READ THIS BOOK BY A FORMER OBAMA OFFICIAL AND THEN FORGET CLIMATE PANIC.

The floods of catastrophic projections and raging wildfires of extreme policy initiatives must, at some point in the evolution of humankind, come to an end. Not today, that’s certain, as U.S. President Joe Biden’s virtual climate summit gives global politicians a platform to spread additional fear and even more extreme policies to rid the world of carbon emissions.

Biden lit the latest wildfire in his opening statement: “This is a moral imperative. An economic imperative. A moment of peril, but also a moment of extraordinary possibilities.” To fight the peril, Biden vowed to cut U.S. carbon emissions to between 50 and 52 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau joined the escalation campaign with a new, radical plan to cut Canada’s carbons emissions to 40 to 45 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, the aim being to hit the Paris Agreement’s net-zero emissions target by 2050.

To hype these plans, Biden and Trudeau assert that such man-made calamities as floods and fires are on the rise, with greater devastation to come. The latest Liberal budget talks about “devastating deluges” hitting Canada along with “more frequent and more severe” wildfires.

None of this is true in Canada and a new, devastating critique of climate science, politics and policy suggests the alarmist claims about floods and fires are open to serious question around the world. So, too, is most of the official alarmism that surrounds global climate policy-making. In a new climate book, Unsettled: What climate science tells us, what it doesn’t, and why it matters, U.S. physicist Steven E. Koonin demolishes most of the foundations for today’s global preoccupation with the idea that carbon-driven climate is an existential threat to humankind.

Also cut down by Koonin are the proposals floating around the Biden summit that aim to reconstruct the world economy around the speculative idea that fossil fuels can be replaced. As the University of Ottawa’s Ian Clark noted on this page the other day, “Net-zero won’t cure the climate but it may kill Canada.”

Koonin, a former undersecretary for science under the Obama administration in the U.S. department of energy, joins other authors to challenge the “broken science” of climate change. Bjorn Lomborg’s False Alarm — How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet, takes on many of the same issues.

Taken together, Unsettled and False Alarm have the power potential to at least begin to slow — and perhaps even reverse — the relentless onslaught of extremist claims and policies.

In Unsettled, Koonin moves systematically and coherently through the rocky origins of what he calls “The Science.” The Science is Koonin’s name for the official accepted consensus science as it is promoted by activists and scientists who seem to believe that the message of impending disaster is more important than the actual science. Koonin cites the well-known line from Timothy Wirth, president of the UN Foundation. “We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.”

The Science, as Koonin says, is unsettled, a point he scores time and again as he describes the uncertainties and complexities — and the often sheer improbabilities — of computer-driven climate models. With pointed graphs Koonin moves in clear and understandable prose through some of the toughest aspects of climate science, how the official UN climate models are flawed and limited in scope — a fact known to many but ignored in the ongoing drive to push policy over science.

One aspect of Koonin’s overview should have consequences to the media and journalists, who appear in Unsettled like bands of wild dogs chasing The Science while ignoring — perhaps deliberately and consciously — the underlying facts and uncertainties.

Koonin gets into this subject in a chapter titled “Who broke ‘The Science’ and Why.” Can it really be, he asks, “that the multiplicity of stakeholders in climate matters — scientists, scientific institutions, activists and NGOS, the media, politicians — are all contributing to misinformation in the service of persuasion?”

The answer is yes, with journalists at the top of the list. “As I interact with journalists,” writes Koonin, “I realize that, for some, ‘climate change’ has become a cause and a mission — to save the world from destruction by humans — so that packing alarm into whatever the story is becomes the ‘right’ thing to do, even an obligation.” This tendency, he adds, “has been compounded by the rise of a new job category: ‘climate reporters.’ Their mission is largely predetermined; if they don’t have a narrative of doom to report, they won’t get into the paper (whether digital or print) or on the air.”

Looking forward, Koonin believes that climate change is a reality, global temperatures have risen one degree Celsius over the past century and could rise another degree by 2100. Instead of aiming to tear down the carbon economy that billions of the world’s people will increasingly depend on, the real option is to look at adaptation.

First, though, we need to fix the broken science through honest debate. Then comes the realization that net zero global emissions in 30 or 50 years is unrealistic. And finally there is adaptation. Humankind has adapted to innumerable climate and natural — not to mention unnatural — challenges over centuries. Koonin’s message: We can do it again without overthrowing the economic order.

FORMER OBAMA AIDE BLASTS POLITICIANS, MEDIA AND ‘BROKEN SCIENCE.’