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Steven Koonin is an American theoretical physicist, a former professor and provost at Caltech, a former chief scientist at BP, and served as Under Secretary for Science in the United States Department of Energy under President Barack Obama. He has become one of the most important voices arguing for a more careful, evidence-based reading of climate risk.

According to Koonin, global temperatures have risen by about 1.5°C over the past 120 years. Over the same period, human life expectancy has risen by roughly 50 years. The global economy is around 20 times larger. Deaths from climate-related disasters have fallen by about 95% over the past century-and-a-bit.

The world has therefore warmed but human beings have become vastly richer, safer, healthier, and more resilient. Growth, technology, infrastructure, energy, science, and innovation have improved the circumstances of ordinary people on a scale unmatched in human history.

Looking to what happens next, Koonin says climate models disagree sharply, by a factor of roughly three. The most extreme predictions, however, have often run ahead of observed trends and do not match observed data.

More realistic models suggest warming of no more than 2°C by 2100. This is pretty much on a par with what occurred over the past 100 years, a period that saw humanity become dramatically better off.

Koonin warns, however, that the extreme models are frequently the ones featured most prominently in media coverage, campaign messaging, and in political speeches. The public is thereby given a distorted picture of the risk. Worst-case scenarios are presented as the likely future. Extreme assumptions, uncertainty, and pessimistic modelling are combined, while more moderate estimates receive little attention.

The costs, especially to people living in Western societies, is vast (non-Western governments are immune to the hysteria and take pragmatic energy policy decisions). In response to the fear and hysteria, Western governments have worked to restrict investment, energy production, and industry in the name of climate policy and the pursuit of the net-zero agenda. Koonin’s stand-out point is that for many Western policy makers energy has been treated as a risk to be suppressed rather than an asset to be developed.

The fiscal cost runs into hundreds of billions, often with little measurable effect on the climate curve, incomes and living standards are artificially capped, and money that could have gone into stronger infrastructure, more reliable energy systems, and economic growth ends up being diverted to projects that don’t only fail to produce returns but actually end up retarding social and economic progress.