Tag Archives: Steve Koonin

Steven E. Koonin – Professor in the Department of Civil and Urban Engineering at NYU and current “skeptical” superstar.

Grok Confirms Michael Shellenberger Talks Abject Nonsense

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Thanks to Going South for the heads up:

By way of additional background information, Wikipedia asserts that:

Grok is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by xAI. It was launched in November 2023 by Elon Musk as an initiative based on the large language model (LLM) of the same name. Grok has apps for iOS and Android and is integrated with the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter), Tesla vehicles, and Tesla’s Optimus robot. The chatbot is named after the verb grok, coined by American author Robert A. Heinlein in his 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land to describe a deeper than human form of understanding.

The bot has generated various controversial responses, including conspiracy theories, antisemitism, and praise of Adolf Hitler, as well as referring to Musk’s views when asked about controversial topics or difficult decisions. Updates since 2023 have shifted the bot politically rightward to provide conservative responses to user queries.

and that:

Michael D. Shellenberger is an American author and journalist. He is the first endowed professor at the University of Austin, serving as CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech.

Shellenberger is a prominent heterodox thinker on topics including climate change and homelessness…

University of Austin is not a school recognized by the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics.

In other news, is Grok schizophrenic?

[Update – November 3rd]

Grok seem to having a lot of trouble answering this simple question:

He/she/it/they has been pondering the problem for over an hour now.

[Update – 15:00 UTC November 3rd]

I got bored waiting for Grok to get back to me, so I asked ChatGPT much the same question. I was informed:

Suggested links

The Naval History & Heritage Command (NHHC) entry: “Skate II (SSN-578)” on history.navy.mil — gives the official history and mentions the March 17, 1959 surfacing. history.navy.mil

An archived photograph in the NHHC image collection: “USN 1040961 USS SKATE (SSN–578)” which shows the submarine moored to the ice pack. flickr.com

A blog article “USS Skate at the North Pole – Truth and Fantasy Fiction” that collects several of the historic photographs and discusses their context. greatwhitecon.info

I asked ChatGPT to check out the final link in more detail. I was informed:

What GreatWhiteCon does well:

It collects and reproduces the historic images and contemporary captions, and discusses how those images have been interpreted (or misinterpreted) over time. That makes it a handy one-stop place to see the pictures and some commentary.

What GreatWhiteCon is not:

It is a blog/analysis piece (2018) rather than an official or archival source. That means its interpretation is useful, but any factual claim that matters (dates, official captions, archival catalog numbers) is best checked against the primary records (Naval History & Heritage Command, National Archives, contemporary magazines, USNI Proceedings).

Grok has a rather different interpretation of what Great White Con does well. Allegedly “Snow White”:

Counters alarmist views… promoting nuanced data interpretation over binary claims.

[Update – November 4th]

Today my discussion with Grok on XTwitter turned (amongst other things) to the recent United States Department of Energy “Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate” report.

My conversation with Grok is remarkably reminiscent of mud wrestling with “skeptical” Twitter trolls:

Watch this space!

The GWPF Boldly Go Where Steve Koonin Feared To Tread

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My apologies for the mixed metaphors in today’s title, but the news I bear is beyond bizarre.

In a press release earlier today The Global Warming Policy Foundation proudly announced that:

A new paper by an eminent meteorologist says that trends in polar sea-ice levels give little cause for alarm. The paper, by Professor J. Ray Bates has just been published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

According to Professor Bates, climate model simulations indicate significantly decreasing sea ice levels in both hemispheres, with the greatest decreases occurring in September each year. However, the observed September trend in the Antarctic is actually slightly upwards, and while observed levels in the Arctic have fallen over the last 40 years, they have been quite stable since around 2007.

Professor Bates said:

“In 2007, Al Gore told us that Arctic sea ice levels were ‘falling off a cliff’. It’s clear now that he was completely wrong. In fact, the trends in sea-ice are an antidote to climate alarm.”

Professor Bates also says that little reliance should be placed on model simulations of future sea-ice decline:

“Climate models failed to predict the growth in Antarctic sea ice, and they missed the recent marked slowdown of sea-ice decline in the Arctic. It would be unwarranted to think they are going to get things right over the next 30 years.”

Professor Bates’ paper is published today, and can be downloaded here (pdf).

By all means download Ray’s “paper” from the link above and take a look at his introduction, which begins as follows:

The recent publication of the book Unsettled by Steven Koonin has led to the likelihood of increased scrutiny of the perception of a climate emergency,1 an idea which has become so widely established in recent years. Koonin, a former scientific advisor to the Obama administration, has demonstrated that what the public are being told by the media is not necessarily what the scientists are saying. He has also shown that what is being relayed in the national and UN climate assessments has often been written for the purpose of persuading rather than informing.

Unsettled clearly shows that important aspects of climate science, which the public have been persuaded to regard as beyond dispute are, in fact, quite unsettled.

Regular readers may recall that as soon as Steve’s book was published in machine readable format we established that it made no mention whatsoever of sea ice, whether of the Arctic or Antarctic variety.

Furthermore, when I attempted to debate that fact with Prof. Koonin he disappeared without trace before justifying that strange omission, beyond asserting that:

The topic is somewhat distant from ordinary folks’ perception.

It seems that Prof. Bates and the GWPF disagree with Prof. Koonin on this topic, since presumably their “paper” is addressed to ordinary folks? Ray even explicitly states that:

Although Unsettled covers a broad spectrum of climate topics, it does not treat in depth the issue of recent polar sea-ice trends, which are key indicators of changes in the global climate.

His “paper” goes on to assert in section 2 that:

Since the introduction of passive-microwave satellite observations in the late 1970s, polar sea-ice extent has been among the most accurately observed climate indicators. Sea-ice volume, on the other hand, is much more difficult to measure.

So far so good I suppose, but then we are told:

In December 2007, former US vice-president Al Gore, in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Oslo, referred to scientific studies warning that the Arctic sea ice was ‘falling off a cliff’. He highlighted forthcoming model results that projected largely ice-free Arctic summers in ‘as little as seven years’. He repeated this warning two years later at the 2009 COP15 climate meeting in Copenhagen.

Gore’s claim was based on a study by researchers from the US Naval Postgraduate School, who used a regional model of the sea ice–ocean system in the Arctic, constrained using observational data for the 12-year period 1996–2007, and concluded that the Arctic would be nearly ice-free in summer by 2016 (plus or minus three years).

Prof. Bates seems blithely unaware that we thoroughly debunked this nonsense many moons ago. What Prof. Wieslaw Maslowski, one of those pesky “researchers from the US Naval Postgraduate School”, actually said in December 2007 was:

If we project this trend ongoing for the last 10–15 years, we probably will reach zero in summer some time mid next decade.

At the risk of repeating myself it seems I must once again:

Reiterate for the benefit of those who seem unable to understand either English or Mathematics that a “projection” is not the same thing as a “prediction”.

Ray then goes on to quibble with the NSIDC’s graph of September average Arctic sea ice extent:

preferring instead a version of his own construction, which looks like this:

Ray then confidently asserts that:

The current slowdown in the rate of sea-ice loss was not expected, and the reasons for it are uncertain.

Sadly Ray’s exhaustive list of references fails to mention this learned journal article from 2011 by authors from the University of Washington and Los Alamos National Laboratory, which not only anticipated such a “slow transition” but also offered reasons for it:

Given the strong thickness–growth feedback of sea ice (Bitz and Roe 2004), where in a warming climate we can expect the thicker MY ice to thin at a greater rate than the thinner FY ice, and the fact that the ratio of MY to FY ice entering into the MY ice category each year is decreasing, it is likely that the difference between FY and MY ice survival ratios will decrease in a warming climate. If this occurs, the Arctic sea ice system would move toward a regime of decreased memory and decreased sensitivity to climate forcing…

There is of course plenty more GWPF sea ice nonsense where that lot came from, but it’s already past my tea time (UTC) and so further debunking will have to wait a while. In the meantime here’s a wake up call for Professor J. Ray Bates:

[Edit – December 17th]

Moving further down section 2 Ray assures us that:

Any objective discussion of the recent Arctic sea-ice decline also requires that some consideration be given to the evidence regarding past natural variability on a multi-decadal timescale. In the pre-satellite era, reliable data on sea-ice coverage was sparse.

So far so good again? Not really! Ray’s gets on to his go to reference, Connolly, Connolly and Soon (2017):

By combining the temperature and partial sea-ice records, statistical reconstructions of the total sea-ice extent going back to the early 1900s can be created. Some of these reconstructions indicate that between the 1900s and 1940s, Arctic sea-ice extent comparable to the present reduced levels may have occurred.

Ray doesn’t sound very certain, which is perhaps because the paper in question blithely states that:

Because Arctic sea ice trends are closely correlated to Arctic temperature trends, they are often discussed in the context of global temperature trends.

Maybe so, but to the best of my recollection Connolly et al. never attempt to “prove” the asserted correlation. Here’s an alternative assessment of “Arctic sea-ice extent between the 1900s and 1940s“:

Watch this space!

Arctic Sea Ice Disinformation and COP26

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There isn’t a million more square kilometers of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year. Or is there?

For our younger readers perhaps I should point out that is a reference to the genesis of the Great White Con blog way back in the mists of time in September 2013, when a Daily Mail headline proudly, but erroneously, declared that:

And now it’s global COOLING! Record return of Arctic ice cap as it grows by 60% in a year.

Almost a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than in 2012

With the COP26 conference due to start in Glasgow on October 31st UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson had this to say to the United Nations General Assembly yesterday, amongst other things:

In the words of the Oxford philosopher Toby Ord “we are just old enough to get ourselves into serious trouble”…

It is time for humanity to grow up.

It is time for us to listen to the warnings of the scientists – and look at Covid, if you want an example of gloomy scientists being proved right – and to understand who we are and what we are doing.

The world – this precious blue sphere with its eggshell crust and wisp of an atmosphere – is not some indestructible toy, some bouncy plastic romper room against which we can hurl ourselves to our heart’s content.

Daily, weekly, we are doing such irreversible damage that long before a million years are up, we will have made this beautiful planet effectively uninhabitable – not just for us but for many other species.

And that is why the Glasgow COP26 summit is the turning point for humanity.

If all that sounds unlikely, then take a look:

https://youtu.be/Z_YPE7vy_wQ?t=27


As we surmised at the time of the recent G7 Summit in Cornwall:

Continue reading Arctic Sea Ice Disinformation and COP26 →

Mud Wrestling with Climategate Pigs

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This article started out as an addendum to my recent tale of woe in which I got banned from Anthony Watts eponymous website just as Willis Eschenbach had published an article about Arctic sea ice inspired by yours truly!

I’ll get back to that in a moment, but earlier today this happened over on Twitter:

In case you haven’t heard the shock news already, earlier today Climategate was featured on BBC News once again:

Needless to say this news caused much excitement amongst both climate scientists and the cryodenialosphere! However getting back to where I was when I went to bed yesterday, I recently had the good fortune to bump into Willis once again, only this time it was on Judith Curry’s “Climate Etc.” blog rather than WUWT. I eagerly sought to reopen our Arctic discussion, and this is how the conversation went:

Continue reading Mud Wrestling with Climategate Pigs →

Watts Up With That Koonin Hypocrisy?

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Our regular reader(s) must have noticed by now that in the dim and distant past we had the occasional debate with Anthony Watts, proprietor of the self proclaimed “world’s most viewed climate website”, catchily entitled “Watts Up With That”?

You may even have noticed that more recently we managed to engage in an admittedly brief debate with the suddenly world famous American Physicist Steven Koonin?

Now in a world exclusive we bring you the shock news that we are suddenly unable to debate with either of them!!!

In a recent article on the Watts Up With That web site Anthony wrote:

I was sent this by email, apparently “Scientific American” doesn’t believe in fairness. I stopped subscribing to SciAm years ago because they’ve turned into a socialist cesspool of opinion, with science as an afterthought. Steve Koonin writes:

“I attach a response that I submitted yesterday to Scientific American.  Not surprisingly, they declined to publish it.  

Please do distribute my response freely among your contacts or websites.

Steve Koonin“

Needless to say Anthony did as he was asked. Since I consider myself by now as something of an expert on the deficiencies of Professor Koonin’s alleged “science” I replied to Steve’s response to Scientific American on WUWT as follows:

Needless to say two days later I have received no reply and my pertinent comment is still languishing underfoot on the Watts Up With That cutting room floor. Paraphrasing Dave Yaussy only slightly, and bolding for emphasis:

The greatest danger posed by Steve and Tony isn’t their ideas, it’s the attempt to silence all dissent.

That, and their corruption of science.

By way of one further example of his hypocrisy, Anthony did of course advertise his article on Twitter:

Of course he also stifled any anticipated dissent:

Q.E.D? As some scientists have been known to write from time to time.

Oreskes, Mann, Dessler et al. versus Koonin

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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’s National 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”:

Unsettling Koonin Critiques Continue

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We have previously mentioned assorted reviews of Steven Koonin‘s new book “Unsettled”, but today we bring news of a novel variation on that theme. In an article on the Union of Concerned Scientists web site Ben Santer writes:

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has invited Professor Steven Koonin to give a seminar on May 27, 2021. Professor Koonin’s seminar will cover material contained in a book he published on May 4. His book is entitled “Unsettled”. Its basic thesis is that climate science is not trustworthy.

Professor Koonin is not a climate scientist. I am. I have worked at LLNL since 1992. My primary job is to evaluate computer models of the climate system. I also seek to improve understanding of human and natural influences on climate.

Please read Ben’s article in full, but I expect you can already see what’s coming?

Continue reading Unsettling Koonin Critiques Continue →

Unsettling Defence of the Undefensible?

Satire,

As mentioned in a previous episode of my series of reviews of Steven Koonin’s new book “Unsettled”, he published an allegedly “detailed point-by-point rebuttal of the fact check” of his book by Climate Feedback on Medium.

I politely enquired in a comment on Medium “Why does ‘Unsettled’ fail to address the issue of declining Arctic sea ice?”, and Steven was gracious enough to reply that:

All writers have to make choices. I didn’t (couldn’t) write an assessment report…

My focus is on significant points where the popular perception about climate and energy is very different from what the science says. In that way, this book is about more than what’s scientifically correct and what isn’t; it’s also about how the science, with all of its certainties and uncertainties, becomes The Science — how it gets summarized and communicated, and what’s lost in the process…

So limited space (and time writing the book) meant arctic sea ice didn’t get much mention. The topic is also somewhat distant from ordinary folks’ perception (unlike storms, heat waves, SLR, …).

Even so, on page 85 you can find a discussion of the ice-albedo feedback, although I don’t use that term. (no need to introduce technical lingo when it’s not convenient)

However Steven then rather ungraciously chose to ignore my follow up question:

Regarding “the topic somewhat distant from ordinary folks’ perception”, that is largely my point. Is Arctic sea ice decline really any more distant to the average (wo)man in the street than sea level rise?

Etc. etc. For 8 days and counting…

via GIPHY

Since Steve is evidently unable and/or unwilling to respond to my enquiry perhaps somebody else might be willing to do so in the space provided for that purpose below?

Meanwhile here’s news of a brand new paper documenting the evidently inexorable decline of the sea ice cover across the Arctic Ocean:

https://GreatWhiteCon.info/2021/05/month-in-review-arctic-science-edition/#Ricker

Steve Koonin’s Unsettled History of US Temperature

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Regular readers will no doubt have noticed by now that here at the Great White Con we are publishing a series of reviews of Steven E. Koonin‘s new book “Unsettled”? Today we move on to the topic of Land-Surface Air Temperature (LSAT for short). Here is an extract from the very first page of the book:

Yes, it’s true that the globe is warming, and that humans are exerting a warming influence upon it. But beyond that—to paraphrase the classic movie The Princess Bride: “I do not think ‘The Science’ says what you think it says.”

For example, both the research literature and government reports that summarize and assess the state of climate science say clearly that heat waves in the US are now no more common than they were in 1900, and that the warmest temperatures in the US have not risen in the past fifty years. When I tell people this, most are incredulous. Some gasp. And some get downright hostile.

Here once again is an extract from page 23 of the Kindle edition of Steve’s book:

The [IPCC] assessment reports literally define The Science for non-experts. Given the intensive authoring and review processes, any reader would naturally expect that their assessments and summaries of the research literature are complete, objective, and transparent—the “gold standard.” In my experience, the reports largely do meet that expectation, and so much of the detail in the first part of this book, the science story, is drawn from them.

First of all let me remind Steve that the United States does not constitute the entirety of our planet. In particular the Arctic is warming a lot faster than mid latitudes in general and the US in particular. Using WRIT once again to produce our own time series, we can compare and contrast longer term temperature records between the Continental United States and the Arctic (including both land and ocean above the Arctic circle):

Also note that for some reason Steve makes no mention of US “coolest temperatures” and/or “cold waves” since 1900. I don’t know about you, but the top graph certainly suggest to me that “the warmest temperatures in the US have risen in the past fifty years”.

Let’s see how Steve explains himself. For that we have to wait until Chapter 5, catchily entitled “Hyping the Heat”. Therein no mention is made of recent temperature increases across the Arctic, but we are able to read in the introductory paragraphs that:

We can all agree the globe has gotten warmer over the past several decades. Here’s another summary statement from the IPCC’s AR5:

[S]ince about 1950 it is very likely that the numbers of cold days and nights have decreased and the numbers of warm days and nights have increased . . . there is medium confidence that globally the length and frequency of warm spells, including heat waves, has increased since the middle of the 20th century. (IPCC. AR5 WGI Section 2.6.1.)

Then there is a long discussion about what Steve apparently perceives to be shortcomings in the “The US government’s most recent assessment report, the 2017 Climate Science Special Report (CSSR)”. Steve is apparently well qualified in physics, so presumably he is able to comprehend these equations?

  • US ≠ Global
  • CSSR ≠ AR5

For those of you less familiar with the arcane language of mathematics and physics that translates to “the climate of the continental United States is not identical to Arctic climate or typical of the climate of Planet Earth as a whole” and hence “US Governmental climate reports are not necessarily typical of ‘Intergovernmental’ climate assessments”.

Next let’s check what Steve’s “gold standard for The Science” has to say on this topic. According to section 2.6.1 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fifth Assessment Report, as cited by Steve:

A large amount of evidence continues to support the conclusion that most global land areas analysed have experienced significant warming of both maximum and minimum temperature extremes since about 1950 (Donat et al., 2013c). Changes in the occurrence of cold and warm days (based on daily maximum temperatures) are generally less marked (Figure 2.32):

Figure 2.32 | Trends in annual frequency of extreme temperatures over the period 1951–2010, for (a) cold nights (TN10p), (b) cold days (TX10p), (c) warm nights (TN90p) and (d)
warm days (TX90p) (Box 2.4, Table 1). Trends were calculated only for grid boxes that had at least 40 years of data during this period and where data ended no earlier than 2003.
Grey areas indicate incomplete or missing data. Black plus signs (+) indicate grid boxes where trends are significant (i.e., a trend of zero lies outside the 90% confidence interval).
The data source for trend maps is HadEX2 (Donat et al., 2013c) updated to include the latest version of the European Climate Assessment data set (Klok and Tank, 2009). Beside
each map are the near-global time series of annual anomalies of these indices with respect to 1961–1990 for three global indices data sets: HadEX2 (red); HadGHCND (Caesar et al., 2006; blue) and updated to 2010 and GHCNDEX (Donat et al., 2013a; green). Global averages are only calculated using grid boxes where all three data sets have at least 90%
of data over the time period. Trends are significant (i.e., a trend of zero lies outside the 90% confidence interval) for all the global indices shown.

To paraphrase The Princess Bride once again: “I do not think ‘The Science’ says what Steven E. Koonin says it says in ‘Unsettled’”.

Unsettling, is it not?

Steven Koonin’s Unsettled Greenland Ice Sheet Science

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For our latest review of Steven E. Koonin’s new book, “Unsettled”, we’re moving from the ice covering the Arctic seas on to land. Greenland to be specific. Unlike Arctic sea ice the Greenland Ice Sheet does merit a mention in the book. In fact it’s one of the bullet points Steve leads with on page 2:

Here are three more [climate facts] that might surprise you, drawn directly from recent published research or the latest assessments of climate science published by the US government and the UN:

  • Humans have had no detectable impact on hurricanes over the past century.
  • ​Greenland’s ice sheet isn’t shrinking any more rapidly today than it was eighty years ago.
  • The net economic impact of human-induced climate change will be minimal through at least the end of this century.

So what gives?

A very good question Steve, because if we stick with the Arctic land ice referred to in the middle bullet, Professor Koonin makes no reference at this juncture to any “recent published research or latest assessment of climate science” to justify his assertion.

Which is a bit of a shame since in the Climate Feedback critique of Professor Koonin’s statement which was mentioned in our introductory article, Twila Moon from the United States’ National Snow and Ice Data Center points out that:

This statement is untrue. In fact, the Greenland Ice Sheet lost more mass during 2003-2010 than during all of 1900-2003 combined. This is evident in the following figure from Kjeldsen et al. (2015)

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Greenland-Kjeldsen-2015-1024x713.png
Surface elevation change rates in Greenland during 1900-1983 (a), 1983-2003 (b), and 2003-2010 (c). The numbers listed below each panel are the integrated Greenland-wide mass balance estimates expressed as gigatonnes per year and as millimetre per year GMSL (global mean sea level) equivalents.

If we look in more detail at changes over 1972-2018, we can further see that the ice sheet was mostly in balance (gain about the same amount of snow/ice in winter as is lost in summer) during the 1970s and 1980s [Mouginot and Rignot et al. (2019)]. It was only in the mid-1990s that Greenland ice loss began to increase more substantially.

Over the last 20 years, ice loss has been rapid and large, creating measurable sea level rise, which we experience as increases in coastal erosion, flooding, problems with water and sewer systems at the coasts, and saltwater inundation of freshwater sources.

So how is it possible for Steve Koonin to have got his facts so wrong? For his attempt at justification we have to wait until chapter 8 of “Unsettled” on the subject of “Sea Level Scares”. On page 160 of my Kindle edition Steve writes:

So future global sea level rise is uncertain not only because of all of the model uncertainties in the global temperature rise discussed in Chapter 4, but also because the dynamics of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are quite uncertain. The IPCC summarizes the situation (SMB is the Surface Mass Balance, measuring the net change in ice due to atmospheric processes): . . .

“For periods prior to 1970, significant discrepancies between climate models and observations arise from the inability of climate models to reproduce some observed regional changes in glacier and GIS [Greenland Ice Sheet] SMB around the southern tip of Greenland. It is not clear whether this bias in climate models is due to the internal variability of the climate system or deficiencies in climate models. For this reason, there is still medium confidence in the ability of climate models to simulate past and future changes in glaciers mass loss and Greenland SMB.”

The reference for this quotation is given as “IPCC SROCC Section 4.2.2.2.6“, which on inspection is entitled “Budget of global mean sea level change”. The immediate question that springs to my mind is “Why didn’t Steve refer to SROCC Section 1.4.2?”. That section is entitled “Observed and Projected Changes in the Cryosphere”, and skipping over the Arctic sea ice section for the moment it states:

AR5 assessed that the annual mean loss from the Greenland ice sheet very likely substantially increased from 34 (-6–74) Gt yr–1 (billion tonnes yr–1) over the period 1992–2001, to 215 (157–274) Gt yr–1 over the period 2002–2011.

Or Steve might have quoted from Section 4.2.2.2.4 “Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets”, but for some reason he didn’t:

Frequent observations of ice sheet mass changes have only been available since the advent of space observations (see Section 3.3.1). In the pre-satellite era, mass balance was geodetically reconstructed only for the GIS (Kjeldsen et al., 2015)

op. cit., or as suggested there he could even have quoted from Section 3.3.1 “Ice Sheet Changes”, but once again he didn’t:

The GIS was close to balance in the early years of the 1990s (Hanna et al., 2013; Khan et al., 2015), the interior above 2000 m altitude gained mass from 1961 to 1990 (Colgan et al., 2015) and both coastal and ice sheet sites experienced an increasing precipitation trend from 1890 to 2012 and 1890 to 2000 respectively (Mernild et al., 2015), but since the early 1990s multiple observations and modelling studies show strong warming and an increase in runoff (very high confidence).

Personally I have very high confidence that Professor Koonin had great difficulty cherry picking a Greenland Ice Sheet quote from the IPCC that could be “spun” into supporting his case. Frankly his “southern tip of Greenland” effort smacks of desperation.

Unsettling, is it not?

[Edit – June 12th]

Here’s a long thread on Twitter from Helen Fricker, explaining the genesis of the IPCC’s Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate. Essential reading for Steve Koonin, since he is apparently unaware of any of this!

Helen refers to her recent op-ed for The Hill which goes into slightly more detail:

The upcoming sixth IPCC report in 2022 will contain updated projections of future sea level rise based on tens of different simulations provided by research groups around the world. These groups all worked together in a community-led effort, involving ice sheet, ocean and atmosphere modeling and observational teams.

We have come a long way, but even after all this we are still playing “catch-up,” and there are still gaps in our understanding. We do know, however, that the ocean is warming and that both Antarctica and Greenland are vulnerable to this warming. The same goes for the atmosphere. We worry that the biggest portion of Antarctica, East Antarctica — which we still think of as a sleepy giant since it is so thick and vast, making it harder for warming ocean waters and increasing air temperatures to reach it — is starting to show signs of change. We also worry that there may be mechanisms, that we have not been able to witness in the modern record and hence that are not in the models, that may amplify the ice loss. Scientists are using paleo-reconstructions to figure out whether these may be important.

Still, we can say with confidence that sea level will continue to rise (faster) in the future and that our projections are conservative estimates. Indeed, satellite observations that measure the changing height (altimetry) and changing mass (gravimetry) of ice sheets are tracking the worst-case predictions from IPCC’s fifth report.

As we gather more data, both on and around the ice sheets using all available tools, including satellites, our observational record gets longer and our understanding improves. As our understanding improves, our models get better. Long-term measurements, sometimes acquired by launching new satellites (such as NASA’s ICESat-2 and other follow-on missions), coordinated modeling and international collaboration are key to delivering more accurate predictions, so that coastal communities can make informed decisions to protect infrastructure and citizens and manage resources.