A Climate Emergency? Ron Clutz provides a transcript of a short video by Steve Koonin, “Is There Really a Climate Emergency?” Koonin, a former Undersecretary for Science of the Department of Energy begins by discussing Hubris. Koonin states:
“Hubris is a Greek word that means dangerously overconfident. Based on my research, hubris fairly describes our current response to the issue of climate change.
Here’s what many people believe:
One: The planet is warming catastrophically because of certain human behaviors.
Two: Thanks to powerful computers we can project what the climate will be like 20, 40,
or even 100 years from now.
Three: That if we eliminate just one behavior, the burning of fossil fuels, we can prevent
the climate from changing for as long as we like.
Each of these presumptions—together, the basis of our hubris regarding the changing climate—is either untrue or so far off the mark as to be useless.
Yes, it’s true that the globe is warming, and that humans are exerting a warming influence upon it. But beyond that, to paraphrase a line from the classic movie The Princess Bride, ‘I do not think ‘The Science’ says what you think it says.’”
Koonin then presents physical evidence (data) showing that nothing unusual is taking place. As Richard Feynman stated:
“It is not unscientific to take a guess, although many people who are not in science believe that it is.”
For a scientist, the issue is to test the guess using physical evidence, preferably from controlled experiments, but if that is not possible, then by careful observations. The globe has warmed and cooled many times in the past as it is doing now. Koonin continues:
“Why aren’t these reassuring facts better known?
Because the public gets its climate information almost exclusively from the media.
And from a media perspective, fear sells.
‘Things aren’t that bad’ doesn’t sell.
Very few people, and that includes journalists who report on climate news, read the actual
science. I have. And what the data—the hard science—from the US government and UN Climate reports say is that… ‘things aren’t that bad.’
Nor does the public understand the questionable basis of all catastrophic climate change projections: computer modeling.
Projecting future climate is excruciatingly difficult. Yes, there are human influences, but the climate is complex. Anyone who says that climate models are ‘just physics’ either doesn’t understand them or is being deliberately misleading. I should know I wrote one of the first textbooks on computer modeling.
While modelers base their assumptions upon both fundamental physical laws and observations of the climate, there is still considerable judgment involved. And since different modelers will make different assumptions, results vary widely among different models.”
Koonin then shows that 73 models overestimate the warming of the globe. These models are the ones cited by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its collaborators as proof of human caused global warming. One problem that Koonin discusses is the failure of the models to correctly forecast clouds. As Koonin states:
“Natural fluctuations in the height and coverage of clouds have at least as much of an impact on the flows of sunlight and heat as do human influences. But how can we possibly know global cloud coverage say 10, let alone 50 years from now? Obviously, we can’t. But to create a climate model, we have to make assumptions. That’s a pretty shaky foundation on which to transform the world’s economy.
By the way, creating more accurate models isn’t getting any easier. In fact, the more we learn about the climate system, the more we realize how complex it is. [Boldface added]
Rather than admit this complexity, the media, the politicians, and a good portion of the climate science community attribute every terrible storm, every flood, every major fire to ‘climate change.’ Yes, we’ve always had these weather events in the past, the narrative goes, but somehow ‘climate change’ is making everything ‘worse.’
Even if that were true, isn’t the relevant question, how much worse? Not to mention that ‘worse’ is not exactly a scientific term. And how could we make it better? For the alarmists, that’s easy: we get rid of fossil fuels.
Not only is this impractical—we get over 80% of the world’s energy from fossil fuels—it’s not scientifically possible. That’s because CO2 doesn’t disappear from the atmosphere in a few days like, say, smog. It hangs around for a really long time.
About 60 percent of any CO2 that we emit today will remain in the atmosphere 20 years from now, between 30 and 55 percent will still be there after a century, and between 15 and 30 percent will remain after one thousand years.”
To this, TWTW adds that the enormous growth in human CO2 emissions is coming from China and south Asia. The hubris of western politicians is amazing. Without even a hint of expertise in climate science, they pretend to “know” that CO2 is ruining the climate, fail to put “blame” on the biggest CO2 emitters, fail to acknowledge the benefits of increasing CO2, and enact laws to control their own citizenry under the guise of saving the planet.
https://www.sepp.org/twtwfiles/2025/TWTW%201-18-2025.pdf
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