Summary of Steven E. Koonin's Unsettled

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

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#1 The questions of influence, response, and impact are the core of climate science. They are similar to the questions parents try to guide their children’s development through example and reward good behavior, and punish bad.

#2 The science we learn in school is a collection of certainties about the natural world. However, each of these facts was hard won through a succession of logical inferences based on many observations or experiments.

#3 The IPCC has established a second set of calibrated terms to indicate confidence in a given finding. Confidence is a qualitative judgment that depends on the number, quality, and agreement of different lines of evidence. The five levels of confidence are Very high, High, Medium, Low, and Very low.

#4 The most prominent series of assessment reports is produced under the auspices of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was established in 1988. The IPCC issued its first assessment in 1990, and the Sixth Assessment Report is expected in the summer of 2021.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Apr 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669381105

IRB Media

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Insights on Steven E. Koonin's Unsettled

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The questions of influence, response, and impact are the core of climate science. They are similar to the questions parents try to guide their children’s development through example and reward good behavior, and punish bad.

#2

The science we learn in school is a collection of certainties about the natural world. However, each of these facts was hard won through a succession of logical inferences based on many observations or experiments.

#3

The IPCC has established a second set of calibrated terms to indicate confidence in a given finding. Confidence is a qualitative judgment that depends on the number, quality, and agreement of different lines of evidence. The five levels of confidence are Very high, High, Medium, Low, and Very low.

#4

The most prominent series of assessment reports is produced under the auspices of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was established in 1988. The IPCC issued its first assessment in 1990, and the Sixth Assessment Report is expected in the summer of 2021.

#5

The Science behind climate change is complex, and it is often presented that way to make it seem more simple. However, the truth is that most severe weather events remain within past variability.

#6

Measuring the world is a childhood obsession of mine. I loved taking temperature readings, and I still do today. The earth is large and not easy to cover, so gathering accurate, precise climate data is difficult.

#7

The temperature graph in Figure 1. 1 is a good example of how climate is not the same as weather. The weather anywhere varies constantly in ways both predictable and unexpected, but climate is the average of that weather over decades.

#8

The temperature anomaly graph in Figure 1. 1 shows how much the average daily temperature at a