I noticed Unsettled WHAT CLIMATE SCIENCE TELLS US, WHAT IT DOESN’T, AND WHY IT MATTERS by Steven E. Koonin soon after I finished reading The Physics of Climate Change by Lawrence Krauss. I am often interested in more than one point of view on a matter and I sometimes seek out contrary opinions. From the provocative title, Unsettled, I knew that this book would be different, perhaps worth reading.
I was not familiar with Koonin so I looked at his biography. He is a distinguished scientist and university professor. He served as Undersecretary for Science in the US Department of Energy under President Obama, indicating views acceptable to the left. For five years Koonin worked as chief scientist for BP, a major oil company, indicating views acceptable to the right.
In his Introduction, Koonin outlines his theme.
We’re all supposed to know what “The Science” says. “The Science,” we’re told, is settled. How many times have you heard it? … Well . . . not quite.
...facts you haven’t heard.
Humans have had no detectable impact on hurricanes over the past century.
Greenland’s ice sheet isn’t shrinking any more rapidly today than it was eighty years ago.
The net economic impact of human-induced climate change will be minimal through at least the end of this century.
Why haven’t you heard these facts before? Why don’t they line up with the narrative—now almost a meme—that we’ve already broken the climate and face certain doom unless we change our ways?
In his Introduction, Koonin also gives us his conclusion.
In short, 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 on it.
The introduction also gives a useful outline of the content of each chapter in this book which are organized in two parts.
Part I begins by clarifying the important questions society asks of climate science—how the climate has changed, how it will change in the future, and what the impact of those changes will be. It also offers some basics about the official assessment reports that we look to for answers to those questions.
In the introduction to Part 1, Koonin makes a point that has increasingly influenced my thinking on many matters.
UNDERSTANDING UNCERTAINTIES… Every measurement of the physical world has an associated uncertainty...
However, I am skeptical of his conclusion, perhaps not justified by his premises..
Projections of future climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for the purpose.
Chapter 1... explains both the importance and challenges of obtaining quality observations of the earth’s climate... over many decades; it also reviews some of the indications of a warming globe and puts them in geological context.
Chapter 1 begins with the challenges of measuring the surface temperature of the earth. Koonin presents data confirming rising temperatures since 1850. He expands the time scale to put this data into a wider context and indicates that assessment reports have “only low confidence that the global warming of the past thirty years has exceeded the range of reconstructed temperatures” in light of the past fourteen hundred years.
Examining cores from ice sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic yields data for a much wider time span, up to five hundred million years. In this graph, the past 170 years do not look alarming. Koonin notes periods of warming and cooling driven by slight changes in the earth’s orbit around the sun and the tilt of its axis.
Chapter 2 then turns to how the earth’s temperature arises in the first place—from a delicate balance between warming sunlight and cooling heat radiation.
Koonin describes what makes life on earth possible.
The technical term for this Goldilocks condition—where the planet is neither gaining nor losing energy and its temperature is steady—is “radiative equilibrium.”
Whether human activity is seriously upsetting equilibrium seems to be a key question. I needed to learn a new word, albedo, which means the amount of the sun’s radiation reflected back out into space, currently 30%. Precisely measuring albedo is important but no simple task.
Knowing the earth’s albedo (as averaged over the globe and daily and seasonal cycles), we can determine its equilibrium temperature by balancing the sunlight absorbed against the infrared cooling.
Koonin describes the Greenhouse effect. More than 99% of the earth’s atmosphere is nitrogen, oxygen and argon which allow heat to radiate back out to space. The rest of the atmosphere is composed of greenhouse gases - water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone - which trap heat. Koonin describes the importance of CO2.
CO2 currently accounts for about 7 percent of the atmosphere’s ability to intercept heat… Since 1750, the concentration has increased from 0.000280 (280 parts per million or ppm) to 0.000410 (410 ppm) in 2019, and it continues to go up 2.3 ppm every year. Although most of today’s CO2 is natural, there is no doubt that this rise is, and has been, due to human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels.
If you’ve followed this far, you might be puzzled by two things. First, how could changing fewer than three molecules out of 10,000, a 0.03 percent change, increase the atmosphere’s heat-intercepting ability by about thirty times that amount (1 percent)? And second, how could a mere 1 percent increase in heat-intercepting ability be such a big deal? carbon dioxide... That molecule intercepts some colors that water vapor misses, meaning a few molecules of CO2. can have a much bigger effect...
The IPCC’s climate models predict that doubling the CO2. concentration from preindustrial levels—causing the 1 percent change in heat intercepting we’ve discussed—would increase the average surface temperature by about 3ºC (5.5ºF).
But Koonin points out that…
The problem with human-caused carbon dioxide and the climate is that… there are other influences (forcings) on the climate, both human and natural, that can confuse the picture... methane… aerosols … volcanoes ...
Koonin concludes…
While the warming effects of CO2. and other greenhouse gases are known to within 20 percent, the uncertainty in the cooling influence of human-caused aerosols is much larger, making the total human-caused forcing uncertain by 50 percent…
The most important human influence on the climate is the growing concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2.) in the atmosphere, largely due to the burning of fossil fuels. This is the focus of Chapter 3—particularly, how the connection between CO2. emissions and concentration diminishes the prospect of even stabilizing growing human influences.
But here’s the key point: the connection between concentrations and emissions isn’t a simple one and, particularly for CO2, the complications of this relationship profoundly increase the challenge of reducing the concentration.
Koonin does not deny science.
I don’t know of any expert who disputes that the rise in CO2 concentration over the past 150 years is almost entirely due to human activities, since there are five independent lines of evidence supporting that conclusion.
He again puts the last 150 years in the context of the past 300 million years.
Only once in the geological past—the Permian period, 300 million years ago—have atmospheric CO2 levels been as low as they are today. Plant and animal life flourished abundantly during times when CO2 levels were five or ten times higher than today’s. But those were different plants and animals.
He points out a significant characteristic of carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide is the single human-caused greenhouse gas with the largest influence on the climate. But it is of greatest concern also because it persists in the atmosphere/surface cycle for a very long time. About 60 percent of any CO2 emitted today will remain in the atmosphere twenty years from now, between 30 and 55 percent will still be there after a century, and between 15 and 30 percent will remain after one thousand years.
Therefore…
...modest reductions in CO2 emissions would only slow the increase in concentration but not prevent it. Just to stabilize the CO2 concentration, and hence its warming influence, global emissions would have to vanish.
Because of the great uncertainties about the decades to come, instead of making precise predictions of future concentrations, the IPCC created a set of scenarios… These scenarios are not meant to be predictions, but rather are schematic descriptions of distinct, but plausible, future worlds.
Again, Koonin does not find these scenarios useful.
...knowing exactly how much warming would occur, when and where, what other changes there might be in the climate system, and how those changes might actually impact society requires much more sophisticated analysis.
Computer models of how the climate responds to human and natural influences are the subject of Chapter 4 … the results have become more divergent with each generation of models. In other words, as our models have become more elaborate, their descriptions of the future have become less certain.
Computer modeling is central to climate science… usefully describing the earth’s climate remains one of the most challenging scientific simulation problems there is.
All but the simplest computer models of the climate begin by covering the earth’s atmosphere with a three-dimensional grid, typically ten to twenty layers of grid boxes stacked above a surface grid of squares that are typically 100 km × 100 km (60 miles × 60 miles)... With the entire Earth covered this way, there are about one million grid boxes for the atmosphere and one hundred million grid boxes for the ocean… researchers must make “subgrid” assumptions to build a complete model… assumptions are necessary.
Comparing the results of computer runs with what we know about past climates (both the average and year-by-year variations) gives some sense of how good a model is.
...the greatest uncertainty in climate modeling stems from the treatment of clouds.
Even with the grid, the basic physics, the subgrid assumptions, and initialization in hand, we’re still not ready to generate a useful climate simulation. The last remaining step is to “tune” the model… sometimes modelers are tuning subgrid parameters in ways that aren’t based on their “knowledge” of the parameter, but rather are aimed at producing a desired result.
Most important are the near exact balance between solar heating and infrared cooling we discussed in Chapter 2, and what the surface temperature is, determined by how sunlight and heat flow through the atmosphere.
Koonin concludes…
...it is impossible—for both practical and fundamental reasons—to tune the dozens of parameters so that the model matches the far more numerous observed properties of the climate system. Not only does this cast doubt on whether the conclusions of the model can be trusted, it makes it clear that we don’t understand features of the climate to anywhere near the level of specificity required given the smallness of human influences.
...the assessment reports average results from an “ensemble” made up of a few dozen different models from research groups around the world… The implication is that the models generally agree. But that isn’t at all the case… model results differ dramatically both from each other and from observations.
One particularly jarring failure is that the simulated global average surface temperature (not the anomaly) varies among models by about 3ºC (5.6ºF), three times greater than the observed value of the twentieth-century warming they’re purporting to describe and explain.
One stunning problem is that the spread of the CMIP5 ensemble in the years after 1960 is larger than that of the models in CMIP3—in other words, the later generation of models is actually more uncertain than the earlier one.
...another equally serious issue is... that the ensembles fail to reproduce the strong warming observed from 1910 to 1940. On average, the models give a warming rate over that period of about half what was actually observed… They cannot tell us why the climate changed during those decades.
An analysis of 267 simulations run by twenty-nine different CMIP6 models created by nineteen modeling groups around the world shows that they do a very poor job of describing warming since 1950 and continue to underestimate the rate of warming in the early twentieth century.
The failure of even the latest models to warm rapidly enough in the early twentieth century suggests that it’s possible, even likely, that internal variability—the natural ebbs and flows of the climate system—has contributed significantly to the warming of recent decades.20 That the models can’t reproduce the past is a big red flag—it erodes confidence in their projections of future climates.
One of the reasons the climate sensitivity is so uncertain is that aerosols currently exert a cooling influence that partially offsets (or masks) the greenhouse gas warming… Because of this large but uncertain cooling by aerosols, a model with high sensitivities to both aerosols and greenhouse gases could describe the historical record about as well as one with much lower sensitivities.
Chapter 5 is the first of five chapters dealing with contradictions between the science and the prevailing notion that “humans have already broken the climate,” exploring areas where the facts and popular perception are at odds (and probing the source of those discrepancies).
...it has become de rigueur for the media, politicians, and even some scientists to implicate human influences as the cause of heat waves, droughts, floods, storms, and whatever else the public fears.
The bottom line is that the science says that most extreme weather events show no long-term trends that can be attributed to human influences on the climate… Yet the popular perception that extreme events are becoming more common and more severe remains.
In the US, which has the world’s most extensive and highest-quality weather data, record low temperatures have indeed become less common, but record daily high temperatures are no more frequent than they were a century ago.
Koonin concludes…
There have been some changes in temperature extremes across the contiguous United States. The annual number of high temperature records set shows no significant trend over the past century nor over the past forty years, but the annual number of record cold nights has declined since 1895, somewhat more rapidly in the past thirty years.
Chapter 6...explains why experts conclude that human influences haven’t caused any observable changes in hurricanes, and how assessment reports obscure or distort that finding.
Storms are becoming more common and more intense, and rising greenhouse gas emissions are going to make it all a lot worse. But the data and research literature are starkly at odds with this message. At the center of this confusion are the assessment reports, which present summary “spin” inconsistent with their own findings.
...you might expect to see a steady increase in hurricane activity as the sea surface has warmed. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple...
Koonin again explains the importance of the time scale used.
After analyzing hurricanes, Koonin presents data about tornados and comes to a similar conclusion.
The natural or human causes of the changes over the past decades remain a mystery.
In Chapter 7, I describe the modest changes seen in precipitation and related phenomena over the past century, discussing their significance and highlighting some points likely to surprise anyone who follows the news—for instance, that the global area burned by fires each year has declined by 25 percent since observations began in 1998.
Since climate is a statistical concept over decades, no individual weather event can ever be firmly attributed to human influences...
To better judge possible changes in events related to precipitation—snowfall and rainfall, droughts and flooding, wildfires—we need to look at the bigger picture of precipitation as the globe has warmed during the past century. Are droughts becoming more or less severe? Are floods becoming more or less frequent? Are wildfires becoming more or less common?
To better judge possible changes in events related to precipitation—snowfall and rainfall, droughts and flooding, wildfires—we need to look at the bigger picture of precipitation as the globe has warmed during the past century. Are droughts becoming more or less severe? Are floods becoming more or less frequent? Are wildfires becoming more or less common? ...There is little consensus among models about exactly how, where, and when these changes would play out.
Droughts are even more difficult to assess than floods…
Sophisticated satellite sensors first began monitoring wildfires globally in 1998. Unexpectedly, analysis of the images showed that the area burned annually declined by about 25 percent from 1998 to 2015.
In the end, the data tells us there’s not very much changing very quickly with precipitation, either globally or in the US. And the uncertain models suggest that humanity’s long frustration with precipitation’s unpredictability isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Chapter 8 offers a levelheaded look at sea levels, which have been rising over the past many millennia. We’ll untangle what we really know about human influences on the current rate of rise (about one foot per century) and explain why it’s very hard to believe that surging seas will drown the coasts anytime soon.
...the record of the tide gauge at The Battery at the tip of Manhattan... sea level there has been rising at an average rate of about 30 cm (1 foot) per century since 1855.
After the oceans, the earth’s largest store of water is in the ice sheets on Greenland and the Antarctic.
...the past half-million years tell a story of repeating episodes in which sea level dropped slowly by about 120 meters (400 feet) every 100,000 years as continental-scale glaciers built up, but then rose back up rapidly over about 20,000 years as the glaciers melted again. During the last interglacial (low-ice) period 125,000 years ago, known as the “Eemian,” sea levels were some 6 meters (20 feet) higher than they are today!
So the question is not whether sea level is rising—it’s been doing that for the past 20,000 years. Instead, what we want to know is whether human influences are accelerating that rise.
At least four independent groups have analyzed tide gauge data to determine the Global Mean Sea Level over more than a century. The results of one such analysis are depicted in Figure 8.3. They show that the GMSL was rising at the end of the nineteenth century—well before there were significant human influences on the climate—and since 1880 risen by some 250 mm (10 inches), for an average rate of 1.8 mm (0.07 inches) per year.
Since the rate varies so much, it’s hard to know for recent years what’s human-caused and what’s natural.
Koonin is not a passive player in climate change controversies.
When a draft of the CSSR was released in August 2017, I read it carefully, as did many other independent scientists, and immediately identified various problems and misrepresentations… I decided to publish an Op-Ed calling out one of the more egregious misrepresentations in the CSSR to highlight an example of the kind of thing that showed the need for a more rigorous review. I did just that right after the CSSR was formally published in November 2017, and the example I chose was sea level rise… The CSSR… follows the lead of some prominent climate scientists in hiding the large fluctuations in the rate of sea level rise over the past century, presumably because they make the past three decades seem less unusual.
In summary, we don’t know how much of the rise in global sea levels is due to human-caused warming and how much is a product of long-term natural cycles. The CSSR and other assessment discussions of sea level rise omit important details that weaken the case for the rate of rise in recent decades being outside the scope of historical variability, and hence for attribution to human influences. There’s little doubt that by contributing to warming we have contributed to sea level rise, but there’s also scant evidence that this contribution has been or will be significant, much less disastrous.
Chapter 9 covers a trio of oft-cited climate-change impacts (fatalities, famine, and economic ruin), predictions of which are belied by the historical record and assessment report projections, even if it’s hard to discern this when reading the reports themselves.
The media, and hence popular and political opinion, attribute all manner of impending societal catastrophes to human influences on the climate, including death and destruction, disease, agricultural collapse, and economic ruin. Luckily for us, the historical data doesn’t support such claims...
The Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) within the Université catholique de Louvain maintains an Emergency Events database covering over 22,000 mass disasters globally, starting from 1900… One takeaway... is that weather-related death rates fell dramatically during the past one hundred years even as the globe warmed 1.2°C (2.2°F); they’re about 80 times less frequent today than they were a century ago. That’s largely due to better tracking of storms, better flood control, better medical care, and improved resilience as countries have developed.
In the fifty years from 1961 to 2011, global yields of wheat, rice, and maize (corn) have each more than doubled, and US corn yields have more than tripled… you might be surprised to learn that the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide has been a significant factor in yield improvements, as it boosts the rate of photosynthesis and alters plant physiology to use water more efficiently.
...the UN report says that the economic impact of human-induced climate change is negligible, at most a bump in the road… Changes in population, age, income, technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation, governance, and many other aspects of socioeconomic development will have an impact on the supply and demand of economic goods and services that is large relative to the impact of climate change.
...in Chapter 10 I take up the question of “Who broke it?”—why the science has been communicated so poorly to decision makers and the public. We’ll see how overwrought portrayals of a “climate crisis” serve the interests of diverse players, including environmental activists, the media, politicians, scientists, and scientific institutions.
...as the age of the internet advanced, headlines became more provocative to encourage clicks—even when the article itself didn’t support the provocation… That’s especially true in climate and energy matters.
As I interact with journalists, 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.
Politicians win elections by arousing passion and commitment from voters—by motivating and persuading.
Politicians on the right who deny even the basics that science has settled—that human influences have played a role in warming the globe—are not above exploiting climate science uncertainties, offering them as “proof” that the climate isn’t changing after all.
Politicians on the left find it inconvenient to discuss scientific uncertainties or the magnitude of the challenge in reducing human influences. Instead, they declare the science settled and label anyone who questions that conclusion “a denier,” lumping conscientious scientists advocating for less persuasion and more research in with those openly hostile to science itself.
...scientific institutions, or their leaders, have also been overwilling to persuade rather than inform.
The media tend to accord NGOs an authoritative stance. But these are also interest groups, with their own climate and energy agendas. And they are powerful political actors, who mobilize supporters, raise money, run campaigns, and wield political power. For many, the “climate crisis” is their entire raison d’etre.
As a scientist, I’m disappointed that so many individuals and organizations in the scientific community are demonstrably misrepresenting the science in an effort to persuade rather than inform. But you also should be concerned as a citizen.
Chapter 11 closes out Part I by describing how we might improve communication and understanding of climate science...
...it’s still pretty easy to watch for a few red flags that should trigger skepticism.
Anyone referring to a scientist with the pejoratives “denier” or “alarmist” is engaging in politics or propaganda.
Any appeal to the alleged “97 percent consensus” among scientists is another red flag.
Confusing weather and climate is another danger sign.
Omitting numbers is also a red flag.
Yet another common tactic is quoting alarming quantities without context.
Non-expert discussions of climate science also often confuse the climate that has been (observations) with the climate that could be (model projections under various scenarios).
Part II begins its discussion of the response story by drawing a distinction between what society could do, what it should do, and what it will do in response to a changing climate—three very different issues often conflated, even by experts.
Chapter 12 illuminates the will issue by discussing the formidable challenges in meaningfully reducing human influences on the climate, including the lack of progress toward the goals of the Paris Agreement.
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere grows by roughly half of the amount emitted each year. If the current concentration is 415 ppm, emitting 37 billion tons of CO2 (as we currently do each year) will increase that concentration by about 2 ppm. But the concentration is the result of cumulative emissions, and as we saw earlier, the CO2 we’ve added to the atmosphere doesn’t go away when we stop emitting it. Emissions accumulate in the atmosphere and remain there for centuries as they are slowly absorbed by plants and the oceans. Modest reductions in emissions will only delay, but not prevent, the rise in concentration.
...a straightforward synthesis of a handful of basic facts led directly to the conclusion that even stabilizing human influences was so difficult as to be essentially impossible.
All else being equal, it might be a good thing to eliminate, or even just reduce, CO2 emissions. But all else isn’t equal, so decisions must balance the cost and efficacy of mitigation measures against the certainties and uncertainties in climate science.
...to achieve the stated Paris goals, the world must almost completely forswear fossil fuels within the next thirty to fifty years.
Today’s global population of just under eight billion will grow to over nine billion by midcentury, with virtually all of that growth occurring outside the developed world… People in every developing country (including China, India, Mexico, and Brazil) consume more energy as their economies grow...
Here’s the glum assessment of the UN’s Emissions Gap Report of 2019, issued just before the Paris signatories convened that December at the COP25 conference in Madrid to review their progress: The summary findings are bleak. Countries collectively failed to stop the growth in global GHG emissions, meaning that deeper and faster cuts are now required...
“Who will pay the developing world not to emit?”
Chapter 13 sheds some light on the could issue by discussing the tremendous changes it would take to create a “zero-carbon” energy system in the US.
I once asked a well-to-do audience in the US if they really understood what it would mean to eliminate their “carbon footprint” next year. That is, to zero out the emissions associated with their personal behaviors. Air travel, large homes (and surely second homes), and meat would all be verboten. There wasn’t much enthusiasm for any of that… That kind of transformation in energy use would have to happen in every country around the globe, even as most of the world’s people need more energy to have even the minimal quality of life we take for granted in the developed world.
The economic slowdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates just how challenging it will be to reduce emissions rapidly. Global CO2 emissions during the first half of 2020 were down only 8.8 percent compared to the same period in 2019...
...because of the central role that energy plays in society, creating an emissions-free energy system will be broadly disruptive—both economically and behaviorally. The question is whether the country will choose to invest the financial and political capital needed to bring that transformation about. Given the barriers I’ve discussed, and the other more tangible and immediate demands on the nation’s attention and resources, I think that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.
The response story wraps up in Chapter 14, with a discussion of “Plan B” strategies that allow the world to respond to a climate changing from either human or natural causes—adaptation, which will happen, and geoengineering, which could be deployed in extremis.
Yet in the unlikely (in my opinion) event that human influences push the climate over some “tipping point,” with deleterious changes happening very rapidly... the world would have no recourse other than to try to adapt—and to geoengineer.
Koonin discusses cloud-seeding, solar radiation management, carbon dioxide removal and other strategies.
...our other Plan B: Adaptation.
Given the enormous challenges of effectively reducing human emissions, and the various concerns that make geoengineering likely to be deployed only in extremis, it seems all but certain that our efforts to reduce emissions will be complemented, if not overshadowed, by adaptation to a changing climate… I think adaptation will be our primary response...
Despite the obvious importance of adaptation and its possible interplay with efforts to reduce emissions, today the two strategies are addressed separately—with much greater focus on mitigation. That imbalance might be due to the fact that adaptation is the “business as usual” response to ongoing natural climate change, but it might also be that we have no simple framework for thinking about adaptation.
The book concludes with some closing thoughts on climate and energy, including what I believe to be prudent steps society should take, both to improve climate science and the way it’s presented to non-experts, as well as to prepare for future climate changes, whether natural or caused by humans.
What should we do according to Koonin?
I’m asked often enough “So what do you think we should do about the climate?” that I feel obligated, now that I’ve finished laying out the facts, to respond.
We can begin with sustained and improved observations of the climate system...
We also need to better understand the tremendously complex climate models we’ve built.
Scientists should be welcoming of debate, challenges, and opportunities for clarification.
We also need to get better at communicating climate science.
...we need to reduce the hysteria in climate journalism.
It also makes sense to pursue “easy” emissions reductions, most obviously stopping methane leaks.
We also need to have a frank conversation about the proper role of government in these efforts…
...the world’s poor need growing amounts of reliable and affordable energy, and widespread renewables or fission are currently too expensive, unreliable, or both.
I would wait until the science becomes more settled... or, failing that, until a values consensus emerges or zero-emissions technologies become more feasible—before embarking on a program to tax or regulate greenhouse gas emissions out of existence or to capture and store massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere… Advocating that we make only low-risk changes until we have a better understanding of why the climate is changing, and how it might change in the future, is a stance some might call “waffling,” but I’d prefer the terms “realistic” and “prudent.”
Another prudent step would be to pursue adaptation strategies more vigorously.
...the best strategy is to promote economic development and strong institutions in developing countries in order to improve their ability to adapt...
Finally, should there be significant deterioration of the global climate, from whatever cause, humanity would be well served to know whether deliberate intervention into the climate system (geoengineering) is a plausible strategy. A research program into geoengineering options like those discussed in the previous chapter is therefore prudent...
What I think we should do, in short, is to begin by restoring integrity to the way science informs society’s decisions on climate and energy—we need to move from The Science back to science. And then take the steps most likely to result in positive outcomes for society, whatever the future might hold for our planet. As President Biden exhorted in his inaugural address, “We must reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated, or even manufactured.”