The use of bogus science reports confected by charlatans, poseurs and quacks to try to validate an unjustified government position has been known for decades. A recent one (during the pandemic) involved the "reports" of the quack epidemiologists who produced the "The Great Barrington Declaration" which claimed the covid 19 virus would ultimately be conquered if enough people got infected. Thereby offering a specious basis for all the lockdowns and mask wearing to stop, given their wacko bunkum would yield "herd immunity." But as the actor Alan Alda wrote in a NYT piece at the time (Oct, 2020):
According to the WSJ (ibid.):
"The report challenges decades of scientific findings that emissions from cars, power plants and factories are warming the planet and posing risks to public health. The Environment Protection Agency is using the report as the scientific basis to roll back its so-called endangerment finding."
Problem is that the report is no more scientific than the codswallop behind the Great Barrington Declaration. As Donald Wuebbles, professor emeritus of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois noted in the piece, it's not as if contrarian voices shouldn't be heard, but "do it in the right way". Meaning get your contrarian views and arguments published in a peer reviewed journal. Which none of the report contributors have managed to do. Among them, Steve Koonin, who blabbed:
"The science does not say what you think it says. The reality of climate risks and benefits have been largely misportrayed in the media....Among other assertions he argued with his fellow authors that increasing carbon dioxide is good for plant growth."
And he's got kind of a point, at least about certain kinds of plant growth. This is given we're now - thanks to much higher CO2 levels - seeing "super weeds" like the pigweed shown below:
Added to the super weeds are the pollen counts generated by ordinary plants, now at their highest points ever, in some cases 300-500% above pre-greenhouse era levels. with allergy season starting earlier with each passing year, e.g.
Allergy season is starting earlier and lasting longer. Pittsburgh doctors share their tips.
These clowns also argue that "temperatures in the U.S. are milder now than in the 1930s and that heat waves, floods and wildfires aren't getting worse."
Which makes one wonder what alternative Earth they've been living on. They obviously missed the memo that the past ten years, from 2015 to 2024, have been the hottest on record, with 2024 being the warmest year overall, according to scientific and weather organizations. This marks a significant shift, as all the warmest years in recorded history have occurred within this recent decade. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has confirmed that 2024 surpassed previous records, making it the first year to exceed the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming threshold above pre-industrial levels.
Recall I had earlier torched Koonin in my April 21, 2017
post, when he called for a "red team" test of Earth
Day. I wrote at the time:
"Let's reference that Koonin himself is not an honest broker for the
"true representation" of climate science. As per a Wikipedia entry
on him we read:
"In Climate Science Is Not Settled a 2014 essay published in
the Wall Street Journal, Koonin wrote that "We
are very far from the knowledge needed to make good climate policy," and
that "The impact today of human activity [on climate] appears to be
comparable to the intrinsic, natural variability of the climate system itself."
Koonin criticized the use of results from climate modelling to support the
"scientific consensus" (quotes in original) about climate change,
noting that, among other problems, "The models differ in their
descriptions of the past century's global average surface temperature by more
than three times the entire warming recorded during that time."
Regarding climate sensitvity, Koonin wrote that "Today's best estimate of the sensitivity (between 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) is no different, and no more certain, than it was 30 years ago. And this is despite an heroic research effort costing billions of dollars."
Ten days after Koonin wrote this, , Jeffrey Kluger in Time called Koonin's piece disingenuous if not
dishonest. Koonin simply used the old debating trick of setting up a strawman
to knock down by misconstruing what climate scientists mean when they say the
climate debate is "settled."
Koonin also resorted to the straw man technique with his objections to the
newly released report, writing that "while much is right in the
report it is misleading in more than a few important places:"
Going on to complain:
"One important example of alarm raising is the description of sea
level rise...the report ominously notes that while global sea level rose an
average of 0.05 inch a year during most of the 20th century it has risen at
about twice that rate since 1993. But it fails to mention the overall rate
fluctuated by comparable amounts several times during the 20th
century"
This actually conflates a statistical definition with discrete outliers in
the assembled data sets. It would be somewhat analogous to making a
complaint about my published (Solar Physics) research on SID flares, say
to the effect "he noted an average frequency of 3.3 major SID
flares from his largest area sunspot class but ignored all the
ARs-sunspots that fluctuated from that frequency by comparable
magnitudes over the study interval"
Missing the key point that subsets of data outliers with magnitudes approximately
the same as the average do NOT overturn the
average. A similar objection was made by one of the report's authors who replied that the report did not state that the rate since 1993 was "faster
than during any comparable period since 1900" - which is
the "non-statement Koonin seems to have objected to."
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