Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.

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Steven Koonin, an Undersecretary for Science in the Obama Administration has produced a book titled Unsettled that begs for reason on climate.

Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, Why It Doesn’t and Why It Matters is a wonderful book, not only for its content, but also because of who wrote it. The author is Steven E. Koonin, a theoretical physicist, director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University and professor in the Department of Civil and Urban Engineering at NYU, served as Undersecretary for Science in the Obama Administration. Obama and friends, of course, have hyped the global warming cause to the nth degree but Koonin, in Unsettled, presents quite a different picture.

I wasn’t sure I’d like this book after quickly leafing through it and seeing it ended with a meaningless quote from Joe Biden, but it turns out this was a throwaway line because, once you’ve read Unsettled you know Koonin has had it with politicians shamelessly exploiting global warming and thereby undermining real science. It’s almost a cry of repentance for having served a cause to which he can no longer, in good conscience, lend a hand unless it rejects “The Science” for science.

Unsettled is methodically written and easily grasped. Koonin thoroughly and completely dispenses with the nonsense put out by lazy media hacks and slimy pols looking to ride an issue to more power. He points out with stark facts and scientific examination that we aren’t experiencing particularly weird weather and weather isn’t climate anyway. He blows away arguments thrown out by climate cultists about rising sea levels. He demolishes apocalyptic forecasts, explains away the hype and shows there is no global warming crisis that excuses the destruction of science he is witnessing by those mouthing the word.

Unsettled is an intended calming of the storm, so we can all get back to this real science. He blasts those who use terms such as “climate denier” to pretend science has settled an issue so obviously not settled and takes the reader back to the truth that no science is ever completely settled. He comes from the left side of the world but realizes something has gone terribly wrong in the way this issue of global warming has been handled. Perhaps it’s no coincidence you won’t find Al Gore in the index or NRDC but once and then to criticize it for always using the issue to appeal for money.

This is interesting because Unsettled only addresses money peripherally and that is my one significant criticism of the book. Koonin adroitly deals with the incentives of politicians, media folks and even science itself to fear-monger, but he only dances softly and gently around the matter of money. He admits trillions will be spent based on the findings of the faulty research and horrible models he sees being used, but he never gets at the fact it’s the money that really drives everything; the enormous opportunity to scam the government into fixing more green eggs for breakfast.

What we need from Koonin and others like him or perhaps an intrepid investigative reporter or a somewhat less-extremist Michael Moore type, is a deep dive into how ratepayers and taxpayers are being pillaged by corporatists using global warming excuses that Kooning exposes in Unsettled. If that doesn’t happen, excellent Koonin’s work will have been in vain because those committed to the cause will only persist in their belief and call him, too, a climate denier, even though he comes from their world politically.

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