The Shameless Attack on a Climate Change DissenterWe couldn't find any negative review of physicist Steven Koonin's Unsettled that disputed its claims directly or even described them accurately.
AARON BROWN AND JOHN OSTERHOUDT
2.13.2023
In 2021, the physicist and New York University professor Steven E. Koonin, who served as undersecretary for science in the Obama administration's Energy Department, published the best-selling Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters.
The book attracted extremely negative reviews filled with ad hominem attacks, such as a short statement appearing in Scientific American and signed by 12 academics that, instead of substantively rebutting Koonin's arguments, calls him "a crank who's only taken seriously by far-right disinformation peddlers hungry for anything they can use to score political points" and "just another denier trying to sell a book."
We couldn't find a single negative review of Unsettled that disputed its claims directly or even described them accurately. Many of the reviewers seem to have stopped reading after the first few pages. Others were forced to concede that many of Koonin's facts were correct but objected that they were used in the service of challenging official dogma. True statements were downplayed as trivial or as things everyone knows, despite the extensive parts of Unsettled that document precisely the opposite: that the facts were widely denied in major media coverage and misrepresentations were cited as the basis for major policy initiatives.
When dissenting scientists are implicitly compared to Holocaust deniers, or their ideas are considered too dangerous to be carefully considered, it undermines public respect for the field and can lead to catastrophic policy mistakes. It's human nature to favor evidence that confirms our biases and leads to simple conclusions. But for science to advance, it's essential that moral certainty does not override objective discussion and that personal attacks not replace rational consideration of empirical evidence.
In a review of Unsettled in Scientific American, Gary Yohe, an emeritus professor at Wesleyan University, gives the impression that he didn't read past the first few pages. The book has nine chapters filled with examples of exaggerations and outright falsehoods in both scientific and popular accounts. Yohe mentions just four claims taken from the first two pages, plus one from a chapter subtitle, and manages to refute none of them.
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After Koonin wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled, "Greenland's Melting Ice Is No Cause for Climate-Change Panic" in February 2022, a publication called Climate Feedback, which calls itself "a worldwide network of scientists sorting fact from fiction in climate change media coverage," published a response. It labeled Koonin's article: "Cherry-picking, Flawed reasoning, Lack of context, Misleading.
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How is it "cherry-picking" to show all the data? Columbia University's Marco Tedesco claims that "the article picks only the last 10 years, excluding the remaining time series for the context." And yet, the graph published in the op-ed clearly shows the data since 1900 and addresses all of it.
Ironically, the Climate Feedback review is guilty of cherry-picking. It claims to rebut Koonin by stating that a 2015 article in Nature "found that ice loss between 2003 and 2010 'not only more than doubled relative to the 1983–2003 period, but also relative to the net mass loss rate throughout the twentieth century'."
In other words, Climate Feedback picked the fastest eight-year increase over the 121 years span shown on the chart and compared it to the lowest 21 years. That's the definition of cherry-picking. It's also irrelevant to the climate change debate because both periods occurred in the time period of rapid global warming, generally taken to have begun in 1970 or shortly before.
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Source:
https://reason.com/video/2023/02/13/the-shameless-attack-on-a-climate-change-dissenter/
