Steven Koonin loves to say wrong things about climate change. Why wouldn’t he!? It’s gotten him press, book sales, and a job at the polluter-funded American Enterprise Institute to supplement his NYU paycheck. (Pity the students who take his classes!)
He said tons of wrong things on Joe Rogan’s podcast recently, and a real scientist had to go on and clean up the mess. He said wrong things for fracker-funded PragerU, and fact-checkers rated his claims about Greenland’s ice melt as “mostly false.”
Now he’s back at it, going on about Greenland’s ice melt in a WSJ op-ed. Koonin’s headline claimed that Greenland’s melting ice, on track to submerge coastlines and turn every city from London to New York to Miami to Hong Kong into Atlantis and entirely submerge every small island nation like St. Lucia, is “no cause for climate-change panic.” That’s because, per the subheadline, “the annual loss has been decreasing in the past decade even as the globe continues to warm.” Oh?
Koonin attempts to dispute the science of Greenland’s ice melt, and uses a graph that shows annual ice loss from 1900 to 2021. There are up and down swings, until 1970, where it dips hard until 1980, and begins to climb back through the ‘90s, and then spikes from 50 gigatons of ice loss a year in 2000, to 250 gigatons of ice lost in 2010, the highest on the chart. Then it held out at that record ice-loss pace for a few years, before dropping down to “just” 200 gigatons of ice melt in 2020.
This, according to Koonin, is good news, because “the annual loss of ice has been decreasing in the past decade even as the globe continues to warm.” He then says that natural cycles have been important before, and that maybe we’ll see a continuation of the slowing in the future, which “would be inconsistent with the IPCC’s projection and wouldn’t at all support the media’s exaggerations.”
But of course climate change isn’t defined by short-term trends over just a decade. Instead, “climate unfolds over decades,” in contrast to “much climate reporting today [that] highlights short-term changes when they fit the narrative… but then ignores or plays down changes when they don’t, often dismissing them as ‘just weather.’”
“Although short-term changes might be deemed news,” those changes “need to be considered in a many-decade context.”
The person who wrote those lines, directly debunking how Steven Koonin took a few years of regression to the mean after a record decades-long spike in order to misleadingly use short-term changes to make news?
Steven Koonin! In the conclusion of his op-ed! Directly after doing the very thing he calls out!
It’s incredible, really, the level of obliviousness Koonin has apparently reached, to be able to claim a few years of not-quite-record ice loss after a few years of record ice loss after decades of ice loss acceleration, and then turn around and accuse others of cherry-picking short-term changes! It's also pretty insulting to the Journal's readers.
What’s worse? Koonin very much knows that focusing on just a decade out of a larger trend is shoddy science, as just days later, he responded to a thorough rebuttal of his claims by saying that “focusing on what happened in the last decade is a characteristic tactic of people who want to disguise what the real data are.”
Unlike most of his other claims on climate, that is something we can undoubtedly say Koonin got right.
