Unsettled: The climate establishment runs scared

Steven Koonin’s credentials are impeccable. That’s what makes him dangerous.

The climate science establishment is fond of lecturing us about the dangers of rising temperatures. With the return of Donald Trump as U.S. President, however, it is rising scrutiny—not rising heat—that has them most alarmed.
In May, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Gold Standard Science,” requiring federally funded agencies to ensure their work is accountable, reproducible, and subject to open debate. It was unremarkable in tone, bordering on mundane. Yet the reaction was swift and bitter.

The clause insisting that scientists consider dissenting views and protect employees from retaliation for expressing them cut across the grain. If applied to almost any other field of government-funded research, it would have passed unnoticed. But in the domain of climate science, where agreeing with the so-called consensus is a condition of entry, it was received as heresy.

The New York Times, which has followed these developments with increasing concern, reported this week that the Department of Energy had hired three scientists “well-known for their rejection of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change.” The three were named as physicist Steven E. Koonin, atmospheric scientist John Christy, and meteorologist Roy Spencer.

Koonin, in particular, has been a persistent irritant to the climate establishment, not least because of his credentials. He served as Under Secretary for Science in the Obama administration, was chief scientist at BP, and before that, provost at Caltech. In 1985, he co-authored one of the first textbooks on computational physics, making him unusually well qualified to assess the strengths and limitations of climate models.

His 2021 book, Unsettled, drew sharp criticism for stating what many others in the field privately acknowledge: that climate modelling remains too immature to offer confident forecasts. “We don’t understand features of the climate to anywhere near the level of specificity required,” he wrote. Greater processing power, he argued, had only increased the range of uncertainty.

Koonin’s challenge to the mainstream began in 2014 when he convened a workshop of leading climate scientists and physicists to stress-test the prevailing assumptions. He came away unsettled. The distinction between human influences and natural variation was far from clear. Models often contradicted one another. And the technical sections of IPCC reports were routinely oversimplified or misrepresented by press releases and summaries.

“In short,” he wrote, “the science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what effect our actions will have upon it.”

These are not reckless claims. They are plainly stated and extensively sourced. What is striking is not the volume of rebuttal but the absence of any serious attempt to refute them. Koonin has been the target of denunciation, not debate.

That in itself tells us something. Exposing the flaws in an argument is the surest way to demonstrate the strength of one’s own. Yet the defenders of consensus seem oddly reluctant to try. Instead, they have surrounded themselves with a rhetorical fortress in which disagreement is cast as denial, and scepticism is treated as a threat.

Criticism of Koonin has been particularly fierce in Australia. Ian Lowe, emeritus professor at Griffith University, accused him of “feeding climate denial in Australia.” Lowe singled out News Corp and Sky News for giving him a platform, along with Fox News in the U.S. The logic is circular: those who challenge the consensus are said to mislead the public because the consensus is what the public must believe.

An invitation to Koonin to speak at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2021 prompted one climate scientist to resign in protest, accusing the lab of undermining science by entertaining views that would confuse the public. The complaint was not about errors in Koonin’s work, but the fact of its being heard at all.

All this might be less troubling if climate policy were a purely academic concern. But the policies it justifies are costly, coercive, and far-reaching. Hence White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers’ statement to the Washington Post last week: “Future generations should not be expected to forfeit the American Dream to foot the bill of ambiguous climate threats.”

The Trump administration’s main strategy has been to cut off the stream of funding. The U.S. National Climate Assessment, the flagship government report on global warming, has been quietly shelved. Hundreds of contributors found themselves without contracts, status, or support.

The Daily Wire reports that the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which oversees the assessment, had a budget of US$4.95 billion in 2025, yet listed just two full-time employees.

NASA’s climate research has also been trimmed. Michael Mann described the cuts as humiliating. “It debilitates our standing in the world community,” he said.

Zach Labe, formerly of NOAA, put it more bluntly: “Every day is a train wreck for climate science.”

Trump is unlikely to be able to shut down the global warming project entirely. Corporate, philanthropic, academic, and state government funding will ensure that the global warming industrial complex survives.

However, by engaging directly with the claims of climate science—rather than fighting a proxy war over energy policy—his administration has changed the terms of the debate.

That shift is being felt in Australia too. Scott Morrison’s embrace of the 2050 net-zero debate brought a welcome cooling of the rhetorical climate. The nuclear debate is important. Yet both serve to distract from the underlying question: is climate change so dangerous that it warrants radical, expensive, and disruptive intervention?

Trump’s progress should give Australia’s political leaders the courage to stop tiptoeing around the question. Before we discuss the mechanics of decarbonisation, we need an open debate about its justification.

Must we not weigh the risks of climate change, such as they are, against the risks to national and economic security posed by overreaction? Shouldn’t we expect the same transparency, contestability, and rigour in climate science that we demand in other areas of public policy?

The Trump administration, with the help of Koonin, is determined to decriminalise dissent so that the evidence can be judged on its merits. Its executive order doesn’t forbid climate action; it insists that action be justified.

If the science is truly settled, it should be able to withstand challenge. That its advocates recoil from frank discussion tells us almost everything we need to know.