Unsettled Science

I am not one who believes that the climate has not changed. Indeed, I know the climate has changed, and will continue to change. There is a reason why Greenland is called “Greenland”, and not “Snowland”. The very terms “Ice Age”, “Little Ice Age”, and “Medieval Warm Period” are reminders that the climate changes continually, and not always in one direction.

About mankind’s contribution to the change in climate, I am much less certain. I do not discount mankind’s contribution as a result of the burning of fossil fuels, but I have some serious problems with the magnitude of that contribution. Specifically, I have trouble seeing how the small amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has such a huge impact on greenhouse warming.

According to the federal government, we set a record for carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere in 2021: 414.72 parts per million (ppm). For non-scientists, this is 0.041472%, or, as a fraction, 0.00041472. This is a tiny number compared with, say, the amount of oxygen in the air (19%) or nitrogen in the air (80%). Let us put that number in perspective.

Carter-Finley Stadium in Raleigh, NC, the home football stadium for the NC State University Wolfpack, has 56,919 seats. If that stadium represents the atmosphere, then about 45,535 seats would be taken up with nitrogen gas, and about 10,815 seats would be taken up with oxygen gas. That leaves only 569 seats for all the remaining gases in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, at a concentration of 414.72 parts per million, would take up less than 24 seats.

The composition of the atmosphere changes a bit, depending upon the weather (which is not the same as climate). On a day that we southerners would consider to be nice and temperate (77 degrees Fahrenheit, 50% relative humidity), the water content in the air is about 1%, or 569 seats in Carter-Finley stadium. Water is also a greenhouse gas. Since the concentration of water vapor is about 24 times that of carbon dioxide, why are we worrying about carbon dioxide, when water seems to be a bigger contributor?

I could not get answers to my simple questions for a very long time, and I was beginning to feel lonely and unloved. After all, the United States seemed willing to turn its economy upside down on the advice of a 15-years-old Swedish teenager with no scientific training. I sat around the house, waiting for the University of North Carolina to recall my PhD.

But I have read a book that makes me feel much better. What follows is not the fallacy of appeal to authority; that is, I am not asking you to believe the author of the book simply because he is credentialed out the wazoo. I give you his credentials simply so you will know that he is not a radical right-winger, and not a “climate denier”.

Dr. Steven E. Koonin wrote the book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t, and Why it Matters. His BS in physics was from Caltech, and his PhD in theoretical physics is from MIT. He was a professor at Caltech for nearly 30 years, as well as a vice president and provost for some nine years. Currently he is a professor at New York University, with appointments in the school of business, the school of engineering, and the department of physics. Best of all, he was undersecretary for science in the Department of Energy during the Obama administration, where he authored the DOE’s Strategic Plan (2011), and the first Quadrennial Technology Review. And as this will have some bearing later on, he wrote the book Computational Physics (1985), which is the foundational textbook for building computer models of complex physical systems.

Unsettled is several hundred pages long, and well documented with a raft of footnotes, so I cannot summarize all of its major points. Please, read the book for yourself to get a good picture of what is wrong with current climate science. I will focus on two points.

Koonin is a careful reader, and he tends to double check everything he reads. When the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) releases a new report on the status of the climate, we generally see extracts from the summaries written for policy makers, and reporters. Koonin is never satisfied with the summary, and he investigates the wording of the actual report. Often, he checks the sources quoted in the report. What he finds is that the “executive summary” is usually not an accurate reflection of what is contained in the report. Sometimes low confidence predictions are stated as facts, and on occasion, the original research papers referenced in the report are misrepresented. He tends to bring these faults to light in newspaper editorials. I have read a few of his contributions to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. So point one is that not everything we read about climate change is true.

Point two: Koonin has very serious problems with the computer models used to predict changes in climate. None are accurate. None. And yet we are basing our energy policies (and as a result wrecking our economy) on inaccurate model predictions. He notes that we have very accurate climate data going back to the 1980s, and some reliable data before then. When the various climate models are set to begin in 1980, with data (not predictions) from that time, and allowed to run, we find that every model vastly over-predicts the temperature rise. If the models were accurate, they would have predicted the temperature rise we have seen in the last 40 years.

There is much more to the book than just these two examples, and I feel that I have done his many arguments an injustice. So do not take my word for it. Get the book, and if you are feeling funky, chase down the papers in the hundreds of footnotes in the book.

And then, relax. The globe is warming, but the end is not near.