Koonin - Part 1 "Unsettled" is Required Reading

I've just finished reading the most important climate change book available today.  Steven Koonin's Unsettled addresses "what climate science tells us, what it doesn't, and why it matters".  Koonin was a professor at CalTech for 30 years, provost for 10 of those years, chief scientist at BP focused on renewable energy technologies, Undersecretary for Science at the Department of Energy in the Obama Administration and is now a professor at NYU.

His book uses available data from many government and academic sources and applies his cross-functional knowledge in physics, computer modelling, statistics, climate science, etc to understand what the data tells us--and more importantly, what it doesn't tell us.  Over 14 chapters, his analysis is devastating to "The Science" that our politicians and climate activists claim is all settled.  By eliminating the cherry picking of data that occurs via selecting narrow windows of time or geography, adding the statistical confidence intervals to measurements that get headlines and noting the counterbalancing effects of some forms of emissions Koonin shows that the media (and some unscrupulous academics and government agencies) are misleading the public.

The book is technical as it must be, but he has written it for the general public so it's very readable if you have some basic knowledge of chemistry, physics and math--mostly statistics.  I've listed this post as Part 1 because I plan to serialize some parts of the book.  Here in B'game we have banned natural gas in new construction, begun worrying about sea level rise, promoted electric cars and issued warnings about all sorts of natural disasters supposedly related to climate change.  Before we get too far into these restrictions and expenses wouldn't it be good to know more about how human activity is really affecting the climate.

Comments

[Peter Garrison]

Thanks, Joe.

[Joe]

Here is some updates on the international political front from yesterday's WSJ:

Climate politics seem to be undergoing a rapid and significant shift in many places, and not in the direction environmental activists hoped. To wit: Voters have started noticing how much they’re each going to have to spend to reduce carbon emissions, and they don’t like it.

It’s a startlingly broad phenomenon. The Swiss last month rejected a referendum to impose a fuel tax and a tax on airline tickets. The British cabinet, which on Wednesday proposed major new carbon restrictions for transport industries, also is split over previously announced plans to ban gas-fired home heating and require landlords to boost energy efficiency in rental units.

President Emmanuel Macron has seen his agenda knocked off course for the better part of three years by grassroots protests against a diesel tax hike that started in 2018.

Meanwhile in Japan, climate-minded shareholders have just wrapped up a disastrous (for them) season of annual shareholder meetings. Resolutions codifying aggressive corporate carbon targets were defeated at all three companies where activists proposed them— Mitsubishi UFJ, Sumitomo and Kansai Electric Power.

This followed the announcement in April that Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund, the world’s largest with around $1.6 trillion under management, is abandoning trendy ESG investing. (It stands for “environmental, social and governance.”) The strategy was a financial loser, and “we can’t sacrifice returns for the sake of buying environmental names or ESG names,” Kenji Shiomura, senior director of the fund’s investment strategy department, said in an interview with Bloomberg. Given Japan’s impending glut of retirees and shortage of workers, Bloomberg’s reporters had to concede that “pensions are a more sensitive subject than climate change.”

Primarily climate activists are victims of their own success. For a variety of reasons—some market-based and benign, and others regulatory and expensive—carbon intensity in developed economies has declined markedly in recent decades. By one count, the U.S. now emits 0.28 kilogram of carbon dioxide for every dollar of gross domestic product, down from more than 0.8 kilogram in the 1970s (using constant 2010 dollars). Britain’s emissions per dollar of GDP have declined to around 0.13 kilogram from above 0.6 kilogram in the same span, and Japan’s to 0.18 from 0.36.

This suggests that further reductions in emissions in these economies are likely to be much harder and costlier to eke out. Note how, despite fantastical promises about the economic benefits of electric cars or green jobs, it always seems to require uncountable trillions of dollars for taxpayer-financed Green New Deals and an extra couple of hundred bucks on your household heating bill to get from here to there.