Physicist Steven Koonin—Caltech/MIT-trained, former BP chief scientist—debunks climate alarmism in Unsettled, citing 800-year Nile fluctuations and hurricane data showing no clear trend. He argues CO₂’s warming effects are overstated, with natural variability (e.g., 1930s Greenland melt) and cooling aerosols complicating projections, while U.S. emissions (13% globally) alone can’t offset China/India’s growth. Models, plagued by 60-mile grid inaccuracies and cloud assumptions, fail to predict local impacts reliably, yet decarbonization plans like COP26 pledges collapse under economic reality. Koonin insists adaptation—not radical mitigation—will handle projected 1.5°C warming, framing alarmism as a misguided distraction from solvable energy challenges. [Automatically generated summary]
It's on climate change and climate science, and we should just establish right away, just because I know you're going to experience some criticism, right?
Well, in reading your book, one of the things that became very clear is there's so much data to sort through.
It's incredibly complex.
I actually listened to it on audio and there were sections of it where I had to go back Over it again, just to try to wrap my head exactly around what was happening.
To squash some more of the criticism really clearly up front, you're very clear about this.
Your position, though, is that there's either an exaggeration or there's a way that people are looking at the data that's alarmist that you don't think is reflected by the actual numbers themselves.
You know, I have in the book one of my favorite quotes from H.L. Mencken is, the purpose of practical politics is to keep people alarmed by a series of mostly imaginary hobgoblins so that they can be clamoring to be led to safety.
Now, if you think that human beings are affecting the climate and you think the climate is changing, what percentage of an effect are human influences?
Now one of the things you highlight in your book is that when you're looking at the way the temperatures have risen on Earth over a period of say like a hundred years, that if you do it in these blocks of time, that there's a way to look at it in a deceptive way that makes it seem, in the alarmist way, where it makes it seem that radical drastic change is happening over a very short period of time.
So, you know, the climate changes a lot on its own.
Maybe we can put up a picture, which is one of the ones I wanted to show you.
Can we put up the second chart in that file called Kunin Thumbs?
And what I'm going to show you...
Is a record of the height of the Nile River, which has been compiled by the Egyptians.
There we go.
So, this is the height of the Nile River from 640 AD up until 1450 AD. So, about 800 years of data every year about what was the lowest level that the Nile River reached in that year.
The Nile was important to the Egyptians, as you might imagine, and so they measured it pretty carefully.
And what you see are two things.
The blue spikes are the annual values.
They go up and down a lot.
One year it was up at six meters, 20 feet, and then the next year it was down to one meter or something like that.
So a lot of variability from year to year.
But then if you look at the curve, which is the average Trend over 30 years.
You can see, for example, in the first 100 years, it was going down.
And you can imagine some medieval Egyptian climate panel saying, new normal, new normal.
We've got to do prayers and sacrifices.
And of course, if they just waited another 100 years, it came back up again.
And this was all before humans had any influence on the climate.
Are we looking at climate and we're looking at these periods of time, are we looking at them incorrectly because we have such a short lifespan ourselves that we tend to think of great change as happening in these incremental ups and downs, but realistically we should be looking at it on a broad, long spectrum of hundreds if not thousands of years.
How did you get started on this journey of being, I want to say obsessed, but if not fascinated with the science of climate change and the data itself?
So I was exposed to climate science in the early 90s when I was working with a group called Jason, which we can talk about at some point, for the government and looking at the impact of then high-performance computing and small satellites on climate science.
The most difficult technical problems, sometimes, you know, mysteries that the government finds going on in other countries, things of that sort, what's going on, etc.
So the initial thing that got me interested was the Department of Energy wanted to deploy a fleet of small satellites, which remember this was 30 years ago, so that was a pretty big innovative deal, to look at the earth and monitor what was going on for climate purposes, for science.
And one of the things that you could do Was to measure how shiny the Earth was.
The albedo, it's called, technically.
Whiteness of the Earth.
And, of course, being curious, we asked the question, well, how was the albedo first measured?
And the answer was, back in the 30s, some guy started watching the dark part of the Moon.
And that brightness of the dark part of the Moon is lit by light that is reflected from the Earth, and so is a good measure of how shiny the Earth is.
It hadn't been done for 30 or 40 years, and so we started up a program that continues to this day to watch the dark part of the Moon to monitor how bright the Earth is.
And we just published a paper in August that showed the Earth has gotten a little bit dimmer over the last many years, and so not surprising it perhaps gotten warmer.
Anyway, that sort of got me interested in climate science.
When I moved into the private sector, I was more concerned with energy technologies and how we could develop and deploy or demonstrate and deploy technologies that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
And I did that for quite a while in both BP and then in the government.
And then in 2014, the American Physical Society asked me to do a review of their statement about climate science.
They had put out a statement in 2007, which was very controversial among the physicists.
Because it used the word incontrovertible.
And for a physicist, that's fighting words.
Okay?
So they asked me, you know, Steve, recommend a new statement.
And so I said, heck, we're physicists.
We're not going to take anybody's word for it.
Let's look at the issue ourselves.
And so I convened a one-day meeting with three mainstream climate scientists and three credentialed skeptical scientists.
And we sat for a day.
Presentations, talk, discussion in early 2014. It's all up on the web.
It was transcribed.
You can find the transcript.
And I came away from that thinking, this science is not anywhere near as settled as I thought it was.
Because of the problems with the models, the observational data, and so on.
And my little group Wound up proposing a statement that could not get through the bigger committee that was approving such things.
People would say things like, we can't say that even if it's true because it gives ammunition to the deniers.
Oh, you know, and we get it to this day with the book, you know, you're cherry-picked, you're misleading, what you said is actually not true, and so on, even though I point to, you know, chapter and verse in the reports where these things are said.
So is this the scientists that are claiming your cherry-picking are they Are they signaling to the other people that follow the ideology that you're not to question climate change and that anything that you say that in any way calls doubt to the settling of the data gives some sort of Ammunition to the people who are the real climate deniers, who are a real problem.
It's not an existential threat by any means, and it's a problem that we have time to deal with, and we should deal with it in time in a graceful way.
But I think, you know, when the book first came out, there appeared an article in Scientific American, written by, I think, 13 mainstream climate scientists, That was a couple thousand words of mostly ad hominem criticisms, a couple of substantive criticisms, which I have rebutted, I think, quite effectively.
But it, you know, put a marker in the ground that people who didn't want to have the book understood could point to and said, aha, you know, those guys said Kuhn is an idiot.
Well, you know, they said, for example, I said sea level rise was not accelerating.
And, of course, I got a whole chapter that talks about the ups and downs of sea level rise.
But they would criticize a review of what I said by somebody else, Or they would say sometimes, you know, Koonin said that and it's true, but it's not important because of A, B, and C. If you don't mind, pull that microphone just a little closer.
Now, so these criticisms that were levied against you, did anyone of prominence that is a climate scientist come out and say, this is a very interesting analysis of the data, these are things that I hadn't considered, Koonin makes a lot of really good points?
You know, when I first sort of came out in that Wall Street op-ed in 2014, I had a chat afterward with the chair of a very prominent earth science department at one of our best universities.
I won't say who or where, but suffice it to say, it's somebody who is firmly in the business.
And he said, you know, Steve, I agree with almost everything you said, but I don't dare say it in public.
You know, there's a whole organization called Covering Climate Now, which is a consortium of media, including the BBC and NPR, I think, and so on, who have—you can look them up on the web—and they have signed an agreement or made an agreement that they will not cover anything that diverges from the narrative.
I think, you know, the allegedly authoritative voices are the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, which issues major reports every six or seven years.
There is the U.S. National Academies of Science.
There is the U.K. Royal Society and the U.S. government issues reports as well.
And, you know, when you get into the meat of these reports, they have some problems and, you know, we can go into them.
But by and large, they're pretty good summaries of the science.
But when you get to the summaries for policymakers or you get to the media coverage or the political discussion, that's where things get really corrupted.
So it's like a long game of telephone that starts with the basic science and the scientists doing it are by and large, you know, Good, honest, hardworking people, and you talk to them privately, and they'll admit to all the problems that they've got.
But by the time it gets to the end and the public, it's, you know, the science is settled, we're headed for doom, etc., etc.
But that's always the case with something that's really controversial, right?
There's always...
The alarmist perspective and the people that are looking at it that have maybe a less extreme point of view are criticized because they're not taking it seriously enough.
And then there's what you were saying earlier is that people are saying that like they can't even say certain things because it will give ammunition to the people that are real climate skeptics.
With the Reformation, when the Catholic Church started to come at odds with the Protestant movement, let me give you two examples.
In one of the best recent introductions I've had, you know, I'm a humble guy and I usually like to keep the introduction short, but this one was real interesting.
I was compared to William Tyndall.
Now, I didn't know who William Tyndall was.
I'm not a historian, so I had to look up.
William Tyndall in the early 16th century did one of the first translations of the Bible From the original Greek and Hebrew into English.
So it had been originally in Latin.
So that let ordinary people read what was in the Bible.
And of course the establishment got really mad at him for doing that.
He was eventually burned at the stake for that and other reasons.
So I sort of made these reports accessible, at least parts of it, to ordinary non-experts.
So that's one.
The other one, which is maybe even more amusing, a couple years ago, 13 senators led by Mr. Schumer proposed a bill that says the government may not spend any money to challenge the consensus.
The Council of Trent in the early 16th century said very much the same thing about church dogma, not about spending money, but you know, you would You'd be in all sorts of trouble if you challenged dogma.
What would possibly motivate the government to come out with a statement like that, that they can't spend any money to challenge the consensus?
And doesn't a consensus mean most?
It doesn't mean all.
So in cases of dogmatic opinions or ideologically formulated opinions, You know, I'm so surprised that the government would try to suppress the scientific process like that.
You know, I felt I was, of course, a little bit concerned about going through the administration, but I had lined up the national academies to play the blue team.
I had assembled pretty much a good red team, and then it was stopped at the last minute by a political decision.
So I'm really disappointed because I point out in the book a lot of problems with those reports.
You know, it says X, but in fact the truth is Y, if you look at the data.
So we need that.
It's about the integrity of the scientific institutions.
So let's go back to your initial impression that the science was not settled.
When you first walked away from this meeting that you were discussing and you realized that this is either far more complex or it's influenced in a way where it's not just about the data, it's about what the narrative is.
So how do you go from there before you write this book?
So I started paying more attention to the disconnect between what was actually in the science versus what was either in the reports or in the political dialogue.
I think the next turning point came when I was helping with a study for another government agency and had occasion to look at hurricanes.
And I turned to the official US government report in 2014 at the time, and you see this graph in the body of the report of some property of hurricanes going through the roof over the last 30 years.
And it sure looks like if you look at that graph, we're in trouble.
And so I dig a little deeper.
I look up the reference that they cite, and I read in the back of the same report on page 700 and something, if I remember right.
And it says there are no long-term trends in hurricanes, which is still largely a true statement.
And I'm looking at that, and I said, my God, that's a swindle.
In the part of the report that everybody's going to read, you see this graph going up and it looks like all hell is going to break loose.
And then in the back it says we don't see any long-term trends.
Well, in that particular case, it was going up, okay, from 1980 up until 2010. But what they didn't show you was there was an earlier part of the graph in which it was going down, okay?
And so what they were looking at, again, we were talking about how we're measuring things on these very small increments where time for us is 100 years.
It's our lifetime.
So we're looking at things like as if that's a lot of time.
So let's pull up chart 35. So there is the original graph in the government report from 2014. And what's shown is from 1980 to 2010, and it's going up, right?
Ten years ago or so, there's a lot of controversy about whether storms are getting more intense.
One paper says yes, another paper published in July says no, and so on.
So the matter is kind of unsettled at the moment, but overall, as I can read for you, the official report, the official statement from the most recent UN report, let me just get it, There is low confidence in most reported long-term,
multi-decadal to centennial trends in tropical cyclone, that's hurricanes, frequency or intensity based metrics.
Now that image, Jamie, can you pull it up again please?
That image when you see 1975 and then you see 2005, it's not that much of a difference.
So the peak of 1945 and then you go to 2005, you're not looking at that much of a difference and clearly there's been a gigantic difference in the amount of human influence.
And this is one I think I'm going to go public with pretty soon in an op-ed.
Let's put it up.
This is about Greenland, okay?
And the popular image that Greenland is melting and it's melting faster and faster and so on, all right?
This is the official data set for how much ice Greenland is losing every year, okay?
And it goes up right until 2021 and it starts in 1900. And what's interesting about this, there are several things.
First of all, even though human warming influences have been growing steadily over the course of this, there are a lot of ups and downs.
So, it says it's got to be a lot more than greenhouse gases at play here.
The second thing to notice Is that in the most recent decades, at the right-hand end of the chart, Greenland's is actually starting to melt less rapidly than more rapidly, even as the globe has been warming.
And then if you go back to 1930, you can see it was melting just as rapidly in 1930 as it was in the last decade or two.
And the human influences were less than a fifth of what they are today in 1930. So, what are the other influences if they're not just- That's an excellent question.
And the answer is this has got to do a lot with the long-term money decade cycles of ocean currents and winds in the North Atlantic.
And you can find papers that say that.
All right.
They're research papers.
You don't hear any of that from the official reports or the media.
So there's all this data that shows the ups and the downs and there's all this data that shows that sometimes they're losing ice and sometimes they're losing less ice and gaining ice.
How do they know what is causing this or do they just assume that there's this series of factors?
It's a combination of modeling and physical principles and other data that let them try to say how much is natural variability and how much is human influence.
There's no doubt that if the globe keeps warming, That that warming might eventually come to dominate the ice loss, the melting.
But right now, and for the foreseeable many decades, it is these natural variabilities.
And instead, in the media, all you hear is that it's been melting faster and faster over the last two decades.
So the non-expert reporter with an agenda, in order for him to Print something that's going to get the response that he's looking for.
He's looking for a positive response from the people that are climate, that believe these models and that think that the climate is of utmost importance.
Did this start with, I remember global warming in the 80s, because I'm a stand-up comic, and there was comics that would do jokes about global warming, like, this is great, I can go golfing in January.
They were joking around about it.
But then I remember An Inconvenient Truth.
And Al Gore put this documentary out when he was vice president, I believe.
You know, apart from the fact that the globe is going to continue to warm and sea levels are going to rise, and we can talk about that in a bit, most of the predictions, you know, that hurricanes are going to get more intense or we're going to see more droughts or floods and so on, almost all of the high-impact things don't show any long-term trend.
One of the things that you point out in your book that I found was interesting that I hadn't considered is when they're talking about the amount of damage that hurricanes do.
So when they're thinking about what kind of danger there is to hurricanes, they also talk about the economic danger of these hurricanes.
And the damage that they do.
But that damage is accentuated by the fact that the population is increased in these areas.
So naturally, when a hurricane hits, there's going to be more things there to damage.
Because they're looking at two different kinds of data.
The paper published in 2020 looked at satellite images of the hurricanes.
We see beautiful images of the hurricanes and you can try to infer from that how strong the storms are, okay?
They used a new technique.
The people who said, no, no, it's a natural fluctuation, looked in the North Atlantic where only 10 percent of the world's hurricanes happen or 12 percent, something like that.
And they looked at historical records And so there's an issue that as you go back in time, you haven't seen all of the hurricanes and you've got to correct the observations for that.
So they tried to do a good job.
What they found was that the measure of hurricane intensity went down from about 1960 to 1980 and then from 1980 to the 2000s was just coming back to normal.
So there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of controversy about this.
This is at the bleeding edge of unsettled science.
This variability when it comes to the temperature of the ocean, when it comes to the melting of the ice caps and all these different things we're talking about, why does that exist in these radical ups and downs throughout the history of the Earth?
One is That the Earth is subject to external influences or influences outside of the climate.
The orbit of the Earth around the Sun, the way the sunlight falls on the Earth, this is what drives the ice ages, if you like, or the glaciations and so on.
But the other is that climate is a chaotic system, which means it has very Complicated and variable internal motions, all on its own.
We know that because we have cartoons of the equations, and they show that.
We know that because you can't predict weather past about 10 days, two weeks.
It's chaotic, and so it has a lot of variability.
Some of these long-term variations we understand.
For example, El Nino Happens every few years, takes a couple years.
We kind of understand that.
But these longer-term things that take 70 years, or in some cases 1,000 years, having to do with the motion of the ocean currents, we don't have a very good handle on it all.
And part of the problem is the models don't reproduce those well.
And so you don't know where you are in those cycles when you're trying to match the model with the observations.
So is it safe to say that what people are looking for or what people would like to see is sort of a flat, easily predictable rise and lower, like that there's very little variation?
And, you know, to set a scale, three millimeters a year, which is kind of the average over that time, is a foot a century.
One foot rise a century, which is about what we've seen over the last 150 years, okay?
It's thought that those ups and downs are due to natural variations in the ocean currents happening on these long timescales, 70, 80 years.
What's interesting is those colored graphs going out from the present to 2000 show that the expected rate of rise starts at about 8 millimeters a year, twice as much as we've ever seen, and then goes on up from there.
Those are the UN projections based on models.
And you can see there are large uncertainties.
And large variations.
I think, you know, if it's going to look like that, we're going to know pretty soon within the next 10 or 15 years.
As a scientist, how frustrating is it when ideology and dogmatic thinking and when someone's trying to push a narrative and it gets involved in something that is a very complex science with many, many variables, some of them that aren't totally understood in terms of their effect?
It's very frustrating To talk to non-experts about this, but I'm even more frustrated with my scientific colleagues, because many of them know that there are these problems in communication, and they do nothing about it, or in fact, they abet it.
You know, one of the reasons I wrote the book Was in part to inform people, not persuade them, but also to inform my fellow scientists, who are not climate scientists, about the kind of misrepresentation that's going on.
And many of them have written to me privately or spoken with me and have said, Steve, thanks for doing that.
You know, I have enough other parts of my life that are interesting and robust.
I'm far enough along in my career that, frankly, I don't really care very much at this point what people think of me.
I've got enough stature.
You know, I... I've been advising the government on non-climate matters for a long time.
I help guide the national academies in some of the reports they did.
I do JSON. I advise companies.
It's fine.
I really just want to get people to understand.
Climate literacy and energy literacy—we haven't talked yet much about energy—are so important and people need to understand.
Let me give you an example of a different field that I think is a terrible example.
So there's this guy named Jonathan Gruber, who's a professor of economics at MIT. And he was one of the principal architects of the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare.
Now, whatever you might think about Obamacare, What he said at one point was the only way we could get a principal provision of that act passed was to rely on the basic ignorance of the American people.
Wow.
All right?
And, you know, there's a videotape of him saying this at a conference.
Doctor reveals why he wrote climate change on patients' medical chart.
When a Canadian doctor wrote two words on a medical chart, he had no idea those few strokes of his pen would make global headlines.
Climate change is what Dr. Kyle Merritt Wrote alongside a patient's symptoms following a heat wave which resulted in poor air quality across Nelson, British Columbia in late June.
Extreme weather condition during the North American summer, the general practitioner believed had deteriorated the health of a 70-year-old woman who was suffering from diabetes and heart failure while living in a caravan with no air conditioning.
The idea that you would say that's climate change.
I'm going to read that again.
A 70-year-old woman who's suffering from diabetes and heart failure while living in a caravan with no air conditioning.
So she's in a trailer, she's got diabetes, and she's suffering from heart failure.
Not only that medicine, but the fact of taking one summer heat wave and calling it climate when it's really weather displays the ignorance of that doctor.
Okay, it says, reflecting on the decision, Dr. Merritt said he wasn't trying to make a big deal out of it, but he felt it was important for both him and his colleagues to recognize the truth, in quotes, and add the contributive factor of climate change.
But he doesn't really know what he's talking about.
When I looked this up, though, just for clarity, too, this is what – when I looked up the battery sea level trends, this is what pops up on the government's website.
So that is – that's the sea level itself, not the – Shorter-term trends, but you can see in the upper right, it shows it's going up at 2.88 millimeters a year, just about 3 millimeters a year for the last 160 years.
When they look at the percentage of how much agriculture has an impact, how much methane has an impact, how much transportation has an impact, how do they measure all that?
But, you know, you shouldn't talk about abundance because there are very complicated issues about how the greenhouse gases actually trap the heat in the atmosphere.
What you really want to talk about is their contributions to what's called radiative forcing, Which is basically how much they enhance the heat-intercepting ability of the atmosphere.
Let me first talk about the economic impact of a changing climate, okay?
And then we'll talk about the economic impact of an energy transition, all right?
So could we put up chart 21 of the Kunin file?
And I'm going to show you a chart that comes right out of the most recent government report on the subject, which is on the left.
And what you see is The horizontal scale is how much the temperature would go up at the end of the century compared to what it is today.
And, you know, it goes up between 1 and 10 degrees or 15 degrees Fahrenheit.
It's a US chart, so it's in Fahrenheit, not centigrade.
And what's shown on the vertical axis is the percent of damage to the US economy in 2100. And the takeaway from this is, first of all, as the temperature rise goes up, the damages go up.
But more importantly, for temperature rises of up to 5 degrees centigrade or 9 degrees Fahrenheit, it's 4% of the U.S. economy in 2100. I'm not exactly sure what that means.
That means that the economy, if the temperature were to go up, the economy would be 4% smaller in 2100 than it would have been otherwise.
So, if we go to the next chart, that's a wonderful question.
There's what would happen.
So, I'll show you the US economy starting from 2000 up to the end of the century.
If it grows at 2% a year, which is kind of what everybody thinks it should be doing and might do, you get that curve.
If you assume a 4% impact at the end of the century or even a 10% impact, you just delay the growth by two years or a few years in 2100, 80 years from now, all right?
So, remember, the Paris Agreement is trying to hold things to 2 degrees centigrade or about 4 degrees Fahrenheit, which is a few percent damage to the economy in 2100. Yes.
Okay?
Whereas the economy is going to grow by 2% a year.
So instead of 70 or 80 years from now, it being, you know, let's say 400, well, the US economy, instead of being 80 trillion dollars, it would be 76 trillion dollars or something like that in 2100. That seems like a lot of money.
Well, not as a percentage.
It grows by 2% a year, so it's a two-year delay in the growth.
And now, if major policy changes are implemented that are going to shift, like the sales of the combustion vehicles being banned, which is what they're doing in California, did that pass in California?
So here, Governor Newsom announced California to phase out gasoline-powered cars, drastically reduce the demand for fossil fuel.
California's fight against climate change.
Yeah, it's 2035. So he wants all new passenger vehicles to be zero emission by 2035 and additional measures to eliminate harmful emissions from the transportation sector.
It says there, the transportation sector is responsible for more than half of all California's carbon pollution, 80% of smog-forming pollution and 95% of toxic diesel emissions, all while communities in the Los Angeles Basin and Central Valley see some of the dirtiest and most toxic air in the country.
Is it possible that battery technology will shift so radically that our concept of what's required to create a battery, specifically the type of conflict minerals and very rare earth minerals that we need right now currently, that that would shift by 2035?
You know, people are doing a lot of research on batteries.
I think that's one of the fields we should be researching more, but it's not as though people haven't been trying.
And, you know, there are issues not only with the minerals you use, but the lifetime of the batteries, because they get charged and discharged, and that does mayhem at the molecular level that tries to destroy the structure.
There's also the weight and size of the batteries, so...
There are many things that go into making a good, viable battery.
I think we will see steady progress, but I'm not optimistic that there will be great breakthroughs.
Well, you know, you hear people saying, well, we can produce a battery that's 50% better, but that's not enough.
And what I've learned is that while things might look really promising in the lab, to actually get them out at scale in the real world is a long, difficult job that you often fail at.
Have they done an analysis on all the rare earth minerals and what the quantities are and what would be required to make all the vehicles on earth electrical?
So, you know, nobody has put together a sensible decarbonization plan for the U.S., let alone the globe.
A sensible plan would entail technology.
Economics, business, because people have to make money doing this.
It would entail what are the right policies and regulations, and it would also entail consumer behavior and preference.
The plans that are put out by the National Academy, by universities, are generally formulated by, if you'll excuse me, a bunch of academics, okay?
And I can say that because I used to be one and I still am, okay?
But very few people who have experience with the real energy system of having to create and operate, whether it's fueling or electrical power and so on.
So I think the best thing that can be done right now is to get that kind of group together, spend a while, we've got the time, and let's come up with something that will let us decarbonize in a graceful way rather than the kind of very disruptive things that are being proposed now.
Yes, well, unless the government intervenes, it's not worth anything.
But if you look at the right question, I think, to ask is, what does the price need to be to start to shift the power sector away from coal?
And the answer is about $40 a ton or $50 a ton, okay?
So people who are trying to do this hope to bring that $500 a ton down to $100 a ton, still too expensive.
But if the price of carbon goes up to $100 a ton, then you can start to make money.
But then the real question is, can you do this at scale?
And there I'm very doubtful.
You need to suck out 10 billion tons a year of CO2 and to think about how much atmosphere you need to pass through this machine with the capture efficiency you have and so on.
Nah.
If you want to capture CO2, the best way to do it is to plant trees.
You know, when I was a kid, I hated earth science because you had to know too much.
I like math, physics, because you don't need to know much.
You just need to be clever.
But as I've gotten older, you start to realize these things are just wonderful science.
So, about 200 billion tons of carbon, so roughly 800 billion tons of CO2, go up and back between the atmosphere and the Earth's surface every year, more or less in balance.
800 billion up, 800 billion down, having to do with the seasonal cycle of plant growth and changes in ocean temperature and so on.
So, 200 billion tons of carbon is a good number to remember.
We are digging out of the ground About 9 billion tons of carbon every year in the form of oil, gas, and coal, and burning some forest as well, and putting it up into the atmosphere, into the cycle.
And it's gradually going up.
About half of it stays in the atmosphere every year.
So, if you could tweak that big cycle of 200 every year, By a little bit.
You could compensate in part or perhaps in whole for those 9 billion tons that we're putting in every year.
And the way to do that is to grow more trees or other living things because they suck carbon out of the atmosphere to make plant material.
So we can measure what's called, well, not only the color, but what's called the leaf area index, which is the fraction of the land covered by leaves in any particular place.
Of course, it's really high in the Amazon.
It's pretty low in the Sahara or the Southwest.
And we can watch that over the years, and we've been watching it for 40, 50, 60 years.
And it's gone up, as I said, by about 40% globally.
You know, crop yields have been going up steadily since 1960. A lot of that is agronomy, that we've gotten better at farming, we've gotten better genetic strains of plants, but some of it also is more CO2. Plants love CO2. We put CO2 into greenhouses to get them to grow more.
They also love warmer temperatures and longer growing seasons.
So, for example, I don't like to cite, you know, this year, etc., but I will in this case.
You know, India has seen record grain harvests this year, more than any other year.
And long-term over the world, the yields have been going up.
So these factors that lead to climate change, the human contributions of agriculture, transportation, all the various ones that you discussed earlier, how much of that can be eliminated?
We in the US have a very distorted view of the world.
We're a big country.
Many people don't travel.
They have no sense of what's going on in the rest of the world.
In the developed world, the US, Europe, Japan, Australia, Canada and so on, about one and a half billion people and we have high energy use and we have a pretty good standard of living.
There are six billion other people in the world who need energy in order to improve their economic heart.
One point something billion people in China, another one point something billion people in India and so on.
The best way for them to get their energy in terms of reliability and convenience is fossil fuels.
And who are we to tell them, no, you can't do that?
That's a moral issue, as Alex Epstein, for example, has pointed out.
And so when you say, can we reduce and what's it going to cost?
I think you have to distinguish between those of us in the developed world where we can do it.
You know, we can cut our emissions if we have enough financial capital and political capital to do it.
But what are you going to do about the people in Indonesia, China, India who need the energy?
So, we're looking at it from a perspective of this first world country, and we're not taking into consideration that there's a lot of countries, particularly third world countries, that are already struggling.
And if we implemented these radical restrictions, it would devastate their economy.
Now, when we look at all of these factors, agriculture, transportation, all these different things, if you eliminated that, how much of an impact would that have on overall climate change and, you know, warming?
And who's going to tell them you shouldn't do that?
I like to say, you know, they've got the wolf at the door, all right?
A real immediate problem with They need lighting, refrigeration, transportation, and so on.
And they're not going to worry about their cholesterol, the long term, you know, what's going to happen two generations from now, and it's kind of vague, and who knows exactly what's going to happen.
So they are making what I would think is actually a pretty Sensible solution for a sensible course of action from their point of view.
Let's say if that didn't happen, let's say if the rest of the world stayed static exactly how it sits now, what we'd do, what is possible to do to eliminate our impact?
If the rest of the world stayed static, Our influences would still—global influences would continue to grow because they keep emitting and it keeps accumulating.
Even if they're not emitting anymore in the future, they're still emitting and it's accumulating.
If we wanted to just stabilize human influences, not let them grow, We would have to go to net zero, namely zero emissions overall, by 2050, 30 years from now, if we wanted to stabilize at a one and a half degree rise.
We'd have to go to zero by 2075, If we want it to stabilize at two-degree rise.
And if I look at the issues of development, demographics, technology, economics, and so on, I would say both of those goals are fantasy.
It's just not going to happen because people need the energy.
They need to develop.
We in the developed world in the US might reduce our emissions, but it ain't going to make much difference.
So, the proposals that you hear when you hear about government proposals for addressing climate change and when you hear about these summits where these countries get together and talk about what they're going to do to implement climate change, how much of that is just sort of signaling that they're working towards doing something good?
I mean, they're always criticized for taking private jets to these things in the first place, which is very odd.
Yeah.
What impact could happen from any of these things that they're proposing?
Well, let's talk about what has happened in the past first.
We just finished in Glasgow in November COP26, the 26th annual conference of parties.
And during that time, it started 26 years ago, which is probably 1995 or so, greenhouse gas emissions have grown spectacularly, despite all of the rhetoric and the treaties or accords, promises, and so on.
The UN itself said that a lot of the pledges that countries have made to reduce their emissions over the next five to ten years are not going to be met, are not being met.
And again, this is what we're talking about at the beginning, that when you're looking at a human lifetime, it's such a short period of time that we look at a shift in our lifetime and you're like, oh my god, the sky is falling.
And you just wait another hundred years and it comes back up again.
That's not true for everything.
Humans are certainly having an influence, but a lot of the variability, the daily weather that the weather people talk about as climate change, it drives me crazy when I hear Al Roker talk about that as climate change.
So, you know, Michael Mann, for example, Naomi Oreskes, Alvin Dressler, Kerry Emanuel at MIT, I'll tell you an interesting story about Kerry in a minute, have all spoken out and said, you know, Kunin doesn't have it right.
Very few of them offer specifics.
Kerry did.
I think I have a medium page that people can look at where I've written detailed rebuttals to the science.
I mean, when people say you're a show for the oil business or you're a physicist, what do you know about climate?
I can't answer those, all right?
But I can try to rebut the specific facts that they say I've misrepresented, and I do, I think, effectively.
Again, you can find it on my medium page.
Sorry about Kerry.
So Kerry was one of the people who criticized me early on.
He said, you know, anybody who talks about 100-year trends and hurricanes doesn't understand that we only have good data until 80 years.
But previously in this conversation, I read you the official statement which says no long-term trends over a century.
So he was being, I think, You know, he's putting on his Cambridge bow tie and say, nobody who understands, et cetera, et cetera.
I had the opportunity to share a stage with Kerry at MIT in October.
And it was convened by John Deutsch, who's a good friend of both of us and a senior scientific figure.
And I had my 10-15 minute presentation and I went through some of the things we've talked about.
Kerry had 10 or 15 minutes and he didn't challenge the science at all.
I was really surprised.
Instead, he started talking about fat tails, namely improbable things that might happen with high consequence.
One of the things that I know, I understand this is going to be a very controversial podcast and your book is controversial.
I would like to get someone to come on opposite of you next and either by themselves first and then you with them together or depending upon what they would like.
Boy, the model, so projecting the future more generally is very complicated.
First of all, you've got to say what emissions are going to be going forward, and that depends on technology and regulations.
But even given some scenario for emissions over the next 80 years, You got to feed that into a climate model and you use that to predict the temperature and other changes in the climate.
The climate models cut the earth into zillions, hundreds, millions of cubes that cover the earth They go up into the atmosphere, 20, 30 layers of cubes, and then down into the ocean, 20, 30 layers.
And then the models use the laws of physics to move water, air, energy, light, and so on through these cubes, 10 minutes at a time, typically.
And you do that for centuries, so millions of steps in time.
There are a number of fundamental problems in doing that, but let me just highlight two of them.
One is that the boxes are typically 60 miles on a side.
You can't make them smaller.
Because then you got too many boxes and the computer can't follow them all rapidly.
In our 60-mile scale, there are a lot of things that happen in the weather that are much smaller than 60 miles.
How many clouds are there?
Are there thunderheads?
Is it raining?
And so on.
And so you have to make assumptions about You know, given the temperature in the box and the humidity and so on, how much clouds are there?
What kind of clouds are there?
And so on.
And different people make different assumptions.
And so you get different answers coming out of the models.
That's one.
The second is the model's human influences are physically very small.
The flows of sunlight and heat in the climate system are measured in hundreds of watts per square meter.
The human influences are two watts per square meter.
And so the model has to be very precisely balanced if you're going to see the effect of human influences.
Balanced at about a percent.
And there are different ways to getting that balance, to tuning the models.
For example, one of the models It changes the way in which marine organisms on the surface produce a chemical called dimethyl sulfide.
This is a wonderful bit of earth science, okay?
So there are these bacteria, microorganisms, plankton, that live on the surface of the ocean.
And if they get too hot, they excrete, they put out a chemical that creates a haze.
So it's a kind of natural sunshade that they make.
And depending upon how much you say they do that, you can change the reflectivity a little bit and tune the model.
Who would have thought that that's what you need in order to get the climate of the Earth right?
But okay, so those are the knobs that they turn.
Different people tune in different ways, and so you get different answers.
Even more importantly, there are these long-term oscillations we've talked about a little bit.
And the models don't necessarily produce the amount of those or their timing, and so you get different answers as well.
So, as some of the modelers have said in professional papers, but not in the media, they only give us a hazy picture of what might happen globally.
And other people have said, again, credentialed members of the consensus, that for local or regional predictions, like the sea level in the battery or the drought in Texas, they're not capable of giving us anything useful.
And you can see this graph of changes In the global temperature, averaged over the globe, starts in about 1860. This is data from a project at Berkeley led by my friend Rich Muller whom I helped get this project funded and off the ground.
And what you can see Is that the data show up until about 1920 from 1860, it wasn't doing very much.
And then the temperature started to rise in about 1910. It went up by about half a degree To 1940, it then actually went down a little bit until 1970, and then it started to go up again, and it's been going up now.
And the dashed line shows somebody's projection, or at least just continuation of the trend to 2060. And what's interesting about this graph is, first of all, you can see that the rise has not been steady.
That the rate of rise from 1910 to 1940 is about the same as the rate of rise from 1980 to 2010. How could that be, and in fact it was even cooling from 1940 to 1970, how could that be if human influences have been growing steadily since 1900?
No, I knew what I was in for, but I was pretty confident.
You know, everything in the book is referenced to the official government reports or the quality data or the research literature that has happened since the reports were issued.
So people say, Kunin's not up to date.
Well, in fact, most of the stuff that is new was presaged in the book.
So, I was pretty confident.
Obviously, I wouldn't put it out if I didn't feel I was confident in it.
I knew I'd make a lot of people mad.
But, you know, I see my job, again, is to inform people, not to persuade them.
Yeah, the making the people mad thing, when that initially started happening, was there any consideration that maybe you could have worded things differently, or maybe you could have appeased them in any way?
What has shocked me, not so much that particular incident, is that I think there really are two media universes in the country, and I think quite apart from climate, that's a very bad thing to happen.
Let me give you one example.
So when the book was just about to come out, we had sent copies around, and My wife and kids turn on Bill Maher one night in, I think, early April.
And Bill Maher goes off on a 10-minute rant about this guy, Coonan, who publishes a book that says climate science, etc., etc.
I haven't had the stomach to watch it again.
But, you know, Bill Maher, of all people, Who, you know, is against religion and dogma and so on.
He obviously hadn't read the book, but he just went off.
I can't get into his head, but I can tell you, and I'll say it, people can hear it, I'd love to get on a stage with him and show him X, Y, and Z, and Bill, tell me why this is not true, and it's counter to what you probably believe.
Well, the problem is, if anybody hasn't read your book, and they would make an assumption based on the idea that you are a climate denier, so it starts with that, which is very clear from the very beginning of the book that's not the case.
I believe we should be doing something about this, but what is being proposed is much too fast and is much too sweeping.
There's a guy named William Nordhaus.
Who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2018 for a fundamental insight about this problem.
And that is that there is an optimal best pace to decarbonize.
If you decarbonize too rapidly, change out the energy system, as is being proposed, you incur a lot of cost associated with economic disruption.
You know, 8% of the U.S. GDP is oil and gas production.
You also deploy immature technology, less than the best solar panels or nuclear reactors or whatever.
If you do it too slowly, you incur a greater risk that something bad might happen with the climate due to human causes.
Bad things are going to happen anyway, but maybe they happen more often when humans are influencing the climate.
And so there is an optimal pace.
And his initial estimate was we could let the temperature go up to three degrees by the end of the century and still be optimal, best course.
I think he's revised that downward a little bit now, but still, we've got the time and we should do it in a thoughtful and graceful way and not, again, try to do tooth extraction.
So there should be some intervention, something done to deal with what we're doing and to mitigate the effect that human beings are having on the climate.
It's going to be very difficult because of the developing world problem.
The other thing we need to do is be thinking about adaptation and resilience.
You know, I like to think about three categories of things We could do, we should do, and we will do.
And I like to try to stay away from the should because you've got to balance all these competing demands, particularly the developed world.
What I think we will do, looking at all the drivers, is we're going to adapt.
That's going to be the main way in which we will respond to a changing climate.
And, you know, adaptation has got a lot of things going for it.
It doesn't matter whether the climate is changing because of human influences or because of natural phenomena.
It's proportional.
If the climate changes a lot, we'll adapt a lot.
Climate changes a little, we'll adapt a little.
Adaptation is local, and so it's much more It's palatable politically.
You're spending for the here and now and not for something halfway around the world and a couple of generations away.
And it's also very effective.
Consider the following.
That the globe, as I showed you, has warmed about a degree centigrade, two degrees Fahrenheit, since 1900. During that time, we've seen the greatest improvement in human welfare we've ever had.
The population in 1900 was two billion people.
Today it's almost eight, so it's gone up by a factor of four.
And we've seen spectacular improvement in nutrition, in health, in literacy, et cetera, et cetera, right?
To think that another one or one and a half degrees is going to completely derail that, just beggars belief.
You were saying also in your book that when they're looking at the global temperatures and they're listing these highest global temperature years, that there's also lowest temperature that sometimes coincides with those years.
There are various processes in the Arctic that are happening that accelerate the warming.
For example, The sea ice in the Arctic Ocean or on the land disappears or at least doesn't come back as rapidly in the wintertime and consequently the Earth absorbs a little bit more energy because the ice is reflective whereas the seawater is not.
Now, when you talk about adaptation and you talk about the rise in the global temperature, so if it does rise up a couple degrees, what sort of adaptation will be required and what areas of the world, or at least of our country, will actually benefit from a warming?
But it also makes us terrified that the changes happen so quickly and it leads to this fear of what's going to happen and what kind of damage we're doing.
People, in the end, what we do about this, I like to say, is a value judgment, okay?
The science is what it is.
I've tried to portray it accurately, certainties and uncertainties.
What we decide to do about it depends on risk tolerance, Intergenerational equity, North-South equity, and just cost-benefit generally.
Those are not scientific issues.
Those are value issues.
They're the proper concern of the politicians But you have to have an accurate representation of the risks and certainties and uncertainties in order to have that discussion.
And I think what people have done in the political and popular discussion is overhyped the threat in order to move the discussion one way or the other.
Is it safe to say that even if there was no impact by human beings on climate change, if there was zero impact because of our society and civilization, that there would still be change that we would have to work with?
Yeah, so you saw that cooling trend, and people started to get the data from ice cores for the first time to understand the cycle of Not what are called ice ages, but glaciations and interglacials.
They happen because of the way in which the sunlight falls on the Earth and how it changes due to the Earth's orbit and tilt of the axis of the Earth and so on.
They happen about once every 100,000 years.
The last interglacial, the last time the Earth was mostly ice-free, happened 125,000 years ago.
The temperature was thought to be 2 degrees warmer than it is currently, and the sea level was thought to be 20 feet higher than it is currently.
It's been, you saw the last glaciers disappeared about 20,000 years or started disappearing about 20,000 years ago.
And 20,000 years is about how long these interglacials last before the ice starts growing again, takes a long time for it to grow, and then it warms up pretty suddenly.
I have often thought, you know, what are the signatures that we'd start to enter a glaciation again?
What should we be looking for?
One of the obvious ones is that the snow cover in the northern hemisphere starts to last through the summers.
If and when that happened, it would of course take some thousands of years for the glaciers to build up.
But you might ask also, what geoengineering could we do?
What interventions would we do if we saw that starting to happen in order to forestall it from happening or slow it down?
And I don't think anybody, at least I haven't found anybody who's thought seriously about that.
So, this is an idea that's been around for, you know, some number of decades.
And the idea is to put, as you said, some reflective particles into the stratosphere where they will hang around for a couple of years and enhance the reflectivity by a little bit.
And you don't need to do very much in order to offset the warming.
There are several downsides to doing that.
One is that you've got to keep putting the particles up there because they fall out, and if they fall out, it's going to get warmer again.
The other bad thing, or at least somewhat downside to it, is it doesn't exactly cancel out the greenhouse gases because it only cools when the sun is shining, whereas the greenhouse gases are effective all the time.
It'll change precipitation patterns somewhat.
And people have done studies with models about how it would change.
You can just imagine the fights that would occur if the world decided to start to do this.
Somebody would say, hey, you know, it was rainy the last two years, and much more rainy than it should have been, and it was your geoengineering that did it, and therefore you owe me money.
So what I hope is that, you know, people will read the book before they criticize, although that usually doesn't happen, and those who do read it will look up some of the references and say, yeah, that guy Kunin seems to be right.
Go ask your favorite climate scientist, is that guy Cootin right?
Well, other than Bill Maher criticizing it, was there anybody else that criticized it that you clearly could tell that they haven't read the science or haven't read your book?
Oh, I think many of the scientists who wrote The criticism in Scientific American clearly hadn't read the book because they say Koonin says X when in fact Koonin actually said not X. So what can you do about that when a public article is published?
You know, I actually submitted a rebuttal to Scientific American.
You know, as a kid, I used to read Scientific American cover to cover.
Because it was interesting and it discussed science.
I and many other people I know have stopped reading it over the last 20 years because it's become so political and the content has been dumbed down, if you like.