Steve Koonin publishes another high-visibility climate op-ed
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8148
In September 2014, the subhead on Steven E. Koonin’s long, controversial Wall Street Journal commentary “Climate science is not settled ” declared, “We are very far from the knowledge needed to make good climate policy.” Now Koonin’s 4 November New York Times op-ed “The tough realities of the Paris climate talks ” prescribes a planetwide redirection of thinking about climate policy. He advocates shifting from mitigation toward adaptation.
Concerning mitigation, Koonin argues that “scientific realities make emissions reductions a sluggish lever for constraining human influences on the climate” while “societal realities conspire to make emissions reductions themselves difficult.” These realities, he writes, “compound to make stabilization of the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, let alone its reduction, a distant prospect.” He calls for “a deeper analysis and more prominent discussion of the nature, effectiveness, timing and costs of various adaptation strategies.”
The Times identifies Koonin as “director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University” and as a former “under secretary for science in the Energy Department from 2009 to 2011" who previously “was chief scientist for BP, where he worked on renewable and low-carbon technologies.” The Times could well have added that Koonin goes back a long way as a national physics leader. In 1989 he figured prominently in the science establishment’s debunking of the claim that “cold fusion” had been discovered.
Koonin’s new op-ed cites “two sobering scientific realities that will weaken the effectiveness of even the most ambitious emissions reduction plans.”
The first is that carbon dioxide emissions “accumulate in the atmosphere and remain there for centuries as they are slowly absorbed by plants and the oceans,” which means that “modest reductions in emissions will only delay the rise in atmospheric concentration but will not prevent it.”
Koonin’s second “sobering scientific reality” is that small carbon dioxide reductions “will have progressively less influence on the climate as the atmospheric concentration increases.” He calls this a “slow logarithmic dependence” with the following “practical implication": “Eliminating a ton of emissions in the middle of the 21st century will exert only half of the cooling influence that it would have had in the middle of the 20th century.”
He also summarizes “societal realities” that make emission reduction hard: burgeoning energy demand, the inevitably continued reliance on fossil fuels, the difficulty of changing a complex energy infrastructure, and limits to the effectiveness of energy-efficiency improvements.
Koonin mentions “adaptation measures such as raising the height of sea walls or shifting to drought-resistant crops.” He continues:
Fortunately, adaptation is on the table in Paris to complement emissions reductions.
Adaptation can be effective. Humans today live in climates ranging from the tropics to the Arctic and have adapted through many climate changes, including the Little Ice Age about 400 years ago.
Adaptation is also indifferent to whether the climate change is natural or human-induced; it can be proportional, depending upon how much or how quickly the climate changes; and it can be politically easier to accomplish because it does not require a global consensus and has demonstrable local and immediate effects. Adaptation will no doubt be more difficult if the climate changes rapidly (as it has done naturally in the past), and, like emissions reductions, it will induce inequalities, as the rich can adapt more easily than the poor. Adapting ecosystems to a changing climate will require a more careful monitoring and deeper understanding of the natural world than we have today.
Koonin added 10 technical footnotes to the full copy of his op-ed that appears at climatologist Judith Curry’s website.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.