Your most valuable 2 hours
This week’s JRE with Steve Koonin clearly demonstrates why CNN and politicians are so afraid of him
For those of you inclined to shortcut reading an entire book in favor of getting a two hour executive summary while on the move, I’m going to recommend the Joe Rogan podcast with Steve Koonin. It’s pasted below. Rogan pulled the strings on “science” with COVID and didn’t like what he saw. Now he’s moved his attention to climate change, and that spells trouble for $131 trillion companies and politicians are hoping to be spent making them rich…. I mean, saving the world.
I have both read the book (‘Unsettled’) and written about the challenges it lays out. Personally, I put Steve Koonin in the same category as Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Shellenberger as “must reads” if you want to understand the challenges of climate modeling. For balance, I would recommend Bill Gates “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.”
On the subject of climate change, we have all been exposed to “the narrative.” But it is based on modeling. As a reservoir engineer, my eyes were opened when I built reservoir models for fields early in my career. “But…. But … I have to make so many assumptions, how can the answer be objective? I know what buttons to tweak to get the answer I want…”. My boss helpfully said:
Garbage in = garbage out!
When it comes to climate, outside of my own research and perspectives on the reasons why companies want to push the “apocalypse disaster” narrative, it’s the specifics around the modeling that causes me equal pause. Computers are limited, even today, so the models are built with 60 miles x 60 miles x 60 miles grid blocks. Those are pretty big blocks.
Equally troubling, the modeler has to make assumptions about the impact of clouds (reflect the sun) and sensitivity to CO2, knowing the answer their funding source wants it want it to be. I’ll quote Substack writer “el gato malo” to share the best summary I’ve seen on the topic (he writes only in lower case letters):
in the age of government sponsored science driven by grants, sinecure, and sponsorship, scientists face a difficult set of choices.
they must, if they wish to continue receiving the largess of the gold-givers toe the party line of state or commercially sponsored science. he who has paid the piper demands to call the tune and producing work that does not suit “the narrative” is career suicide. your funding will dry up. so may your position, your prospects for advancement, and even your tenure. you will not be asked to join committees, interviewed for articles, citied, or supported. you may be outright attacked.
Steve Koonin is very balanced, brilliant MIT trained physicist who worked in the Obama administration. Of note as well was that Joe Rogan took on his critics head on. In my opinion, his effectiveness and influence will increase significantly, much to the chagrin of CNN and politicians.
Rogan led the interview with “why will people dismiss your views,” asked “who would disagree with you so that I can have them on” and overall asked really good questions that made the topic accessible. Not bad for a guy that self declares “isn’t a scientist.” The net result will be that his 11 million listeners just found out climate change has a lot more uncertainty than they’ve been previously told. On the heels of revelations about COVID, that’s a huge problem for trust in public institutions. Remember the Imperial College model that called for 2.2 million deaths between April and August 2020 in the US and drove the lockdown response in the U.K., which a new John Hopkins study has shown to be ineffective? Yeah. That.
Once the populous realizes that models are notoriously fickle and the uncertainty of “how does cloud coverage change?”, “why did the global temperature go down from 1940-1970” and “what led to the little ice age in the 1700s that froze the River Thames over?” matter to history matching, the narrative quickly falls apart when the answer is “we don’t know.”
Science is a process, it is not determined by consensus (ask Galileo), and that’s the inconvenient truth.
Until we recognize this issue is not about “ climate change” we are not arguing the same issue. This is about the transfer of wealth and dismantling the capitalist system under a globalist agenda. The books you mention all address the fallacies of the fossil fuel- CO2 “ problem” and the impossible economics in a lucid and persuasive manner. I suggest also the books “Green Fraud” by Moreno, “ Hot Words, Cold Science “ by Singer, and “ False Alarm” by Fleming.
Narrative has been around forever. It is a religious thing. Religion of climate/environmentalism.
Other religions...
But math is a funny thing, yet often ignored.
https://www.icr.org/article/mathematical-impossibility-evolution/