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May 6, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
15:19
Dennis speaks with Author Steven Koonin
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When you were in the Obama administration, did you think at that time that the catastrophic predictions were accurate?
No.
No.
So you were never an alarmist?
No, I never was.
As I started to focus on energy matters related to climate, when I went to BP, when I was a chief scientist for five years, I was much more concerned about energy technologies and didn't really do a hard look at the science.
But, you know, my attitude was, okay, this is likely a problem and we should be working on ways in which we might be able to deal with it.
And I was focused on energy technologies.
But catastrophe?
No.
Come on.
Anybody who knows anything about the world knows we're tremendously resilient.
So what animates people?
Who say that, you know, we have 12 years, nine, we're down to nine.
It's like, you know, you renew your car, a lease, every three years.
This is the same thing here.
So Al Gore in 1990 said we had 12 years.
And described it, these are the words constantly, existential threat to biological life.
What animates them, since you are a prominent scientist?
It is clearly not science.
Yeah.
These people don't know the science.
They've not read the reports.
They're not scientists.
And that goes for Mr. Kor and all the way on up to the people, most of the people in politics today.
You know, I like to think, again, I'm a scientist.
I'm not a student of human behavior.
But I like to think about this quote from H.L. Mencken, who says, you know, It's to keep the populace alarmed by a series of mostly imaginary threats.
And, okay, I think we can take what the politicians say with a grain of salt, but when they start invoking the science and abusing the science, that's where I think it's really bad.
That's right.
All right, let me hold that thought, because we must take a break, because I want to re-announce your book.
To which I am morally committed.
It is titled Unsettled!
What Climate Science Tells Us What It Doesn't and Why It Matters.
Stephen Kunin.
The Dennis Prager Show.
Live from the relief factor being free studio.
Some of us that are conservatives have hoped, I think it was a false hope, that at some point the left was going to stop.
At some point they were going to say, you know what, maybe we've gone too far.
No, this is just the beginning of their plans.
This is just the very start of what they plan to do to our nation and to our country.
And Donald Trump, I think, only accelerated a lot of their radicalism.
You see...
What they used to hide, what they used to pretend did not exist, they now lead with.
They now say the private part out loud.
Because they know the media will not hold them accountable.
A great example of this is the Washington Post has now completely disbanded their fact-checking division.
Who needs fact-checking when the Ministry of Truth has taken over the presidency?
Where all they did was fact-check Donald Trump's presidency.
And most of those fact-checks were basically Critiques of nuance and context.
They were not things that actually were necessary for massive front-page fact-checking, but they've disbanded their fact-checking division because who needs to fact-check Joe Biden?
He's who they want to be put in place.
But here's the thing that I think that we need to focus on the most, which is every single conservative in the country, and I'm just going to start doing this right after, you know, right after, I'd say, late May, early June.
Which is every single conservative in the country needs to start showing up to these school board meetings.
I think we have the tape here of this group of teachers that showed up, not teachers, this group of parents in Vail, Arizona.
They just showed up to a random school board meeting and took over the school board.
They fired the school board and they said, we're in charge now.
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*music* From colleges to corporations to our culture, people are making money and gaining power by pretending we haven't made any progress at all.
By doubling down on the divisions, we've worked so hard to heal.
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Some of us that are conservatives have hoped, I think it was a false hope, that at some point the left was going to stop.
At some point they were going to say, you know what?
Maybe we've gone too far.
No, this is just the beginning of their plans.
This is just the very start of what they plan to do to our nation and to our country.
And Donald Trump, I think, only accelerated a lot of their radicalism.
You see, what they used to hide, what they used to What pretend did not exist, they now lead with.
They now say the private part out loud because they know the media will not hold them accountable.
A great example of this is the Washington Post has now completely disbanded their fact-checking division.
Who needs fact-checking when the Ministry of Truth has taken over the presidency?
where all they did was fact-check Donald Trump's presidency.
And most of those facts...
Thank you.
I'm Dennis Prager, and I welcome you back speaking to the top scientist in the Department of Energy in the Obama administration, Caltech professor.
What specifically, by the way, professor of what?
I was a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech.
Oh, my God.
That's right up my alley, theoretical physics.
When I first heard the word string theory, I thought of a Beethoven quartet.
Gives you an idea where I am.
Right, right.
Well, you know, look, we're all just people, and all I was doing was having fun.
And that's what I, about most professors, that's what you like to do.
I wish most professors liked to have fun.
Oh, God, that would be a better world.
All right, we'll leave it at that.
Anyway, his book, ladies and gentlemen, is of unsurpassed importance at this time.
It's titled Unsettled, because with a question mark, Unsettled.
And the question is about the whole issue of global warming, climate science, and so on.
And this is from a man who was in the Obama administration and a Caltech professor.
Ignored completely in the world of the Washington Post, New York Times, etc.
However, he got a featured review in the Wall Street Journal.
That was why it was my first question to the professor, and I was not surprised by his answer.
Let's go to a number of the most popularized images that we get.
I think the two biggest are polar bears.
And glacier melting.
So let's begin with polar bears.
Are they disappearing?
You know, that's not a particular subject I've studied up on, but from my casual reading, I think polar bears are doing just fine.
Okay?
Populations are going up.
By the way, it is indicative of your being a scientist that you would say it's not your field.
But you did do your research, and it is in the book.
And certainly not my field, but I did a lot of reading, and that's what I have understood.
Next, the melting of glaciers both in Antarctica and Greenland.
Yeah, so, you know, I think this is something that there's some popular misconception about.
I've got a graph in the book from a very recently published paper that tries to tease apart...
All of the things that are causing sea level to rise.
And what you see is that the glaciers were high in terms of melting about 60 years ago, and then they went down, and now they're starting to go up again.
All right?
But not quite as high as they were, let's say, in 1950. And so there's a lot of variability here.
The glacier melting depends on a lot of different things.
Not just the temperature.
And if we look at just the last 20 years and get all excited because, ah, it's going up, it's melting faster, you really have to put that in some historical and geological perspective.
The same is true for Greenland.
Again, I'm looking at this graph in the book, and it was melting more in 1940, say, than it was a few years ago.
You know, it may be going up again.
It's very variable.
The exact causes of that variability we don't understand.
And so we shouldn't get too excited.
You know, climate is a 30-year average.
And let us step back a little bit and stop confusing weather with climate or natural variability with human influences and really take a lower-term view of these things.
What is your reaction to the constantly stated argument, 97% of scientists agree, and then fill in the rest on climate science?
Yeah, well, first of all, the 97% number comes from a ridiculously distorted survey of some published papers.
It's been thoroughly debunked, and again, there are references in the book to the debunking.
But even beyond that, What are we supposed to be agreeing or disagreeing about?
If you ask me if the globe is warmed by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit over the last century, absolutely.
If you ask me whether carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is going up because we're burning fossil fuels, absolutely.
If you ask me whether that is exerting a warming influence on the globe, sure.
But is that the only cause of warming, or is that going to lead to a catastrophe?
I'm not there at all.
That's the issue.
That's what I said from the beginning.
I'm just telling my listeners.
Never denied it's getting warmer.
Never denied that carbon dioxide might play a role.
But the question is, is it catastrophic?
Yeah.
So where are these modeling predictions of catastrophe coming from?
Probably 20 different modeling centers around the world.
And they build and run these very large, complex computer models.
They're all different.
They all give different results.
And then they feed in assumptions about what future emissions are going to look like, and hence future temperatures.
But even as the temperature is rising, The economic impact of the rising temperatures is expected to be minimal, according to the reports.
And again, not Steve talking, but the official UN and US government reports.
So I don't understand where climate catastrophe comes from.
Well, from somebody who has at least as many credentials as you, a young woman named Thornburg.
Oh, right.
Well, you know, I've read her book, and I hope she reads mine, and maybe someday she and I can have a conversation.
You're a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech.
She's a teenage girl, and she gets the attention, and you don't.
That's fine.
I never, you know, I never set out for attention when I sat down to write this book.
I really, again, just wanted to explain to people and see the eyes light up when they finally understand, which is what I've been doing as an educator for 30 or 40 years.
Do you have any, forgive me, do you have any thoughts about the objective of getting the country off?
Fossil fuels by 2030 or 2040?
Yeah.
So it's good to sort of say a little more precisely what the proposals are.
All right.
So hold on.
I don't want to interrupt you.
I want to have your full thoughts on that when we come back.
Again, I'm speaking to a professor of theoretical physics, Caltech.
He was the head scientist in the Department of Energy in the Obama administration.
My suspicion is he's a lifelong Democrat.
I'm not going to go there with him, unless he wants to note it.
But I just want you to understand where he's coming from.
This notion of the settled science, 97% agree, existential threat.
None of it is true.
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