Earlier today Scientific American published an article entitled “That ‘Obama Scientist’ Climate Skeptic You’ve Been Hearing About“. The climate skeptic in question being of course Steven E. Koonin. If you click that last link it will be immediately obvious that I’ve recently been critical of Professor Koonin’s new book “Unsettled” in several more ways than one! The article in Scientific American is authored by several more people than one. Twelve to be precise, including the famous names of Naomi Oreskes, Michael E. Mann and Andrew Dessler. That team takes a largely different approach to my own criticism, making no mention of the cryosphere for example, although sea level rise does get a mention. Rather than going into the science in detail, Oreskes et al. take a different approach. Here’s the introduction to the article:
If you’d heard only that a scientist who served in the Trump administration and now regularly appears on Fox News and other conservative media thinks climate change is a hoax, you’d roll your eyes and move on. But if you heard that someone associated with former President Barack Obama’s Democratic administration was calling the climate science consensus a conspiracy, the novelty of the messenger might make you take it a little more seriously.
The latter is what Steve Koonin is using to sell his new book, which is being billed as the revelation of an “Obama scientist” who wants you to think that climate change isn’t a big deal. But unfortunately, climate change is real, is caused primarily by burning fossil fuels, and is already hurting people all over the world, including here in the United States.
For example, a study published recently found that because climate change has caused sea levels to rise, Superstorm Sandy flooded an additional 36,000 homes, impacting 71,000 people who would’ve been safe otherwise, and caused $8 billion in additional damage.
A little later the article suggests that:
Steve Koonin is hoping you’ll see Obama’s name and trust him when he tells you that he’s better equipped to summarize major climate reports than the authors of the U.N.’s IPCC report and the U.S. government’sNational Climate Assessment, who wrote at length about the already sizable and growing costs of climate change. He’s hoping you won’t recall that each president appoints thousands of people, and Koonin, it turns out, was hired at the Energy Department specifically for his contrarianism. His boss at the time, Stephen Chu, said he “didn’t want to have a department where everybody believed exactly as everybody else” and added that Koonin “loves to be the curmudgeon type.”
Curmudgeon or not, Steve’s science certainly leaves a lot to be desired, as has been proved here! Oreskes et al. put it this way:
When it comes to the science, Koonin cherry-picks and misrepresents outdated material to downplay the seriousness of the climate crisis…
He wants you to believe that, as an Obama hire, he knows better about what you should take away from these reports than the scientists who wrote them.
That sums things up quite nicely, although the article doesn’t actually contain a whole lot of evidence for the first assertion, what Steve refers to as “The Science”. Instead it prefers to link to the Climate Feedback article mentioned here at the Great White Con back at the beginning of May and two articles by Marianne Lavelle in Inside Climate News.
However towards the end of the article, in true “Merchants of Doubt” style, following the money trail behind the promotion of “Unsettled” is mentioned:
The misrepresentations cited as appearing in Koonin’s book are being amplified in right-wing media and beyond. A recent Washington Post column by conservative contributor Marc Thiessen repeats several points Koonin makes…
Thiessen is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. For those unfamiliar with the tangled world of organized climate denial, a recent study paints a pretty clear picture: of all the conservative, climate-denying think tanks that get Koch and other industry funding, AEI has gotten the most. It received some $380 million to peddle industry-friendly denial like Koonin’s, much of it through dark money pass-throughs to conceal that it’s coming from conservative and dirty-energy donors.
Be all that as it may, in conclusion let’s get back to the cryospheric science. Here’s how I first found out about the Scientific American article, and Steve Koonin and/or Judith Curry still haven’t answered my pertinent questions about the unsettling lack of Arctic scientific expertise evident in “Unsettled”:
I rather doubt that Judith! Although @michaelemann and @NaomiOreskes are a bit behind the curve in their critique of the "recent Washington Post column by conservative contributor @marcthiessen" which I covered on May 16th.
We have previously mentioned the Wall Street Journal’s assorted activities promoting the new book by Steven E. Koonin which possesses the rather long winded title of “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.”
We further speculated that assorted things that climate science tells us which Dr. Koonin neglected to mention in his book would also not appear in moving pictures expounding his “message”. That has indeed proved to be the case. You can see a copy of the book in question handily placed on a bookshelf behind Steve Koonin in this interview with Paul Gigot for the Wall Street Journal:
By way of introduction Paul enquires:
What isn’t settled in your mind?
Steve responds:
What isn’t settled is how the climate is going to respond to growing human influences, and how that response will affect society and ecosystems.
A little later Paul asserts that:
There’s no question that fossil fuel extraction and burning adds carbon dioxide and methane and other things into the atmosphere. Is the issue just how the interactions work and how much warming they will cause? I mean Al Gore keeps telling us for example that if you look at the graph of CO2 emissions it’s going up, therefore there’s a direct correlation between that and temperature. I think you’re saying “that’s not true”?
to which Steve responds:
That’s not true! For example, when you look at the record global temperature went down between 1940 and 1970 even as greenhouse gases increased. That’s got to tell you immediately that things are a little more complicated than just greenhouse gases are warming the Earth.
So there you have it. Al Gore is a mere straw man, easily knocked down with a cherry pick without even bothering to mention any of the underlying science.
Paul moves on to mention in passing our favourite topic here at the Great White Con:
Now what about the idea that if we continue to warm you’re seeing all these consequence in terms of much more severe weather events, you’re seeing rising oceans, you’re seeing the melting of the polar ice caps. All of that sort of blends together into a kind of disastrous scenario. Are you saying that those are also just simply exaggerated?
Steve responds eagerly:
Yes they are! And let me give you some factoids.
Unsettlingly none of the factoids he gives us mention Arctic sea ice, a topic which Professor Koonin appears to be strangely ignorant of. Perhaps that’s because whichever way you try to slice and dice it that’s still the ultimately unavoidable giant canary in the climate coal mine?
[Edit – May 11th]
Needless to say Steve Koonin has also been interviewed by Tucker Carlson for Fox News. Needless to say the clip once again opens with a speech by that well known climate scientist, Joe Biden. Needless to say there is no mention of the giant canary in the Arctic coal mine once again. Tucker makes no reference to Greenland either, which does at least merit a mention in Steve’s book. Take a look:
Tucker opens his questioning with:
A hurricane will arise out of the Caribbean. We’ll have a heat wave. We’ll have a cold snap. All of them are attributed reflexively to climate change. How certain can we be that climate change causes those events?
Steve responds:
When you read the official reports from the UN and the US Government you find some surprises. For example, even though the globe has warmed by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit over the last century the incidence of heat waves across the 48 states is no greater than it was in 1900, and the highest temperatures haven’t gone up in 60 years.
We have been able to find no detectable influence on hurricanes from humans, and the models that we use to predict future climates have become more uncertain even as they’ve become more sophisticated. All of these things suggest that people who say that “we’ve broken the climate” and face certain doom unless we take drastic action are just misinformed about what the official reports actually say.
Despite the fact that Fox display some stock footage of sea ice during the interview, Tucker and Steve seem strangely unaware that those 48 states do not constitute the entire globe, or that there was a 2.7 degrees Celsius “heat wave” in the Arctic even as the interview was being conducted:
A little later in the interview Steve says:
We need to have an accurate portrayal of what we know and what we don’t know, and then we can have the debate about what to do about it, without using science as a weapon.
Sadly Steve seems strangely unaware that evidently you’re not going to get the accurate portrayal he recommends via Fox News!
[Edit – May 14th]
Steven Koonin has also been interviewed on CNBC’s Squawk Box, where Joe Kernen’s introduction gives you a strong flavour of what’s to come:
Corporations are spending billions to reduce their so called carbon footprint. President Biden’s infrastructure plan is loaded with subsidies for green industries. In fact if the new green deal ever was passed it wouldn’t be billions, it would be trillions.
Our next guest questions the conventional wisdom on climate science and it’s impact on business and the US economy. Steven Koonin served as the chief scientist in the Obama energy department, and is currently a professor at NYU and the author of “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters” :
Steve begins by assuring Joe’s audience that:
Everything I’ve written in this book comes almost directly from the official UN and US Government assessment reports, so this is not Steve talking really, but it is the consensus science.
For some strange reason Steve neglected to include the phrase “ignored and/or cherry picked” in front of “official UN and US Government assessment reports”. He then spouts his by now familiar schtick about “heatwaves in the US”, “hurricanes” and “global wildfires”. Joe then moves the conversation on to the economy:
Will there be an unnecessary negative effect on GDP, on corporations, if they pursue this when it’s not really necessary?
To which Dr. Koonin, as Joe calls him, responds:
I like to say you change the energy system by orthodonture rather than tooth extraction. And so if we do want to reduce carbon emissions we need to do it at a more thoughtful pace and in a more thoughtful way than is being proposed, and moreover we need to get the rest of the world to come along with us if it’s going to have any impact at all…
As [John] Kerry has said, unless the rest of the world comes along US efforts are futile.
So yet again no mention of the IPCC’s “consensus science” regarding Arctic sea ice or even the Greenland Ice Sheet. I cannot help but wonder where Steve’s talking head will appear next on United States’ viewers screens, but on past performance it seems unlikely that the cryosphere will merit a mention.
The show is over, and it went pretty much as Alice F. predicted it would. Lamar Smith has passed his verdict on the morning’s proceedings in strangely untheatrical style:
My own mileage certainly varied from Lamar’s! Here’s a hasty summary of events via the distorting lens of Twitter:
A more detailed analysis of United States’ House Committee on Science, Space and Technology’s “show trial” of climate models will follow in due course, but for now if you so desire you can watch the entire event on YouTube:
I’ll have to at least watch the bit where my live feed cut out as Dana Rohrabacher slowly went ballistic with Mike Mann:
Nevertheless, given our long running campaign against the climate science misinformation frequently printed in the Mail on Sunday it gives us great pleasure to reprint in full the following extract from his written testimony today:
For proper context, we must consider the climate denial myth du jour that global warming has “stopped”. Like most climate denial talking points, the reality is pretty much the opposite of what is being claimed by the contrarians. All surface temperature products, including the controversial UAH satellite temperature record, show a clear long-term warming trend over the past several decades:
We have now broken the all-time global temperature record for three consecutive years and a number of published articles have convincingly demonstrated that global warming has continued unabated despite when one properly accounts for the vagaries of natural short-term climate fluctuations. A prominent such study was published by Tom Karl and colleagues in 2015 in the leading journal Science. The article was widely viewed as the final nail in the “globe has stopped warming” talking point’s coffin.
Last month, opinion writer David Rose of the British tabloid the Daily Mail — known for his serial misrepresentations of climate change and his serial attacks on climate scientists, published a commentary online attacking Tom Karl, accusing him of having “manipulated global warming data” in the 2015 Karl et al article. This fake news story was built entirely on an interview with a single disgruntled former NOAA employee, John Bates, who had been demoted from a supervisory position at NOAA for his inability to work well with others.
Bates’ allegations were also published on the blog of climate science denier Judith Curry (I use the term carefully—reserving it for those who deny the most basic findings of the scientific community, which includes the fact that human activity is substantially or entirely responsible for the large-scale warming we have seen over the past century — something Judith Curry disputes). That blog post and the Daily Mail story have now been thoroughly debunked by the actual scientific community. The Daily Mail claim that data in the Karl et al. Science article had been manipulated was not supported by Bates. When the scientific community pushed back on the untenable “data manipulation” claim, noting that other groups of scientists had independently confirmed Karl et al’s findings, Bates clarified that the real problem was that data had not been properly archived and that the paper was rushed to publication. These claims too quickly fell apart.
Though Bates claimed that the data from the Karl et al study was “not in machine-readable form”, independent scientist Zeke Hausfather, lead author of a study that accessed the data and confirmed its validity, wrote in a commentary “…for the life of me I can’t figure out what that means. My computer can read it fine, and it’s the same format that other groups use to present their data.” As for the claim that the paper was rushed to publication, Editor-in-chief of Science Jeremy Berg says, “With regard to the ‘rush’ to publish, as of 2013, the median time from submission to online publication by Science was 109 days, or less than four months. The article by Karl et al. underwent handling and review for almost six months. Any suggestion that the review of this paper was ‘rushed’ is baseless and without merit. Science stands behind its handling of this paper, which underwent particularly rigorous peer review.”
Shortly after the Daily Mail article went live, a video attacking Karl (and NOAA and even NASA for good measure) was posted by the Wall Street Journal. Within hours, the Daily Mail story spread like a virus through the right-wing blogosphere, appearing on numerous right-wing websites and conservative news sites. It didn’t take long for the entire Murdoch media empire in the U.S, U.K. and elsewhere to join in, with the execrable Fox News for example alleging Tom Karl had “cooked” climate data and, with no sense of irony, for political reasons.
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), chair of this committee has a history25 of launching attacks on climate science and climate scientists. He quickly posted a press release praising the Daily Mail article, placing it on the science committee website, and falsely alleging that government scientists had “falsified data”. Smith, it turns out, had been planning a congressional hearing timed to happen just days after this latest dustup, intended to call into question the basis for the EPA regulating carbon emissions. His accusations against Karl and NOAA of tampering with climate data was used in that hearing to claim that the entire case for concern over climate change was now undermined.
That’s pretty much the way we see things too Mike!
[Edit – March 31st]
In the aftermath of Wednesday’s hearing, the accusations are flying in all directions. By way of example:
No clarification has yet been forthcoming from Dr. Pielke.
The denialosphere is of course now spinning like crazy attempting to pin something, anything, on Michael Mann. Over at Climate Depot Marc Morano assures his loyal readers that:
Testifying before Congress, climate scientist Michael Mann denies any affiliation or association to the Climate Accountability Institute despite his apparent membership on the Institute’s Council of Advisors.
Whilst correctly quoting Dr. Mann as saying:
I can provide – I’ve submitted my CV you can see who I’m associated with and who I am not.
Here’s the video Marc uses to support his case:
Meanwhile over on Twitter:
As I said before, Mann said "No." He then added "I've submitted my CV. You can see who I'm associated with". The CV contradicts his lie.
Today is All Fools’ Day, but this is no joke. Last night Judith Curry posted an article on her “Climate Etc.” blog entitled “‘Deniers,’ lies and politics“. Here is an extract from it:
“Turns out Mann appears to be a bit of a denier himself. Under questioning, Mann denied being involved with the Climate Accountability Institute even though he is featured on its website as a board member. CAI is one of the groups pushing a scorched-earth approach to climate deniers, urging lawmakers to employ the RICO statute against fossil-fuel corporations. When asked directly if he was either affiliated or associated with CAI, Mann answered “no.” [JC note: Mann also lists this affiliation on his CV]
Some additional ‘porkies’ are highlighted in an article by James Delingpole.
Now the first thing to note is that I’d already explained the context of Mr. Mann’s “interrogation” by Rep. Clay Higgins on Judith’s blog several times:
At the risk of repeating myself Mann said, and I quote:
“I’ve submitted my CV. You can see who I’m ‘associated’ with”
His CV states, quoted by McIntyre:
Why on Earth Judith chose to repeat the “CAI” allegation is beyond me.
Secondly, Prof. Mann is NOT featured on the CAI website as a board member. He is instead listed as a member of their “Council of Advisors”.
Thirdly, quoting James Delingpole as a source of reliable information about anything “climate change” related is also beyond me. Needless to say Mr. Delingpole also repeats the CAI nonsense, whilst simultaneously plagiarising our long standing usage of the term “Porky pie“!
All of which brings me on to my next point. In the video clip above Rep. Higgins can be heard to say:
These two organisations [i.e the Union of Concerned Scientists & the Climate Accountability Institute], are they connected directly with organised efforts to prosecute man influenced climate sceptics via RICO statutes?
to which Dr. Mann replied:
The way you’ve phrased it, I would find it extremely surprising if what you said was true.
Now please skip to the 1 hour 31:33 mark in the video of the full hearing to discover what Marc Morano left out. Rep. Higgins asks Dr. Mann:
Would you be able to at some future date provide to this committee evidence of your lack of association with the organisation Union of Concerned Scientists and lack of your association with the organisation called Climate Accountability Institute? Can you provide that documentation to this committee Sir?
This is, of course, a “when did you stop beating your wife” sort of a question. How on Earth do you prove a “lack of association with an organisation”. Supply a video of your entire life? Dr. Mann responded less pedantically:
You haven’t defined what “association” even means here, but it’s all in my CV which has already been provided to Committee.
So what on Earth are Rep. Higgins and ex. Prof. Curry on about with all this “RICO” business? With thanks to Nick Stokes on Judith’s blog, the document he refers to seems to be the only evidence for the insinuations:
It turns out that what the congressman was probably referring to was a workshop they mounted in 2012 (not attended by Mann), which explored the RICO civil lawsuit mounted against tobacco companies.
It does mention for example “the RICO case against the tobacco companies” but it never mentions anything that might conceivably be (mis)interpreted as “pushing a scorched-earth approach to climate deniers”.
That being the case, why on Earth do you suppose Judith Curry chose to mention that phrase on her blog last night and why did Clay Higgins choose to broach the subject on Wednesday?
[Edit – April 2nd]
Perhaps this really is an April Fools’ joke? Over on Twitter Stephen McIntyre continues to make my case for me. Take a look:
And he’s not the only one! Alice F.’s sixth sense tells her that another Storify slideshow will be required to do this saga justice!
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