Climate-consensus advocates ignore a whopper of a false-balance proposal
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8217
Protesters rally at the People’s Climate March in Washington, DC on 29 April.
Becker1999, CC BY 2.0
Controversy erupted across the media when climate-scoffing, Pulitzer Prize–holding WSJ columnist Bret Stephens moved to the New York Times. There he faces hostile readers and critics, including climate experts. It’s a classic case of the media grappling with the issue of false balance—how the objective truths uncovered by scientific investigation square with the he-said, she-said approach of political reporting. He and the world are hearing their criticisms—sometimes all but shouted—even though nonscientist Stephens has begun moderating his climate mockery.
Yet at the same time, climate-consensus advocates have all but ignored the mother of all false-balance proposals: a call to subordinate the peer-review approach of evaluating climate change in favor of an undoubtedly political process. The scheme comes from physicist and national science leader Steven Koonin, writing on the Wall Street Journal opinion page not against a hostile audience, but for a receptive and influential one.
Stephens stirs the pot
Stephens challenged consensus advocates with his very first Times column , which appeared on 29 April under the headline “Climate of complete certainty.” He framed his argument with an analogy reviled by climate experts as false. The failed Hillary Clinton campaign’s “limitless faith in the power of models and algorithms to minimize uncertainty and all but predict the future,” he proposed, constitutes a “cautionary tale” for climate science with its inherent uncertainties.
“The science is settled,” he affirmed, and the “threat is clear.” Those assertions seemed to herald a new Stephens—except that the threat turned out not so clear for Stephens after all. Attempting to build on the reviled analogy, he wrote:
Anyone who has read the 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change knows that, while the modest (0.85 degrees Celsius, or about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the earth since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities. That’s especially true of the sophisticated but fallible models and simulations by which scientists attempt to peer into the climate future. To say this isn’t to deny science. It’s to acknowledge it honestly.
On 1 May, a correction appeared beneath the online copy of the column. Stephens’s original column had said that only the Northern Hemisphere, not the whole planet, had warmed by 0.85 °C.
Another passage from Stephens’s debut Times column has drawn harsh scrutiny:
Claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong. Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions. Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.
Construing the Stephens controversy as a question of free expression of opinion, many in the media have urged the world to let Stephens speak. “The goal wasn’t to resolve the finer points of atmospheric physics,” wrote Times public editor Liz Spayd, “but to get an answer to a simple question: Do you actually want a diversity of views on the Opinion pages, and if so, what’s the matter with Bret Stephens?” Even Jonah Goldberg at the consensus-mocking National Review argued for giving a break to a guy with an opinion: “When someone says that he is not denying climate change and concedes that it’s real, that is ‘classic climate change denialism’? Huh. What words do we have left for people who call the whole thing a hoax?”
“Uncertainty cuts both ways”
In fact, many did charge denialism, often angrily, and often with their own haziness about the difference between fact and opinion. Slate science editor Susan Matthews, while charging denialism , said that technically, Stephens got no facts wrong. But in an open letter to the Times, more than 100 climate experts, after affirming the legitimacy of “well-informed opinions when it comes to societal responses to climate change,” asserted that “it must be made clear that there are facts that are not subject to opinion.” They were condemning false balance without naming it.
Their letter contradicted Stephens concerning the amount of global warming and criticized the Times concerning the posted correction. The letter called the term modest “inaccurate and misleading” to describe the amount of warming, and it quantified the criticism. It corrected Stephens’s statements about certainties, uncertainties, and scientists’ reporting of uncertainties. It condemned what it called Stephens’s “false accusation that scientists claim total certainty regarding the rate of warming.”
Echoing other critics, the open letter added this:
Stephens suggests that risk management should only be guided by the possibility that warming and its impacts could be less than the best estimate, and not the possibility that it could be more. This cherry picking presents only one side of the range of uncertainties. But uncertainty cuts both ways, and reasonable risk management demands looking at both.
That point echoes a criticism from Andrew Revkin, the longtime climate-science observer formerly of the Times, now at ProPublica. He acknowledged the progress in Stephens’s acceptance of climate science, and he stipulated that “many of the most consequential aspects of climate change remain shrouded in deep uncertainty.” He even named a few. But he condemned what he called the “fool’s errand” of “using uncertainty as an excuse to pursue nothing beyond more debate.”
A dangerous proposition
In his nearly unexamined proposal, Koonin embraces the opportunity to pursue more debate.
Consider—as the consensus-scoffing WSJ editors have obviously done—Koonin’s particular stature as a national science leader, going back to his Caltech decades as a professor of theoretical physics and provost. In 1989 he spoke for the national physics community in the organized debunking of cold fusion. Later he served as BP’s chief scientist, focusing on renewable and low-carbon energy. He became an undersecretary of energy for science during President Obama’s first term, and he now directs New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress. He’s a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the JASON group of scientists who advise the federal government.
In 2014, nonclimatologist Koonin rose as well to a certain unique prominence in the climate-science realm. He chaired an American Physical Society workshop to review the society’s formal public statement on climate change, which famously included the word incontrovertible in this eight-word-long paragraph: “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.” Yet in September that year, he published a long WSJ commentary headlined “Climate science is not settled.” In the paper version, the editors used italics to emphasize the word not. The national science leader had become a climate heretic.
The WSJ editors plainly knew then, and know now, what Koonin’s particular stature means in the climate wars. They timed that 2014 op-ed to appear one day before hundreds of thousands of climate protesters marched in New York City—and three days before the United Nations climate summit that had inspired the march and others worldwide. The climate expert Raymond T. Pierrehumbert observed that the WSJ evidently had “high hopes for promoting Koonin as a prominent new voice for inaction.”
This spring, the WSJ timed another Koonin commentary to appear the day before the March for Science—not necessarily to promote inaction directly, but to present his whale of a false-balance proposal. In the column, Koonin called for the same kind of formal review for climate change as that used for national security matters. Notably more than in the Stephens case, his inherent, and inherently volatile, false-balance presumption was that the climate consensus itself remains extensively debatable.
Koonin called his proposed review process “very different and more rigorous than traditional peer review”—that is, than the very process that established the consensus. He asserted that the “public is largely unaware of the intense debates within climate science”—for example, when “researchers challenge one another” in striving “to separate human impacts from the climate’s natural variability.” The “inherent tension of a professional adversarial process,” he promised, “would enhance public interest, offering many opportunities to show laymen how science actually works.” He also wrote:
We scientists must better portray not only our certainties but also our uncertainties, and even things we may never know. Not doing so is an advisory malpractice that usurps society’s right to make choices fully informed by risk, economics and values. Moving from oracular consensus statements to an open adversarial process would shine much-needed light on the scientific debates.
To shine a particular shade of light, the WSJ also posted online a pair of under-four-minute video interviews with Koonin. The editors captioned one of them “How government twists climate statistics: Former Energy Department undersecretary Steven Koonin on how bureaucrats spin scientific data.” Koonin accused NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of failing to meet the public-truth standard that he himself learned from three famous physics mentors: Hans Bethe, Sidney Drell, and Richard Garwin. He charged that press officers and senior science administrators have been “misleading” about climate data, for instance by scanting the scientific reality that “there’s no detectable long-term trend in hurricanes.” He insinuated that NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt defends spin.
The editors called the other short interview “The climate change debates you never hear about: Former Energy Department undersecretary Steven Koonin on scientific self-censorship.” Koonin reported that in climate science, the government has a point of view, and it’s “very difficult to get into the club so to speak if you’re a contrarian…. If you speak up, you can be in big trouble.” He charged that in the typical “popular summary” of work published in Science and Nature, “things get suppressed.” When asked to name “courageous” scientists who have decided “the science isn’t settled, I’m not going to stand for that, let’s have a real public debate,” he named Richard Lindzen, Judith Curry, and Freeman Dyson, and pointed out that they are all beyond career worries about what they say.
On the Web, plenty of criticism has appeared about Stephens and his debut Times column. It’s hard, though, to find criticism of Koonin’s renewed WSJ campaign to call scientists’ climate consensus into question. Perhaps critics should redirect some of their fire. In a 4 May Axios report that was echoed quickly by Newsmax, Koonin said that his proposal has “found some resonance” in the Trump administration, where “people seem to be interested.”
Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today‘s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.