Physicist Stephen E. Koonin debunks climate alarmism, citing a 2018 U.S. report showing no rise in heat wave frequency since 1900 and dismissing IPCC projections of catastrophic warming as overstated. He critiques media sensationalism—like John Kerry’s existential framing—and exposes climate models’ failure to predict regional weather, calling renewable energy’s grid reliability claims "unconscionable." Koonin advocates for nuclear power, including small modular reactors, as the only scalable solution, warning that 2035 decarbonization goals are impractical. His book Unsettled sparks backlash, with critics ignoring his call for balanced policy amid rising energy costs and reliability risks, suggesting climate policies may face public pushback before achieving "sane" compromise. [Automatically generated summary]
So as we become a global world, one of the biggest issues facing us is the globe.
And I know that we as conservatives have a lot of questions about the climate, the climate panic, the climate alarmism that we feel is often a guise of power.
And I wanted to bring somebody on who has a really interesting record because he is, first of all, a scientist.
But Stephen E. Kuhnin was also the Under Secretary for Science, the U.S. Department of Energy under the Obama administration.
And yet he's written a remarkable new book called Unsettled, What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters.
Stephen Kuhn, thank you very much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Pleased to be talking with you, Drew.
So you have been under attack ever since this book came out from some of your former friends.
And what I wanted to do just to start, since I'm not a scientist, I wanted to read some of the assertions that you make early on in this book and some of the things that people have been saying about them and just hear what you have to say about them so I can at least make a judgment.
You begin this book in a very, very shocking way where you just take a bunch of the assertions of the climate alarmists and you basically say they're not true.
You say heat waves in the U.S. are now no more common than they were in 1900 and the warmest temperatures in the U.S. have not risen in the past 50 years.
So Scientific American ran a story saying not true.
Heat waves have clearly become hotter and longer over the past few decades.
The nighttime temperatures are increasing most and people never get relief from the insufferable heat and more of them are at risk of dying.
Why are they wrong?
Well, you know, I think they're addressing different questions that the nighttime temperatures are increasing the most is in fact right there in the reports and I don't have anything to say about that.
In terms of the heat waves, you can see very clearly in the 2018 government climate report, a graph, and I refer to it in the book, that shows exactly that, that they're exactly the same as they were in 1900.
So when we hear that, oh, this is the hottest year ever, this year was the hottest year, that's not true.
Well, that's a different metric of the temperature.
You have to be careful.
I mean, the hottest year ever is about the average temperature of the globe, which averages the high and low temperatures of every point and refers them to the average and calculates what's called the anomaly.
That's a different measure of the temperature.
Heat waves, temperature extremes, all what I was talking about in that comment.
All right.
I just want to do a few more and then get to the more general topic.
You say the net economic impact of human-induced climate change will be minimal through at least the end of the century.
Scientific American says that's unconscionable to make that statement.
Well, it may be unconscionable, but it's what the IPCC and the U.S. government said.
Right.
Again, it's right there in the reports.
It takes a little bit of interpretation because they kind of obscure it.
But, you know, I don't think anybody has challenged that statement.
It might be unconscionable, but it's true.
So in general, I mean, you were the Undersecretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy under the Obama administration.
One of your roles was to increase spending on what they call renewable energy.
And there has been a lot of talk about just this panic that we are, if we don't stop this global warming right away.
Did something change your mind?
Did your mind change?
Yes, yes.
Yes, it did.
You know, I had an epiphany, if you like, around the beginning of 2014 when I was asked by the American Physical Society to take a hard look at their statement on climate change.
This is a society that represents 50,000 physicists in the U.S. and around the world.
And I convened a panel of three consensus scientists and three, I'll call them skeptics or credentialed people.
We sat and talked for a day.
And I came to realize that the science behind the climate concern is a lot shakier than I had been led to believe.
It's got to do with the large variability in the climate system.
The climate changes all by itself.
It's got to do with the sensitivity of the climate system and that there are many influences beyond just carbon dioxide.
And it's got to do with uncertain projections of how society is going to respond to a changing climate.
You put all that together and it's not at all obvious that we're facing an existential threat.
In fact, when I hear the politicians, John Kerry, AOC, Bernie Saunders, talk about climate crisis existential threat, I'm thinking you're not reading the reports because that's not at all what the reports say.
They just came out this UN report, what is it, the IPCC?
It was reported as if it was declaring basically that the world was over.
I mean, the press reports were as panicky and hysterical as they could possibly be.
And you wrote in the Wall Street Journal that this was simply not what was in the report.
What was in the report?
Well, what was in the report is, first of all, so, you know, we have to make scenarios or assumptions about what emissions are going to look like in the future.
And the first thing they did was to declare the most extreme scenario quite improbable, which is in contrast to previous reports.
Nevertheless, of course, you still see it used in the current report, but okay.
The second is that they gave, I think, more realistic projections of what the temperature would be under a more plausible scenario.
And the answer is that the global temperature would rise about another one and a half degrees by the end of the century under that scenario.
We've already risen one degree, so the net would be about two and a half by the end of the century.
Now, you know, the world has prospered in an unprecedented way over the past century as the globe has warmed about a degree centigrade.
To think that it's all going to come to an end if it warms another one and one and a half degrees is just complete nonsense.
And I blame the media more than anybody else, and perhaps the people who write the summary in the UN reports.
It's just immoral.
You talk about unconscionable to scare the wits out of people, particularly young people, that the world is going to end unless we make radical changes in our society.
Political Suspicions and Climate Models00:04:49
That's just not what we should be doing.
Let's have an honest representation of what they're saying, and then let's have a discussion about what we should do.
So this is the question I think that bedevils conservatives.
The conservative suspicion is that the panic is being caused by people who want to take control, who want government essentially to take control of our energy resources, who want the power to collect at the top, who want to basically tell us how much gas we can use and fly around on their private jets to Davos to discuss about whether or not we should be able to walk to the grocery store.
And you were in the Obama administration.
Is that suspicion correct or is it justifiable?
You know, I'm not going to say because, of course, the administration was and is a big organization, and you don't know what goes on at the very political levels.
I was not a political functionary in the administration.
I was brought in to help plan what alternative energy research would look like.
And the motivations of the people at the top, I really can't speak to.
However, as I note in the book, if you go back to H.L. Mencken in the early part of the 20th century, he said the purpose of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by a series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary, so that they'll be clamoring to be led to safety.
And you see that across the political spectrum, whether it's immigration or it's COVID or it is global warming, we can imagine many others.
It's just a generic tool that the politicians use.
Okay, fair enough.
So much of this has to do with one of the things that drives me crazy about this is the use of the term science.
I mean, I love science.
I read a lot about science.
And they use this word, but they're really talking about computer models, which actually only fall under the heading of science in a very, very contingent way.
How good are these computer models?
Yeah.
So let me first say, you know, as someone who's built computer models for many different purposes over the last four decades, they are very much a part of the science, and there is a science to them.
What most people don't recognize is their deficiencies and their shortfalls.
George Box famously said, who's a mathematician who was building models, he said, all models are wrong, but some are useful.
And the models can give guidance, but in fact, for something as complicated as the climate, and we can go into the reasons why, they're just not fit for purpose.
They can give us a general sense.
It's going to go up the temperature, let's say, as human influences grow, but exactly how and exactly how that's going to affect weather patterns is entirely up in the air.
And again, this is not me saying it.
It is the professionals saying it.
They just don't say it very loudly or in popular publications.
So in the past, have the predictions borne out, the predictions of climate computer models.
You know, that it's gone, that the temperature, let's just talk about the global temperature, that the global temperature has gone up.
The models have in fact predicted that exactly how much the models have a tremendous variation associated with it.
When you ask for other phenomena about precipitation or storms, there's such a wide divergence among the models that you can almost claim that there's always one that's going to be right.
What they do, I mean, just is to take like 50 different models from 50 different groups and just average them all together.
And the variability among the models is so much greater than the changes you're trying to describe.
The book we're talking about is Unsettled What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't and Why It Matters by Stephen E. Kuhnin, K-O-O-N-I-N, who was in the Obama administration.
You know, Paul Krugman wrote this piece in the New York Times.
I don't know if you saw this, but.
Which one?
This.
This was, he said that I'll read just a little bit.
He says, we used to believe that achieving big reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would be difficult and expensive, although not nearly as costly as anti-environmentalists claimed.
Technological Miracle in Renewable Energy00:07:25
Over the past dozen years or so, however, we've experienced a technological miracle.
As nicely documented in an article by Max Roser, the costs of solar and wind power, once dismissed as foolish hippie fantasies, have plunged to the point that quite modest incentives could lead to a rapid reduction in use of fossil fuels.
Now, I read the Max Roser article and it didn't seem to actually be saying that to me, but the reason I bring this up is because he actually credits essentially you.
He credits the spending of the Obama administration for bringing renewables down until the point where they're useful.
Are renewables actually capable of being exchanged for fossil fuels?
So I've no doubt that Mr. Krugman is a smart guy.
He won a Nobel Prize after all.
He's an economist.
He's not a technologist.
And what I think he doesn't appreciate is that the grid is a lot more than just generation.
So wind and solar are great for producing electricity, but the grid is an entity that involves many sources of generation, and they all have to play together to send electricity reliably down the wires.
We've come to expect that that reliability is about four-ninths, namely 99.99% of the time, the grid is going to be supplying electricity.
The problem with wind and solar is that they only generate when the sun shines or the wind blows.
And that's not most of the time.
And so you have to figure out a way to provide electricity when that doesn't happen.
And there are basically two ways to do that if you're going to try to do it carbon-free.
One is you have to have a lot of batteries.
You charge up the batteries when the wind and sun are working.
That means you need more than just to meet the immediate demand.
You charge them up and then you discharge them.
The other is to have non-emitting sources of reliable electricity.
And nuclear is about the only way we can do that cheaply.
And so those backups are what really drive the cost of the system.
To get 95% reliability, yeah, you could deploy enough wind and solar.
That'd be great.
But to get that last 5% reliability, which we absolutely need for the few weeks when the wind goes down or it's cloudy, costs a zillion dollars, a lot more than the wind and solar hardware itself.
And so that's where these guys fall down.
They sort of understand, okay, cost of a solar panel or cost of a wind turbine, but nobody thinks about the system unless you're an expert.
And is there any possibility of creating the kinds of batteries that we would need to store that amount of energy?
Well, you know, this last spring, I ran a workshop for the U.S. National Academy and the UK Royal Society.
And I've got to admit, the prospects are not great, at least on the few decade time scale that we are looking for to decarbonize rapidly.
So I would say that the ambitions of the Obama, of the Biden administration to make the power grid emissions-free in 14 years by 2035, just not going to happen.
And what about nuclear?
It seems to me there's almost a superstitious hatred of nuclear.
It's been incredibly safe in free countries.
Is that something we should be looking into more?
Is something we should be investing in?
Yeah, so full disclosure, first, you know, I'm trained as a nuclear physicist, and so I can tell you in great detail how uranium atoms splits apart.
I'm not a nuclear engineer, but I've been around them long enough that I can sound credible.
And yes, I think absolutely it is the largest emissions-free source of power that we have right now.
It can, it has been extraordinarily safe apart from a couple of spectacular accidents.
We need to, in the future, look at small reactors.
They're called small modular reactors, and I helped get them started when I was in the administration.
They're about one-tenth the size of the big ones.
We could build them in a factory with a standard design, truck them on a rail car to the site and put them in one at a time.
Much safer and much more economic because you can use the cash flow from one to help build the next one.
So there are companies trying to pursue that.
I just heard China has got one in the works as well.
We've got to be pursuing that if we're going to reduce emissions from the power sector.
What has been, you write this book, Unsettled, and you've basically dismantled the climate alarmist agenda.
What has been the reaction?
I've seen reactions in the press, but personally, are you getting a lot of blowback here?
Well, you know, what is most gratifying to me are other scientists and engineers who aren't climate scientists who say, wow, thanks for writing that.
These are things I never knew.
And I hope that they've got the tools to go dig further if they want.
There are some professional climate scientists who've told me quietly, Steve, you got it about right.
You know, I'll quibble here and there, but again, I'm glad you wrote it.
There are other people, as you saw in Scientific American or the popular press, who basically either offer ad hominem arguments, he's not a climate scientist, he's a show for the fossil fuel industry, and then other people who respond to quite different points than what I made, like the story about temperature extremes, for example.
So, you know, I haven't been called an idiot as much as I thought I would be.
I personally love reading the Amazon reviews because mostly they're people who say, thanks for being so clear and complete and well-referenced.
There will be opportunities, I believe, in this coming academic year for me to have a more significant or substantial engagement with some of the people who've been criticizing me.
And let's have it out.
I'm all up for it.
I'm out of time, but I have to ask you very quickly: are you hopeful that we can have a sane climate policy or do you think this kind of craziness will continue?
I think Saturday will return as the proposals that are being made by the administration start to bite ordinary people.
Electricity becomes more expensive and less reliable.
Fossil fuel gasoline costs go up.
Consumer choice gets limited because you can't buy an internal combustion car or truck.
People are going to start to say, please tell me again why we're doing all of this.
And I think there will be a lot of popular pushback because the administration wants to go too far, too fast.