decisionmakers. A robust, transparent public peer-review evaluation of climate change is something everyone should support."

Koonin, 65, has been director of New York University's Center for Urban Science and Progress since April 2012. From 2009 until 2011, he was undersecretary for science in Energy Department under the Obama administration. He was previously BP PLC's chief scientist and provost of the California Institute of Technology. He has a doctorate in theoretical physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

'No dog in the fight'

Science — not politics — is what drives him, Koonin insists.

"I've got no dog in the fight about whether this is the greatest catastrophe that's facing the planet or this is a nothing burger," he said. "This is something that is a national issue, and I feel the scientific community has an obligation to see that this is accurately portrayed."

But the climate science debate has long been highly politicized, and Koonin cannot escape it.

He's gotten public blowback from prominent scientists and plenty of criticism from his former Obama administration colleagues, who say he's being used by the Trump team to further an agenda to promote uncertainty and roll back climate change regulations.

In June, scientists Benjamin Santer and Kerry Emanuel and science historian Naomi Oreskes penned a response in The Washington Post titled, "Attention Scott Pruitt: Red teams and blue teams are no way to conduct climate science."

They wrote that red team exercises "are dangerous attempts to elevate the status of minority opinions, and to undercut the legitimacy, objectivity and transparency of existing climate science."

Holdren wrote his own op-ed in July, in The Boston Globe. "The argument that such a process would be helpful is some combination of naive and disingenuous," he argued.

'Somewhere between Trump and Obama'

So what exactly does Koonin think about climate change?

He said he's not a climate "skeptic," and he doesn't like the term. "I'm a scientist, and I think we have an obligation to portray the science accurately to decisionmakers and the public. That has been my goal throughout."

Asked whether he agrees with President Trump's approach to climate change, he said, "The truth is probably somewhere between Trump and Obama. It doesn't matter what I think about climate policy. I'm just a scientist. These are complicated scientific, political, social and, in some ways, theological issues."

He said, "My only agenda is to get a good science discussion."

In 2014, he wrote, "There is little doubt in the scientific community that continually growing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, due largely to carbon-dioxide emissions from the conventional use of fossil fuels, are influencing the climate."

The "crucial, unsettled scientific question for policy," Koonin wrote, is: "How will the climate change over the next century under both natural and human influences?"

He's also interested in geoengineering, the idea that humans can intervene in the environment in order to counter global warming.

In 2009, he co-authored a paper assessing the feasibility of pumping aerosol particles into the atmosphere to induce global cooling. The concept of geoengineering remains highly controversial, due in large part to concerns about unintended side effects.

Koonin said it's important to know what's feasible in terms of responding to climate change. Mitigation "is not going to be enough to do what most people think needs to be done," he told E&E News. He said he thinks adaptation will be "the dominant response," and it's valuable to have other options "in our back pocket."

As for geoengineering, he said, "You want to know whether that's an option or not."

Pruitt's 'straw man'?

Koonin's previous work for a Democratic administration makes him an attractive pick for some of those who support a "red team" approach to climate science.

"He has the Obama administration background, so I think he could be seen as an honest broker," said Myron Ebell, a prominent critic of the prevailing views about climate science. Ebell ran Trump's EPA transition team.

Some of Koonin's former colleagues say he's being used to advance Trump's agenda.

"This is a brilliant man who is politically inept," said a former DOE official who worked with Koonin.

"I think Pruitt is using this as a straw man," that person said. "I hope Koonin doesn't take it."

Another former Obama administration colleague said of Koonin, "I think there's a general sense that he's being exploited by the current administration. ... I think political acumen has always been Steve's Achilles' heel."

That was the case during his time at DOE, the former colleague said. Koonin was very active in helping the Obama administration produce its high-profile Quadrennial Energy Review.

"He always had the sense that if he wrote it, if the policy paper was done, that everyone would just endorse that," the former colleague said. "He struggled to understand that policy has to be sold in the political environment."

Koonin brushes off those criticisms.

"I think I have tried to stick with the science, and if discussing the science disappoints people, that's disappointing to me," he said.

If his goal — to get the science accurately depicted — lines up with what Trump's team wants to do, "that's not so bad," he said.

==

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "What you saw coming out of the press releases about climate data, climate analyses, was, I would say, misleading. Sometimes, just wrong, but much more often misleading. For example, in the national climate assessment that came out in 2014, from the US Global Change Research Program, one of the key findings is that hurricane activity increased from 1980. What they forgot to tell you, and you don't know until you read all the way into the fine print, is that it actually decreased in the decades before that. And all of the papers at that time and currently say there's no detectable long-term trend in hurricanes."

==

 wiki

Steven E. Koonin (born December 12, 1951)^[1] is a theoretical physicist and Director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University. He is also a professor in the Department of Civil and Urban Engineering at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering.^[2]

• :{:{Biography:(style="display:table-cell"):}::(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}:
• :{2:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Views on climate science}:
• :{3:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Bibliography}:
• :{4:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{References}:

Biography[

Koonin received his Bachelor of Science from Caltech and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[3] In 1975, Koonin joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology as a Professor of Theoretical Physics, and served as the Institute's provost from 1995 to 2004.^[4] In 2004, Koonin joined BP as their Chief Scientist where he was responsible for guiding the company’s long-range technology strategy, particularly in alternative and renewable energy sources.^[5][citation ^needed]^ 

In 2009, he was appointed the U.S. Department of Energy’s second Senate-confirmed Under Secretary for Science serving from May 19, 2009 through November 18, 2011.^[6] He left that post in November 2011 for a position at the Institute for Defense Analyses. On April 23, 2012, Koonin was named director of NYU's Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP).^[7]

He has served on numerous advisory bodies for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy and its various national laboratories, such as the JASON defense advisory group,which he has chaired.^[8] Koonin's research interests have included theoretical nuclear, many-body, and computational physics, nuclear astrophysics, and global environmental science.^[9]

Views on climate science[

In "Climate Science Is Not Settled," a 2014 essay published in the Wall Street Journal, Koonin wrote that "We are very far from the knowledge needed to make good climate policy," and that "The impact today of human activity [on climate] appears to be comparable to the intrinsic, natural variability of the climate system itself." Koonin criticized the use of results from **climate modelling**to support the "scientific consensus"(quotes in original) about climate change, noting that, among other problems, "The models differ in their descriptions of the past century's global average surface temperature by more than three times the entire warming recorded during that time." Regarding climate sensitivity, Koonin wrote that "Today's best estimate of the sensitivity (between 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) is no different, and no more certain, than it was 30 years ago. And this is despite an heroic research effort costing billions of dollars."^[10]

In 2017, Koonin urged interested parties to a drill-down debate with an article, "A ‘Red Team’ Exercise Would Strengthen Climate Science." ^[11]^ In support of such an approach, he wrote: "The public is largely unaware of the intense debates within climate science. At a recent national laboratory meeting, I observed more than 100 active government and university researchers challenge one another as they strove to separate human impacts from the climate’s natural variability. At issue were not nuances but fundamental aspects of our understanding, such as the apparent—and unexpected—slowing of global sea-level rise over the past two decades."

Bibliography:{:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[e}:

• Computational Physics, Fortran version, ISBN 978-0-201-38623-3

References[

1. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Steven Koonin". Array of Contemporary American Physicists. American Institute of Physics. Retrieved 20 September 2014.
2. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ http://engineering.nyu.edu/people/steven-e-koonin
3. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/hottel-koonin-0923.html
4. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ https://www.caltech.edu/content/former-caltech-provost-steven-koonin-nominated-under-secretary-science
5. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ http://www.earth.columbia.edu/sop2006/bios/koonin_s.html
6. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Energy.gov: "Dr. Steven E. Koonin - Director - NYU's Center for Urban Science & Progress and Former Under Secretary for Science" retrieved October 20, 2013
7. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ http://cusp.nyu.edu/about-us/
8. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Steven Koonin". Department of Energy.
9. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2010-06-23. Retrieved 2014-07-18.
10. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Climate Science Is Not Settled by Steven E. Koonin, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 19, 2014
11. :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Koonin. "A 'Red Team' Exercise Would Strengthen Climate Science". WSJ.

Categories: 

• Living people
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• People associated with energy
• BP people
• Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
• California Institute of Technology alumni
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• Members of JASON
• New York University faculty
• Polytechnic Institute of New York University faculty

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A Deceptive New Report on Climate - WSJ - Wall Street Journal

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-deceptive-new-report-on-climate-1509660882

Steven E. Koonin. Nov. 2, 2017 6:14 p.m. ET. 801 COMMENTS. The world's response to climate changing under natural and human influences is best founded ...

Opinion Journal: How Government Twists ... - Wall Street Journal

:{▶ 3:41:(style="border-top-left-radius:2px;bottom:0px;font-weight:bold;padding:1px 3px;position:absolute;right:0px;text-align:right;background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.7)"):}:

www.wsj.com/.../80027CBC-2C36-4930-AB0B-9C3344B6E199.htm...

Apr 21, 2017

Former Energy Department Undersecretary Steven Koonin on how bureaucrats spin scientific data. Photo ...

A 'Red Team' Exercise Would Strengthen Climate ... - Wall Street Journal

https://www.wsj.com/.../a-red-team-exercise-would-strengthen-climate-science-1492728...

Apr 20, 2017 - Former Energy Department Undersecretary Steven Koonin on scientific ... Mr. Koonin, a theoretical physicist, is director of the Center for Urban ...

Good Science Should Rule U.S. Climate Policy - WSJ

https://www.wsj.com/articles/good-science-should-rule-u-s-climate-policy-1510084635

Nov 7, 2017 - It's unfortunate that Steven E. Koonin chose to wait until months after an extensive public review process to critique the Climate Science Special ...

Opinion Journal: The Climate Change Debates ... - Wall Street Journal

www.wsj.com/.../64410386-C38D-4902-A53A-1E73B0468D4C.htm...

Apr 21, 2017

Former Energy Department Undersecretary Steven Koonin on scientific self-censorship. Photo: istock images.

Climate Science Is Not Settled - WSJ - Wall Street Journal

www.wsj.com/articles/climate-science-is-not-settled-1411143565

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

1.

:{:{Steven:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: E. :{Koonin:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:. Sept. 19, 2014 12:19 p.m. ET. 2921 COMMENTS. The idea that "Climate science is settled" runs through today's popular and policy ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Steven E. Koonin - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_E._Koonin

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

2.

:{:{Steven:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: E. :{Koonin:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: (born December 12, 1951) is a theoretical physicist and Director of the Center ... In "Climate Science Is Not Settled," a 2014 essay published in the :{Wall Street Journal:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, :{Koonin:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: wrote that "We are very far from the knowledge ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

Faculty News | Steven Koonin | The Wall Street Journal - NYU Stern

www.stern.nyu.edu › Experience Stern › News & Events

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

1.

:{Apr 21, 2017 - Professor :{Steven Koonin:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: discusses how bureaucrats spin scientific data ... Excerpt from The :{Wall Street Journal:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: -- "What you saw coming out of ...:(style="word-wrap:break-word"):}:

E.P.A. to Give Dissenters a Voice on Climate, No Matter the ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/climate/scott-pruitt-climate-change-red-team.html

Jun 30, 2017 - In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal in April, Steven Koonin, a physicist at New York University, proposed that a “red team” of dissenting ...

EPA: Here's the Obama energy guy that Pruitt might hire -- Monday ...

https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060058443

:{:(style="border-color:#006621;;border-style:solid;border-width:5px 4px 0px;width:0px;height:0px;margin-left:3px;top:7.5px;margin-top:-4px;position:absolute;left:0px"):}:

1.

:{Aug 7, 2017 - :(style="text-decoration-line:none;cursor:pointer;display:block;padding:7px 18px;outline:0px;word-wrap:break-word"):}:In the fall of 2014, :{Steven Koonin}: was finishing up an op-ed for The :{Wall Street Journal}:. The theme was a contentious one, especially for a ...

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OPINION  COMMENTARY

A ‘Red Team’ Exercise Would Strengthen Climate Science

Put the ‘consensus’ to a test, and improve public understanding, through an open, adversarial process.

Opinion Journal: The Climate Change Debates You Never Hear About

Former Energy Department Undersecretary Steven Koonin on scientific self-censorship. Photo: istock images

By Steven Koonin

April 20, 2017 6:49 p.m. ET

Tomorrow’s March for Science will draw many thousands in support of evidence-based policy making and against the politicization of science. A concrete step toward those worthy goals would be to convene a “Red Team/Blue Team” process for climate science, one of the most important and contentious issues of our age.

The national-security community pioneered the “Red Team” methodology to test assumptions and analyses, identify risks, and reduce—or at least understand—uncertainties. The process is now considered a best practice...

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wiki

obama appt!

**Steven E. Koonin**:{ :(style="text-decoration-line:none;cursor:pointer;display:block;padding:7px 18px;outline:0px"):}:(born December 12, 1951):{}:[[1]](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_E._Koonin#cite_note-1) is a theoretical physicist and Director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University.

Contents

  [hide] 

• 1 Biography
• 2 Views on Climate Science
• 3 Bibliography
• 4 References

Biography:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

Koonin received his Bachelor of Science from Caltech and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[2] In 1975, Koonin joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology as aProfessor of **Theoretical Physics**, including a 9-year term as the Institute's provost.^[3][citation ^needed]^ In 2004, Koonin joined BP plc serving as their Chief Scientist where he was responsible for guiding the company’s long-range technology strategy, particularly in alternative and renewable energy sources.^[4][citation ^needed]^ In 2009, he was appointed the U.S. Department of Energy’s second Senate-confirmed Under Secretary for Science serving from May 19, 2009 through November 18, 2011.^[5] He left that post in November 2011 for a position at the Institute for Defense Analyses. On April 23, 2012, Koonin was named director of NYU's Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP).^[6]

He has served on numerous advisory bodies for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy and its various national laboratories.^[7][citation ^needed]^ Koonin's research interests have included theoretical nuclear, many-body, and computational physics, nuclear astrophysics, and global environmental science.^[8]

Views on Climate Science:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

In "Climate Science Is Not Settled," a 2014 essay published in the Wall Street Journal, Koonin wrote that "We are very far from the knowledge needed to make good climate policy," and that "The impact today of human activity [on climate] appears to be comparable to the intrinsic, natural variability of the climate system itself." Koonin criticized the use of results from climate modelling to support the "scientific consensus" (quotes in original) about climate change, noting that, among other problems, "The models differ in their descriptions of the past century's global average surface temperature by more than three times the entire warming recorded during that time." Regarding climate sensitivity, Koonin wrote that"Today's best estimate of the sensitivity (between 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) is no different, and no more certain, than it was 30 years ago. And this is despite an heroic research effort costing billions of dollars." ^[9]

^ ^

Bibliography:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

• Computational Physics, Fortran version, ISBN 978-0-201-38623-3

References:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

1. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ "Steven Koonin". Array of Contemporary American Physicists. American Institute of Physics. Retrieved 20 September 2014.
2. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/hottel-koonin-0923.html
3. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ http://www.its.caltech.edu/~koonin/
4. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ http://www.earth.columbia.edu/sop2006/bios/koonin_s.html
5. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Energy.gov: "Dr. Steven E. Koonin - Director - NYU's Center for Urban Science & Progress and Former Under Secretary for Science" retrieved October 20, 2013
6. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ http://cusp.nyu.edu/about-us/
7. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ http://www.energy.gov/organization/dr_steven_koonin.htm
8. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ http://www.pma.caltech.edu/PhysColl/biographies/people/koonin_steven.html
9. :{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^ Climate Science Is Not Settled by Steven E. Koonin, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 19, 2014

Categories: 

• Living people
• 1951 births
• Obama Administration personnel
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• People associated with energy
• BP people
• Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
• California Institute of Technology alumni
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni
• California Institute of Technology faculty

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There is no death for even the most long-debunked climate myths, especially on the pages of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. And the only certainty about carbon taxes — or indeed any serious climate action — is that the Journal will try to undercut their moral urgency by giving life to dead myths.

In the case of the Journal’s Saturday piece, “Climate Science Is Not Settled,” we get the umpteenth error-riddled rehash of denier talking points — to the effect that the remaining uncertainties in climate science undermine the case for strong action.

The piece is by former BP chief scientist and former Department of Energy official, Steven Koonin, but this dangerously error-riddled piece is much more BP than DOE — and its bizarre and unjustified conclusions have already beendebunked by leading climate scientists.

In fact, it has long been known that the reverse is true: Uncertainty is a major reason climate action is so urgent. Three years ago, a major climate-assessment study of just the rainfall impacts to this country conducted by Sandia National Laboratory concluded:

“We want to reemphasize that the methods of this study reveal how compelling risk derives from uncertainty, not certainty. The greater the uncertainty, the greater the risk. It is the uncertainty associated with climate change that validates the need to act protectively and proactively.”

As a side note, Koonin was in charge of “coordinating and overseeing research across the DOE” when this major scientific report from a DOE lab came out.

Uncertainty increases the moral necessity of climate action for two main reasons. First, virtually all the large-scale uncertainty associated with climate inaction concerns how catastrophic the worst-case scenario is. That’s because inaction makes the chances of a best-case scenario — tolerable or manageable impacts — very small.

Climate science makes clear that “inaction eliminates most of the uncertainty about whether future warming will be catastrophic.” Worse, inaction introduces the very real risk that we might render large parts of the currently inhabited and arable land of the world unfit for human life and/or crops, reducing the carrying capacity of the planet far below its current level of 7 billion, let alone the 9+ billion people we are projected to have post-2050.

But uncertainty at the smaller-scale level is also a key reason we must act. Critics of climate models like Koonin often note that they aren’t able to make accurate predictions of local weather. That’s true, and unfortunately that makes waiting and adapting a far more costly proposition.

We know that global warming makes previously rare, city-devastating deluges increasingly common. We know that devastating deluges of the kind that have swamped Boulder and Nashville and upstate New York and Pakistan are becoming more frequent and more intense over time thanks to climate change. We know the same is true for storm surges like Superstorm Sandy’s that flattened so much of the New York and New Jersey coast.

But we can’t predict exactly where these super storms will strike. So that means if we don’t spend the money to minimize them from happening somewhere, we have to spend money preparing for them everywhere. And that is very, very expensive.

Relatedly, it is a very well known that humans dislike uncertainty, especially uncertainty surrounding the possibility of catastrophic risks. That’s why we own fire insurance, even though the chances of a fire are very small. It’s a key reason we own health insurance, especially catastrophic health insurance. We don’t know who is going to get catastrophically sick; we only know that if it were to happen to us, it could easily be a life-ruining, bankruptcy-inducing event.

That’s a key reason uncertainty motivates so much human action.

[cartoon resk assess]

And it’s a key reason inaction on climate change is so immoral. It is one thing to take a potentially catastrophic risk upon yourself — smoking, eating more and more unhealthy foods — but to impose a potentially catastrophic risk on billions of people who contributed little or nothing to the problem is among the most immoral acts imaginable. That’s particularly true when the prospective damage is irreversible over a time span of centuries and the cost of even very strong action is negligible if not zero (or less!).

Koonin’s Wall Street Journal piece itself is an embarrassing collection of errors, denier talking points and hypocrisy. You can find fuller debunkings by scientists here and here. But a few whoppers are worth highlighting.

Koonin claims that “the impact today of human activity appears to be comparable to the intrinsic, natural variability of the climate system itself.”

No. Not even close! In fact, the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which Koonin repeatedly mentions but apparently never read closely) states clearly that the “best estimate is that humans are responsible for all of the warming we have suffered since 1950.”

As Dr. Michael Mann, Director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State, explains in his reply to Koonin:

The fact is that the actual peer-reviewed scientific research shows that (a) the rate of warming over the past century is unprecedented as far back as the 20,000 years paleoclimate scientists are able to extend the record and (b) that warming canONLY be explained by human influences.

Indeed, it is the RATE of warming that presents such risk to human civilization and our environment.

Climate scientists Michael Oppenheimer and Kevin Trenberth also debunk Koonin, noting, “Warming is well beyond natural climate variability and projected rates of change are potentially faster than ecosystems, farmers and societies can adapt to without major disruptions.”

They add that Koonin’s main conclusions — that climate science only justifies increased R&D into renewable energy and “cost-effective” energy efficiency — “ignore decades of research results.”

Bottom Line: Although Koonin was technically in charge of overseeing science at DOE for years, he has chosen to ignore decades of research, including research done at DOE during his tenure.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/09/22/3570280/wall-street-journal-climate-inaction/

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