An Obama-era physicist is pushing back on long-standing claims that human activity is causing harmful changes to global weather patterns and other phenomena, insisting that the data simply don’t bear out those assertions.
In an interview on Fox Nation’s “Tucker Carlson Today,” Dr. Steve Koonin, who served as undersecretary of Energy for Science from 2009-2011 and is currently the director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University, said the U.S. media and political leaders have routinely engaged in manipulating data on climate in order to advance a political agenda.
The notion that human activity is causing more floods, droughts, and other weather events “is a fiction of the media and the politicians who would like to promote that notion,” Koonin told the host during an interview that was posted to the streaming service this week.
The MIT-educated scholar went on to discuss his findings which he published in a recently released book, “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.”
(Video: Fox News)
“When you look at the actual data, and what I’ve written in the book is a summary of the data and the official science, as written by the IPC, the UN, and the U.S. government, there are no detectable human influences on hurricanes over almost a century,” Koonin said.
“The heatwaves in the U.S. are no more common today than they were in 1900, and the warmest temperatures have not gone up in the last 60 years,” the scientist continued.
He did say that sea levels are, indeed, rising, but only “at the grand level of a foot a century,” adding that levels “are rising the same if you go back 60 years ago.”
“So there’s a lot of natural variability in the system, and it’s very difficult to untangle or discern human effects in extreme weather,” he added.
Later, Koonin responded to a video clip of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg claiming that several weather patterns are being caused by Americans who travel using fossil fuel-powered vehicles.
In response, the scientist noted that he is reminded of “a line from ‘The Princess Bride’ movie” when he hears people warn of the “existential threat” caused by climate change. Referencing a character’s repeated use of the word “inconceivable,” Koonin went on to note that another character replied, “You keep using that word — I don’t think it means what you think it means.”
“I don’t think the science says what Secretary Pete says it means, in fact, I can guarantee you, he’s never read the science,” Koonin said.
The physicist may have been referencing recent comments by the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., in which he claimed that any decisions about infrastructure would be tied to the climate change theory.
“The truth is that every infrastructure decision is, already inevitably, a climate decision as well,” Buttigieg said during a Climate Summit in April.
Koonin ticked off a list of Democratic officials and political leaders, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, Biden ‘climate czar’ John Kerry, and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who he says have also “never read the science.”
“Because you need to be a scientist in order to do that,” he noted. “And, in fact, when you read it, there’s very little in terms of extreme weather that’s changed over the last many decades.”
Carlson responded by noting that the “claim” that extreme weather events have dramatically increased in recent years is “ubiquitous.”
“Of course, it is,” Koonin replied, as Carlson proceeded to ask him why that is the case.
“That’s part of the corruption of climate communications that’s taken place,” he said, going on to suggest that hard data does not show any substantial weather pattern alterations but that information is nonetheless suppressed in favor of pushing the human-caused weather event narrative.
“It’s just wrong,” he said of the narrative. “It’s just wrong. We’ve seen no national change in the incidents of floods or droughts.
“Yes, there are certain regions that have gotten drier and other regions that have gotten wetter, but overall, no more variation than what we’ve seen naturally,” he added.
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Jon is a staff writer for BizPac Review with 30 years' worth of reporting experience, as well as an author and U.S. Army veteran. He has a BA in political science from Ashford University and an MA in national security studies/intelligence analysis from American Military University.
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