The blurb on the flap confirms this with its opening sentence: “When it comes to climate change, the media, politicians, and other prominent voices have declared that ‘the science is settled.’”Ī bit of fact checking by the author or publisher would have shown that this claim is not true. Koonin’s title hints at a logical fallacy called the “strawman” argument. Unfortunately, “Unsettled” is a book you can accurately judge by its cover.

Sign up for our weekly email newsletter and never miss a story. The climate is changing, and our journalists are here to help you make sense of it. Most of the technical mistakes and misrepresentations in “Unsettled” may simply be attributable to Koonin’s trust of those advisors and lack of rigorous independent verification. The three contrarians had a long and well-documented history of engaging in ad hominem attacks on mainstream climate scientists and misrepresenting their work. The position sometimes referred to as “doomism” (the belief that the worst-case is inevitable and it is too late to prevent it) was not represented. He completely ignored another, equally unfounded, contrary view. The lack of proportionate representation amplified the contrary opinions that he heard, and only in one direction. In an apparent quest for fairness when he led a committee of the American Physical Society (one of my professional organizations) to assess its statement on climate change, he recruited three scientists to represent the 97% consensus, and three contrarians, presumably to speak for the other 3%. He’s smart and I like him, so I’m inclined to give his book a chance.īut smart scientists aren’t always right, and nice guys are still prone to biases – especially if they listen to the wrong people. But I’ve known the author of “Unsettled” since I took his quantum mechanics course as a Ph.D.

I would normally ignore a book by a non-climate scientist promising “the truth about climate science that you aren’t getting elsewhere.” Such language is a red flag.

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