Former Obama Official: Climate Change Not 'Settled' Science

by JASmius



An absolutely delightful follow-up to last evening's global warming/climate change hoaxery "Stand Up To Carbon!" post.

It's almost as if God really does have a serendipitous sense of humor:

A former high-ranking Obama administration official says climate science and the implications of global warming are not "settled," insisting such claims are "misguided" and stifle debate on the matter.

Parenthetically, here's another "former Obama Regime official" publicly calling BS on another of the demigod's "messianic" policy claims now that he no longer "worships in the Obama Cathedral," as it were.  Boy, blasphemy against The One is becoming a bigger pandemic than Ebola, isn't it?

Writing a Page One story in the Wall Street Journal Weekend Review section, Dr. Steven Koonin argues that groupthink among experts has been inhibiting "the scientific and policy discussions that we need to have about our climate future."

Koonin, who served at the [Anti-]Energy [Commissariat] as President Obama’s under[commissar] for science..., is director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University.

Koonin’s position strikes a blow against climate change [extreme]ists as People’s Climate March organized demonstrations at more than 2,000 locations worldwide.

I'm not sure how much of a blow Dr. Koonin's piece strikes against the Global Carbonophobes, but it's really a case of "the more, the merrier," and his essay appearing in the WSJ certainly doesn't minimize the impact.  But it's the timing of it that is so delicious - almost as if the climatic Chicken Littles knew Dr. Koonin's article was appearing in the Journal this weekend and staged their worldwide "Greenapalooza" placard festival in a desperate attempt to drown him out.  To no avail, evidently.

Now one might fairly ask what a "climate change denier" - aka genuine scientist - like Dr. Koomin was ever thinking by going to work for Barack Obama as an undercommissar for "science" when that position's job description is the antithesis of its title.  And that's a very legitimate question.  The word "science" derives from the Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge".  A synonym for "knowledge" is "truth".  Historically and traditionally, the scientific method was the process by which man learned the truth about nature and his environment; everything from biology to chemistry to astronomy to thermonuclear astrophysics and every other scientific discipline that Bruce Banner and Tony Stark banter back and forth over a big bag of potato chips.  Building our store of scientific knowledge facilitates the development of technology that comprehensively improves the quality of life for our "species".  Which is a big reason why we have clean water, clean air, miracle vaccines and disease cures, plasma screen televisions, i-phones, the Internet, jet air travel, space stations, interplanetary space probes, and everything else that makes Sheldon Cooper reach for his Kleenex, if you know what I mean.  It's what we know as present-day "intelligent design," and what the greenstremists would call "human evolution," if they didn't have such a vested political interest in dragging us all back to the primordial slime.

Which brings us back to Dr. Koomin, and what he was doing prostituting his professional integrity to such a "liberal left Marxist socialist commie" pinko pagan shimpmonger as Red Barry.  Since he accepted the job as O's climate change political hack minion in May of 2009, it can't be that he was a Bush holdover.  I can only conclude that either he was hopelessly naïve, or it took over two years for him to develop a sufficient sense of ethics to muster enough conscience to become a, well, genuine scientist.  Or maybe the Obamunists' anti-carbon jihad has gotten so ludicrously strident that even he could no longer take it seriously.

Or maybe he bailed out for other reasons.  That's what I gather from his own explanation:

We often hear that there is a 'scientific consensus' about climate change," writes Koonin.  "But as far as the computer models go, there isn't a useful consensus at the level of detail relevant to assessing human influences."

Koonin says his extensive training as a computational physicist with a forty-year career of scientific research and management, has given him an up-close knowledge of climate science.

"Detailed technical discussions during the past year with leading climate scientists have given me an even better sense of what we know, and don't know, about climate," writes Koonin. [emphasis added]

In other words, once he got away from the greenstremist hacks and started consulting with genuine scientists, he realized that he'd spent the preceding two years being a greenstremist hack.

And then he re-discovered science...:

However, Koonin adds, while humans can cause serious issues for the climate, "they are physically small in relation to the climate system as a whole," with additions to carbon dioxide to "directly shift the atmosphere's natural greenhouse effect by only 1% to 2%."

Other scientists have argued that the sun’s solar activity has a much greater impact on [planetary] temperatures that human activities.

....and facts....:

Meanwhile, while....Earth's average surface temperature has risen by 0.9 degree Fahrenheit over the last quarter of the 20th century, the increase has been much slower over the past sixteen years, while the human contribution to carbon dioxide has gone up by 25%.

"Yet the models famously fail to capture this slowing in the temperature rise," says Koonin. "Several dozen different explanations for this failure have been offered, with ocean variability most likely playing a major role. But the whole episode continues to highlight the limits of our modeling."

....and more facts:

Models that show Arctic ice melting over the past twenty years forget to note the almost equal growth of ice across Antarctica, which he says is “now at a record high.”

A prediction that the “lower atmosphere in the tropics will absorb much of the heat of the warming atmosphere” has not materialized.

The fact global sea levels in the first half of the twentieth century rose at almost the same rate as today.

Climate sensitivity— "that is, the warming induced by a hypothetical doubling of carbon-dioxide concentration," he says is "no different, and no more certain" than it was thirty years ago.

What would a true climatologist conclude from this observational knowledge and the risible inadequacy of "state of the art" climate theories and modeling?  That climatology is enormously more complex than global warming hoaxers want anybody to know; that it cannot be distilled down to the miniscule fraction of climatic influences that stem from the mere existence of modern human civilization; that we don't know jack bleep about climatology to be taking drastic, draconian governmental policy actions that will decimate civil and economic liberties and the global economy right along with it; and that, accordingly, greenstremists, being the "liberal left Marxist socialist commie bastards" they are, are both willing and determined to force human civilization to regress centuries to a medieval level of squalor, poverty, filth, disease, pestilence, and primitivism so as to finally and permanently rule the planet with an iron fist.  A condition you can count on them never accepting for or imposing on themselves.

It almost sounds like a Global Climatic....Caliphate, come to think of it.

No wonder the Global Left and the Global Jihad get along so well.