- What I Learned After a Month Without Air Conditioning - June 20, 2025
- Why Some Scientists Are Now Pushing Back on Climate Crisis Forecasts - June 20, 2025
- What Happens If the Oceans Stop Flowing? Scientists Lay Out the Risks - June 18, 2025
Former Obama Administration Scientist Challenges Mainstream Climate Messaging
You’d expect someone who worked for President Obama to follow the party line on climate change. But Dr. Steven Koonin isn’t your typical former government scientist. From 2009 to 2011, he was Under Secretary for Science, Department of Energy, in the Obama administration. In 2024, he became the Edward Teller Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Koonin is wrong on both counts. The science is stronger than ever around findings that speak to the likelihood and consequences of climate impacts, and has been growing stronger for decades. Koonin’s intervention into the debate about what to do about climate risks seems to be designed to subvert this progress in all respects by making distracting, irrelevant, misguided, misleading and unqualified statements about supposed uncertainties that he thinks scientists have buried under the rug. His critics might dismiss him, but his credentials make him hard to ignore. After working for BP as their chief scientist for five years, Koonin found himself questioning whether climate models were as reliable as everyone claimed. I came away from the workshop not only surprised, but shaken by the realization that climate science was far less mature than I had supposed. Close quote.
The Numbers Don’t Always Add Up the Way We’re Told
When you actually look at climate data without the political spin, some surprising patterns emerge. Heat waves in the US are now no more common than they were in 1900, and that the warmest temperatures in the US have not risen in the past fifty years. This is a questionable statement depending on the definition of “heat wave”, and so it is really uninformative. Heat waves are poor indicators of heat stress. Whether or not they are becoming more frequent, they have clearly become hotter and longer over the past few decades while populations have grown more vulnerable in large measure because they are, on average, older. It’s like comparing apples to oranges – the raw statistics tell one story, but the context completely changes what they mean. despite a dramatic rise in greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures actually decreased from 1940 to 1970. What’s more, the models we use to predict the future aren’t able to accurately describe the climate of the past, suggesting they are deeply flawed. This disconnect between predictions and reality has left some researchers wondering if we’re building policy on shaky foundations. Koonin also points out how wildly climate computer models disagree with each other. Having written one of the first textbooks on such modeling, he is especially harsh on the “fine-tuning” of models to adjust for unwelcome findings.
When Climate Models Miss Their Mark
Think of climate models like weather forecasts, except they’re trying to predict decades into the future instead of next week. Recent studies, however, showed that a substantial number of CMIP6 GCMs run “too hot” because they appear to be too sensitive to radiative forcing, and that the high/extreme emission scenarios SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5 are to be rejected because judged to be unlikely and highly unlikely, respectively. According to recent research, the GCM macro-ensemble that best hindcast the global surface warming observed from 1980 to 1990 to 2012–2022 should be made up of models that are characterized by a low equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) (1.5 °C < ECS ≤ 3.0 °C), in contrast to the IPCC AR6 likely and very likely ECS ranges at 2.5–4.0 °C and 2.0–5.0 °C, respectively. Even the IPCC itself acknowledges significant uncertainties in its projections. We argue that the probability distributions published in those assessments are still approximately valid; while various subsequent studies have claimed further narrowing, they have omitted important structural uncertainties associated with missing processes, imperfect relationships, or other factors that should be included. The distributions could nonetheless be narrowed in the future, particularly through better understanding of certain climate processes and paleoclimate proxies. It's remarkable how these uncertainties rarely make headlines, yet they're fundamental to understanding what we actually know versus what we think we know. The gap between model predictions and observed reality has grown large enough that some scientists are calling for a complete rethink of how we approach climate forecasting.
La Niña’s Unexpected Role in Recent Temperature Trends
Nature has a way of throwing curveballs that even the best scientists don’t see coming. He noted that temperatures in early 2024 got an extra boost from El Niño, a warming weather pattern now trending toward its cooler La Nina counterpart. “It’s still going to be in the top three warmest years,” he said. Temperatures didn’t return to the “old normal” after the El Niño climate phenomenon ended in May last year like scientists expected they would. Instead, 2024 went on to exceed the 2023 heat record. On the other side of the debate, scientists see this “blip” as falling within projections for global warming. “A lot of scientists do feel that actually the previous climate models still fully explain this,” Urge-Vorsatz says. We will only know in a few years whether this was just a natural variability blip or it is due to some phenomena that we have not yet understood. What’s fascinating is how natural climate cycles like La Niña can temporarily mask or amplify warming trends, making it incredibly difficult to separate human influence from natural variation. This uncertainty isn’t just academic – it directly affects how we interpret current temperature records and what they actually mean for long-term climate patterns.
Technology Advances Might Change the Game Completely
While everyone’s focused on doom and gloom scenarios, engineers and innovators are quietly working on solutions that could revolutionize how we deal with climate change. After decades of trying to stop Earth from heating up, scientists are exploring how to reverse climate change and maybe even cool the planet back down. Geoengineering technologies that seemed like science fiction just a decade ago are now being seriously studied by major universities and government agencies. And, last year, the White House released a report identifying knowledge gaps and potential research areas for a federal solar geoengineering research program. There has not been a directive to act on the findings yet. So far, most research has been limited to computer modeling. While valuable, unforeseen variables are likely to make real-world scenarios more complex. Field research that would begin exploring these complexities has been difficult to get approved. Two high-profile experiments—one in California and another in Sweden—were canceled this year due to local opposition. Residents, including a Nordic indigenous tribe, expressed passionate concerns about potential impacts on weather patterns. The rapid pace of innovation in carbon capture, renewable energy, and adaptation technologies suggests that our current climate projections might be missing a crucial variable: human ingenuity. It’s like trying to predict the future of transportation in 1900 without accounting for the possibility of cars, planes, or rockets.
The Politics of Climate Science Funding
Money talks, and in climate science, it often dictates which research gets published and which gets buried. The corruption of “Science” by “the power of money” which Eisenhower predicted with remarkable foresight in his 1962 Farewell Address has clearly come to pass and is surely “greatly to be feared”. Although the development of mutually supportive claques was clearly revealed by Climategate with, “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [TRENBERTH] and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!… we will keep this paper out even if we have to change the nature of peer review”, motivated reasoning can not only move mountains but cause the faithful can remain unmoved. The academic pressure to conform to prevailing narratives is intense, and scientists who question mainstream climate projections often find their funding threatened or their papers rejected. The truth’s last line of defense should be the scientific community, but here Koonin indicts those of his fellows who have discarded a commitment to the truth — the whole truth, and nothing but — in favor of their own view of wise policy. “Distorting science to further a cause is inexcusable,” he says, a violation of scientists’ “overriding ethical obligation.” Even if such people ultimately prove right, and Koonin wrong, about climate, he is correct to label their willful distortions “dangerous” and “pernicious.” Scientific research has already suffered serious self-inflicted wounds over recent decades. The discovery that as many as half of all published paperscannot pass the basic test of replication has yet to be meaningfully addressed. This creates a vicious cycle where researchers know what conclusions they need to reach before they even begin their studies.
Over 1,600 Scientists Sign Controversial Climate Declaration
In a move that sent shockwaves through the scientific community, more than 1,600 researchers put their names on a document that directly challenges the climate emergency narrative. A global network of over 1900 scientists and professionals has prepared this urgent message. Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures. Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. In particular, scientists should emphasize that their modeling output is not the result of magic: computer models are human-made. What comes out is fully dependent on what theoreticians and programmers have put in: hypotheses, assumptions, relationships, parameterizations, stability constraints, etc. Unfortunately, in mainstream climate science most of this input is undeclared. To believe the outcome of a climate model is to believe what the model makers have put in. Critics point out that many signatories aren’t climate specialists, but supporters argue that scientific truth isn’t determined by consensus anyway. Only 10 of the signatories described themselves as climatologists or climate scientists, Agence France-Presse found. Those with climate expertise were few. The list included engineers, doctors, lawyers, mathematicians, architects, entrepreneurs, and economists. Others did not list any occupation at all. The declaration strikes at the heart of how we conduct science in the modern era – should research be driven by political urgency or methodical skepticism?
The Media’s Role in Amplifying Climate Anxiety
Turn on the news and you’ll hear about every hurricane, drought, and heat wave being linked to climate change, but the full story is much more nuanced. Nonprofit “public interest” groups raise fortunes on forecasts of doom, often on the flimsiest evidence. The modern news media, chasing the dollars that titillating, click-catching headlines bring, have been, if anything, worse than the political class in discussing climate change. Koonin serves up multiple examples, with descriptions such as “deliberately misleading” and “blatantly misrepresenting.” The problem isn’t that climate change isn’t happening – it’s that the constant drumbeat of catastrophe stories makes it nearly impossible to have rational discussions about realistic solutions. CLINTEL’s declaration against the climate change narrative counters propaganda spread by climate alarmists who have long predicted doomsday scenarios triggered by global warming—none of which have ever come true. In 1970, some climate scientists predicted that the earth would move into a new ice age by the 21st century. In May 1982, Mostafa Tolba, then-executive director of the United Nations environmental program, said that if the world did not change course, it would face an “environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible, as any nuclear holocaust” by 2000. In June 2008, James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Sciences, said that within five to 10 years, the Arctic would have no ice left in the summer. When predictions consistently fail to materialize, it erodes public trust in scientific institutions and makes people more skeptical of legitimate climate concerns. The boy who cried wolf effect is real, and it’s damaging the very cause that climate activists are trying to support.
What This Means for Climate Policy Moving Forward
The growing scientific pushback against climate alarmism doesn’t mean we should ignore environmental concerns, but it does suggest we need a more balanced approach to policy-making. The world has warmed significantly less than predicted by IPCC on the basis of modeled anthropogenic forcing. The gap between the real world and the modeled world tells us that we are far from understanding climate change. Net-zero emission policies are not necessary because SSP2-4.5 is sufficient to limit climate change hazards to manageable levels. Rather than rushing into trillion-dollar commitments based on uncertain projections, these scientists argue for policies that focus on adaptation and technological innovation. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. Go for adaptation instead of mitigation; adaptation works whatever the causes are. This shift in thinking could lead to more pragmatic approaches that address real environmental challenges without devastating economic consequences. Koonin, who’s joining the Hoover Institution this fall as a senior fellow, has a new op-ed out in the Wall Street Journal titled “The ‘Climate Crisis’ Fades Out.” He warns that overreach based on overheated interpretations of climate science is already causing societal pushback. The question isn’t whether climate change is happening, but whether our current responses are proportionate to the actual risks we face.
Did you expect that established climate scientists would be this divided on such a critical issue?
