“If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.” - Michael Crichton in a famous 2003 lecture at Caltech.

George Rebane

The evil Democrats and their corporatist allies continue their massive nationwide campaign to suppress speech and the First Amendment.  Among their latest forays in this area of America’s public discourse is to suppress substantive debate on climate change by loudly and insubstantially denigrating the latest comprehensive treatment of the topic by Caltech physicist Dr Steven Koonin in his Unsettled: What climate science tells us, what it doesn’t, and why it matters (2021).  This book becomes a significant part of the struggling bulwark against the Left’s promotion of mass hysteria about what is claimed to be preventable manmade global warming.  In these pages I and others have presented years of reasoned arguments illustrating the folly of politically erected and sustained consensus science; here we continue this ongoing effort.

In his 26apr21 WJS review of Unsettled, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Mark Mills writes –

Physicist Steven Koonin kicks the hornet’s nest right out of the gate in “Unsettled.” In the book’s first sentences he asserts that “the Science” about our planet’s climate is anything but “settled.” Mr. Koonin knows well that it is nonetheless a settled subject in the minds of most pundits and politicians and most of the population. … The book is no polemic. It’s a plea for understanding how scientists extract clarity from complexity. And, as Mr. Koonin makes clear, few areas of science are as complex and multidisciplinary as the planet’s climate.

One of my major criticisms of the hyped predictions of climate doom is that they are a based on faulty (general circulation) models.  Dr Koonin wrote the book on modeling large scale ‘physics systems’, and corroborates my own longstanding professional assessment of such models as to their feasibility and reliability.

But what Steven Koonin’s massive and well-referenced tome documents are the factual counters to the large-scale lies with which big government collectivists and their media allies daily fill the news and entertainment channels worldwide.  Examples –

• Frequency and magnitude of severe weather events (e.g. hurricanes) is increasing – NOT TRUE.
• World’s temperature highs are increasing – NOT TRUE.
• Atmospheric CO2 levels are at all-time highs – NOT TRUE.
• Number and severity of droughts are increasing – NOT TRUE.

The real harm is generated by the public’s acceptance of these lies (over 64% of the world’s population believes in a climate “emergency”) is that they compliantly accept the insane, economy stultifying, and liberty constraining public policies their political leaders and government bureaucracies concoct.  All this in the name of nowhere near any “settled science”, as Koonin makes clear.  But then, as they have demonstrated over recent decades, the average voter has had neither the interest nor intellect to examine what science is and what it really says about climate change.  A Swedish teen-ager’s emotional ramblings about a climate calamity are a much more digestible fare to all the folks out there in television land.  Forgive them Father, for they know not … .  (more here and here)