Hi - one last book from my April 2022 reading list.
Unsettled by Steven Koonin
Technically speaking, I thought this was among the best books I've read so far in 2022. (Yes, I'll address the qualifier.) Unsettled promises to detail the shortcomings in the communication of climate science, and Koonin has a long list of credentials which qualify him for the task. On the whole, I think the book keeps its promise. Koonin makes his argument across a wide range of examples, pointing out common sense details (such as the way percentages can be manipulated based on reading temperature using C or F units) in addition to raising more nuanced questions that may escape the average reader (such as the replication challenge, where current climate models fail to "predict" the past using retroactive inputs). He returns time and again to the idea that science should inform rather than persuade which, by the end of Unsettled, turns out to be a quite compelling conclusion based on his recap of how the information has been presented to the public.
I was pleasantly surprised with Koonin's recommendations regarding the best courses of action. His observation that reducing emissions works best through conservation rather than efficiency, for example, or his conviction that addressing global poverty will alleviate some of the underlying pressures on climate change are the types of simple recommendations that I feel get lost whenever I hear commentary on this topic. The WHO (at the time of writing) points to indoor air pollution in poor countries as the most serious environmental issue in the world, but being distracted by the headlines I have no idea what rich countries are doing about it. I also have no idea how the forty percent of humanity without adequate access to energy will be involved in the solutions to the climate crisis, or if they would consider the solutions adopted by rich nations as adequate responses to their specific concerns. The idea that we need to preserve poverty to save the planet seems to me, for the lack of a better word, unsettling.
So, then, the qualifier. I think my experience predisposes me to see Koonin's point through a strictly technical perspective. I routinely interact with others in the context of informing with data, these colleagues or partners generally well-versed in the original analysis, but I rarely find that their summaries and conclusions maintain the same level of rigor that went into the analysis. The end result is something I'm sure Koonin would relate to - the quality of information that reaches the audience is often a step or two lower than the quality of the original analysis. But what is the point, so to speak, about this point, particularly in the context of a climate crisis? A crisis usually requires action, but in this specific example it's the lack of action that is becoming its own crisis - when so many in power have been unresponsive for so long, there is a growing case for persuasion rather than informing. In the context of climate change, Unsettled reads as an aside to determine whether the data meets a certain standard of scientific rigor, but to me an aside feels beside the point.
Is it necessary to rearrange the deck chairs when so many are panicking that the ship is sinking? It may not be the moment to get lost in the precision of exactly how the ship is taking on the rising sea. I am sympathetic to the importance of maintaining scientific rigor but I'm willing to deal with that issue after we get ashore safely. It seems to me that we know what we need to know about climate change, and by this I mean we know the big things which should set our direction, but despite knowing these things it still feels a bit directionless at the moment. Why wait for the Arctic to flood the Charles before we acknowledge that some things need to change? There are things big enough to work on regardless of the details in the science.
I am perhaps the least qualified person around to make such a point, but I don't feel unqualified when I say that a smokestack spewing black clouds into the air should be banned on the account of raw ugliness. Regardless of whether I thought Unsettled was well-written, I won't lose any sleep worrying about scientific standards when society remains tethered to a fossil fuel industry that enriches a small handful while nearly one-tenth of humanity remains in extreme poverty. I'll accept that the data is not always as conclusive as it has been presented, but this doesn't really change my main concern. My main concern remains that there are some major problems which need to be resolved, these problems requiring resolution whether they can be tied conclusively to the climate science or not, and books like Unsettled give certain people excuses, via technicalities, to dismiss the urgency of how these problems should be solved regardless of whether you think they have any relationship to the climate crisis or not.
