Another Blow Against Climate Hysteria: Steven Koonin, *Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us And What It Doesn't*

Thing is, this is kinda right:

Barack Obama is one of many who have declared an “epistemological crisis,” in which our society is losing its handle on something called truth.

   However, it's the left that's the main culprit now, not the right. In fact, it's not even close. The left has subordinated truth to dogma on principle. The right at least feels embarrassment when it does such things. They don't count it as virtue...

   Sadly, philosophy has beclowned itself by becoming pervasively, progressively political. Calls for papers are common now in which the theme is a thinly-veiled epistemic criticism of non-progressives.

   Anyway, none of these comes as a surprise to even mere laypeople who have been paying attention--and who haven't drunk the climate hysteria Kool Aid:

   Mr. Koonin is a practitioner and fan of computer modeling. “There are situations where models do a wonderful job. Nuclear weapons, when we model them because we don’t test them anymore. And when Boeing builds an airplane, they will model the heck out of it before they bend any metal.”
   “But these are much more controlled, engineered situations,” he adds, “whereas the climate is a natural phenomenon. It’s going to do whatever it’s going to do. And it’s hard to observe. You need long, precise observations to understand its natural variability and how it responds to external influences.”
   Yet these models supply most of our insight into how the weather might change when emissions raise the atmosphere’s CO2 component from 0.028% in preindustrial times to 0.056% later in this century. “I’ve been building models and watching others build models for 45 years,” he says. Climate models “are not to the standard you would trust your life to or even your trillions of dollars to.” Younger scientists in particular lose sight of the difference between reality and simulation: “They have grown up with the models. They don’t have the kind of mathematical or physical intuition you get when you have to do things by pencil and paper.”
   All this you can hear from climate modelers themselves, and from scientists nearer the “consensus” than Mr. Koonin is. Yet the caveats seem to fall away when plans to spend trillions of dollars are bruited.
   For the record, Mr. Koonin agrees that the world has warmed by 1 degree Celsius since 1900 and will warm by another degree this century, placing him near the middle of the consensus. Neither he nor most economic studies have seen anything in the offing that would justify the rapid and wholesale abandoning of fossil fuels, even if China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and others could be dissuaded from pursuing prosperity.
   He’s a fan of advanced nuclear power eventually to provide carbon free base-load power. He sees a bright future for electric passenger vehicles. “The main reason isn’t emissions. They’re just shifted to the power grid, and transportation anyway is only about 15% of global greenhouse-gas emissions. There are other advantages: Local pollution is much less and noise pollution is less. You’re sitting in a traffic jam and all of these six- or four-cylinder engines are throbbing up and down burning fuel and just doing no good at all.” [My emphasis, obviously.]