It’s interesting to see information like this, in the New York Post, coming from Steven Koonin, who was undersecretary for science in the Obama administration’s Department of Energy:

… both research literature and government reports state clearly that heat waves in the US are now no more common than they were in 1900, and that the warmest temperatures in the US have not risen in the past fifty years. When I tell people this, most are incredulous. Some gasp. And some get downright hostile.

These are almost certainly not the only climate facts you haven’t heard. Here are three more that might surprise you, drawn from recent published research or assessments of climate science published by the US government and the UN:

•  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 80 years ago.
• The global area burned by wildfires has declined more than 25 percent since 2003 and 2020 was one of the lowest years on record.

According to Koonin, he was onboard with the climate change common wisdom until the American Physical Society asked him to help the organization update its public statement on the issue.  At that time, the findings of a workshop he convened to assess “the state of climate science” left him “shaken by the realization that climate science was far less mature than [he] had supposed.”

Yet, as a person often discovers to his or her dismay, the common wisdom did not change on the subject just because he had discovered it to be false.

Wonder what Koonin thinks of the theory that the Wuhan virus developed without human intervention or spread across the planet following a leak from a Chinese Communist Party lab.

Featured image by Charles Unitas on Unsplash.