A former Obama administration official is helping the Trump White House mount a challenge to the scientific consensus on climate change.
Steven Koonin, a former undersecretary for science in the Energy Department of the Obama administration, told the Washington Examiner that the nascent effort is meant to make “the science more transparent and explicit.”
He argues that climate science conventional wisdom is flawed, relies on alarmist scenarios, exaggerates economic impacts, and fails to note the “climate has actually become milder.”
Koonin is best known for being recruited by former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt to lead a debate of climate science, but then-chief of staff John Kelly ultimately canceled the project. Now he’s back.
He is assisting the White House in creating a committee to scrutinize climate science after being asked by long-time friend William Happer, a controversial National Security Council senior director leading the effort. The committee is being derided by critics, with one branding it a “slapdash band of climate contrarians.”
Happer, who was hired by national security adviser John Bolton in September, once said that the “demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.”
The exact form of the panel is to be determined. It could be an independent federal advisory committee, subject to transparency rules, or an “ad hoc” working group operating in secret.
Either way, the Trump administration is recruiting academics and scientists who reject mainstream climate science to join it. Koonin said that after helping set up the group up, he may be a member.
Koonin, who served at the Energy Department under President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2011, is a theoretical physicist and director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University. He was previously chief scientist for BP, the British oil and gas giant.
The plan for the committee, Koonin said, is first to investigate the science underlying the National Climate Assessment, completed by U.S. government researchers across 13 federal agencies and released in November 2017.
That assessment concluded that climate change is already affecting the country and is caused by humans. The committee, he said, will send an evaluation of the assessment to the National Academy of Sciences, a private group of researchers, for review.
The report would be intended as a skeptical but credible second opinion on the government’s findings about global warming, he said.
“This would ensure there is real dialogue,” Koonin said. “If this is a bunch of administration hacks who write an adversarial review, the academy will call them out. If, on the other hand, these folks generate some valid criticisms, we will all have better a sense of what climate science is really about.”
The second phase of the initiative, Koonin said, would use the findings of the science review and apply it to national security policy.
At that stage, the effort could conflict with the findings of the national security and intelligence communities within the U.S. government that climate change threatens national security.
Some Republicans are skeptical of the project’s goal and don’t think it’s possible that it could result in a credible challenge to the existing government findings about climate change.
“Any kind of objective analysis of climate change is going to result in a conclusion that there is a national security impact,” said George David Banks, President Trump’s former international energy adviser and a supporter of mainstream climate science.
But Koonin contends the national security community’s findings about climate change rely on flawed science.
He argued the National Climate Assessment and related documents downplay key details that clash with the narrative that “we have broken the climate already and we face certain doom if we don’t change our ways.” He charges that the report focused heavily on “worst-case scenarios.”
While the burning of heat-trapping fossil fuels has caused global temperatures to increase about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) over the pre-industrial levels, Koonin said heat waves have occurred no more frequently over the past 50 years, while cold snaps have declined. “So the climate has actually become milder,” he said.
But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA released a report this month finding nine of the 10 warmest years have occurred since 2005, with the last five years being the hottest. Koonin counters that such reports “focus too heavily on the last decade or two to avoid natural variability over the last century.”
Koonin also said the National Climate Assessment overstates the impact of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions on recent extreme weather events, such as hurricanes and wildfires, which the report says are becoming more intense because of climate change. And he claimed the media exaggerates the economic implications of climate change.
He contends that up to the year 2100, the net economic impact of human-caused climate change is uncertain — and probably insignificant — because it is not known how societies and industries will adapt.
John Holdren, a former White House science adviser in the Obama administration, said Koonin is “quibbling about points in climate science where there are uncertainties.”
He noted the National Climate Assessment considered a range of scenarios, including a very low-emission possibility, and was reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences, the same body Koonin says the White House initiative would enlist.
“The key findings are robust beyond any reasonable doubt,” said Holdren, who worked with Koonin in the Obama administration. “There is zero chance that some slapdash band of climate contrarians assembled by the current White House will have any impact whatever on the key scientific understandings of what is going on.”
Critics have also pounced on Happer’s history of controversial comments about carbon dioxide and climate change, including his statement in 2017 that the threat of global warming has been “tremendously exaggerated.”
Koonin, however, defends Happer’s credentials, calling him an “good scientist” who is “not the demon or ideologue the media are portraying him as.”
He and Happer are both physicists, not formally trained as climate scientists, who have known each other for 30 years.
Koonin insists his own motives are genuine. “I don’t agree with everything this president is doing,” he said. “I try to make a positive difference where I can. If I can advise on getting the dialogue on climate science to a better state, I will do that.”
