First wordIN answer to criticism of my recent columns on climate change, I say flatly that 'climate change is the lie,' not the issues I raised about the climate change travesty.The objective behind my columns is to seek a full review of Philippine climate policy, including the country's hasty signing of the Paris climate agreement in 2015.I want a serious discussion of the issues and reject the preposterous claim by climate-change believers that the debate is over.To continue the discussion, I want to direct attention today to two important developments in the climate issue:First, the staging in New York City of an unprecedented debate between climate scientists (climate change believers vs climate skeptics) on climate change.And second, the recent publication of a major book on climate science by physicist Dr. Steven Koonin titled, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, And Why It Matters.I'm interested to see what my critics will say about these events, whether they will call them fake news or misinformation, or attempt to dispute their findings.Rupert Darwall, a senior fellow of the Real Clear Foundation, wrote a report on the debate and a review of Koonin's book, which I use here to make my case.Climate debate in New York CityOn Jan. 8, 2014, at the New York University in Brooklyn, there occurred a unique event in the annals of global warming - nearly eight hours of structured debate between three climate scientists supporting the consensus on man-made global warming and three climate scientists who dispute it, moderated by a team of six leading physicists from the American Physical Society (APS), led by Dr. Steven Koonin, a theoretical physicist at the New York University.The debate, hosted by the APS, revealed consensus-supporting climate scientists harboring doubts and uncertainties and admitting to holes in climate science - in marked contrast to the emphatic messaging of bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United Nations (UN).At one point, Koonin read an extract from the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report released the previous year. Computer model-simulated responses to forcings - the term used by climate scientists for changes of energy flows into and out of the climate system, such as changes in solar radiation, volcanic eruptions and changes in the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere - 'can be scaled up or down.' This scaling included greenhouse gas forcings.Some forcings in some computer models had to be scaled down to match computer simulations to actual climate observations. But when it came to making centennial projections on which governments rely and drive climate policy, the scaling factors were removed, probably resulting in a 25- to 30-percent overprediction of the 2100 warming.Holes in climate scienceThe ensuing dialogue between Koonin and Dr. William Collins of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - a lead author of the climate model evaluation chapter in the Fifth Assessment Report - revealed something more troubling and deliberate than holes in scientific knowledge:Doctor Koonin: But if the model tells you that you got the response to the forcing wrong by 30 percent, you should use that same 30-percent factor when you project out a century.Doctor Collins: Yes. And one of the reasons we are not doing that is we are not using the models as [a] statistical projection tool.Doctor Koonin: What are you using them as?Doctor Collins: Well, we took exactly the same models that got the forcing wrong and which got sort of the projections wrong up to 2100.Doctor Koonin: So, why do we even show centennial-scale projections?Doctor Collins: Well, I mean, it is part of the [IPCC] assessment process.Koonin was uncommonly well-suited to lead the APS climate workshop. He has a deep understanding of computer models, which have become the workhorses of climate science. As a young man, Koonin wrote a paper on computer modeling of nuclear reaction in stars and taught a course on computational physics at Caltech. In the early 1990s, he was involved in a program using satellites to measure the Earth's albedo - that is, the reflection of incoming solar radiation back into space. As a student at Caltech in the late 1960's, he was taught by Nobel physicist Richard Feynman and absorbed what Koonin calls Feynman's 'absolute intellectual honesty.'On becoming BP's chief scientist in 2004, Koonin became part of the wider climate change milieu. Assignments included explaining the physics of man-made global warming to Prince Philip at a dinner in Buckingham Palace. In 2009, Koonin was appointed as undersecretary at the Department of Energy (DoE) in the Obama administration.'The science' isn't as it should beThe APS climate debate was the turning point in Koonin's thinking about climate change and consensus climate science ('The Science'). 'I began by believing that we were in a race to save the planet from climate catastrophe,' Koonin writes in his new book, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, And Why It Matters. 'I came away from the APS workshop not only surprised, but shaken by the realization that climate science was far less mature than I had supposed.'Unsettled is an authoritative primer on the science of climate change that lifts the lid on The Science and finds plenty that isn't as it should be. 'As a scientist,' writes Koonin, 'I felt the scientific community was letting the public down by not telling the whole truth plainly.' Koonin's aim is to right that wrong.Unreliable computer modelsKoonin's indictment of The Science starts with its reliance on unreliable computer models. Usefully describing the earth's climate, writes Koonin, is 'one of the most challenging scientific simulation problems.' Models divide the atmosphere into pancake-shaped boxes of around 100 kilometers (km) wide and 1-km deep. But the upward flow of energy from tropical thunderclouds, which is more than 30 times larger than that from human influences, occurs over smaller scales than the programmed boxes. This forces climate modelers to make assumptions about what happens inside those boxes. As one modeler confesses, 'it's a real challenge to model what we don't understand.'Inevitably, this leaves considerable scope for modelers' subjective views and preferences. A key question climate models are meant to solve is estimating the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) of carbon dioxide, which aims to tell us by how many temperatures rise from a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Yet in 2020, climate modelers from Germany's Max Planck Institute admitted to tuning their model by targeting an ECS of about 3° Centigrade. 'Talk about cooking the books,' Koonin comments.The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating. Self-evidently, computer projections can't be tested against a future that's yet to happen, but they can be tested against climates present and past. Climate models can't even agree on what the current global average temperature is.Neither is it reassuring that for the years after 1960, the latest generation of climate models show a larger spread and greater uncertainty than earlier ones - implying that, far from advancing, The Science has been going backwards. That is not how science is meant to work.Distortion of climate dataThe second part of Koonin's indictment concerns the distortion, misrepresentation and mischaracterization of climate data to support a narrative of climate catastrophism based on increasing frequency of extreme weather events. As an example, Koonin takes a 'shockingly misleading' claim and associated graph in the US government's 2017 Climate Science Special Report that the number of high-temperature records set in the past two decades far exceeds the number of low-temperature records across the 48 contiguous states. Koonin demonstrates that the sharp uptick in highs over the past two decades is an artifact of a methodology chosen to mislead.Koonin also has sharp words for the policy side of the climate change consensus, which asserts that although climate change is an existential threat, solving it by totally decarbonizing society is straightforward and relatively painless. 'Two decades ago, when I was in the private sector,' Koonin writes, 'I learned to say that the goal of stabilizing human influences on the climate was 'a challenge,' while in government it was talked about as 'an opportunity.' Now back in academia, I can forthrightly call it 'a practical impossibility.''Role of scientistsThe most unsettling part of Unsettled concerns science and the role of scientists. 'Science is one of the very few human activities - perhaps the only one - in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected,' Karl Popper wrote nearly six decades ago. That condition does not pertain in climate science, where errors are embedded in a political narrative and criticism is suppressed.There is pressure on climate scientists to conform to The Science and the emergence of a climate science knowledge monopoly. Its function is the manufacture of a product - political legitimacy - which, in turn, requires that competing views be delegitimized and driven out of public discourse through enforcement of a 'moratorium on the asking of questions.'Many scientists take this lying down. Koonin won't.Phony doctrineTo this day, the climate change (CC) movement has not recovered from the devastating debate in New York. CC believers are wary of debating climate change with climate realists, particularly scientists. They won't even present a reasoned brief on their dogma of climate change. They want it to be granted a presumption of proof.No wonder, Cal Thomas, the most widely syndicated columnist in America, calls climate change a phony doctrine.yenobserver@gmail.com
