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Steve Koonin Wonders if Climate Change Can Put New York Underwater, 10 Years After Sandy [1]
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Date: 2023-01-06
Koonin's op-ed focuses on sea level at Battery Park, arguing it'll be no big deal for decades to come, if ever. Above is a photo of the Battery Park underpass in 2012.
We all know that person who did something mildly interesting once and then never shuts up about it for the rest of their life: the semester-abroad student who came home with a cheesy forced accent they refuse to drop, the former athlete who still wears their letter jacket well into middle age, or the once-viral sensation forever attempting to recreate their 15 minutes of fame. These tragic figures serve as constant reminders that the glory days are great, but being trapped in them is not.
But at least these people have their glory days. For others, even their crowning achievement was more of a Burger King crown than one made of gold and jewels, yet these folks still rest on their faux laurels for the rest of their lives.
Such is the fate of disinfluencer Steve Koonin, who has spent over a decade relying on the fact that he spent two scant years as a token conservative contrarian in the Department of Energy during President Obama's first term. In the many years since Koonin's '09 appointment, he has basically dedicated his life to being the former "Obama scientist" ' who says climate change is no big deal and who turned a terrible 2014 WSJ op-ed into a terrible book and a bunch more op-eds .
His accolades these days? Well, he may be one of the most-fact-checked figures on ClimateFeedback, which has corrected his climate disinfo on multiple different occasions . As we pointed out last March, in addition to other fact checkers correcting him, Koonin sometimes even debunks himself !
His latest op-ed in the Wall Street Journal is more of the same, with a headline asking if climate change can " really put New York underwater? " Koonin rejects the findings from fringe sources like NASA and NOAA, which point out that yes, sea level rise is a major threat to New York, and instead insists that because "sea level hasn't done anything in recent decades that it hasn't done over the past century," there's no need to build sea walls or "dash to higher ground."
Now first of all, climate change has already put New York underwater. Remember 2012's Superstorm Sandy? No? Well here are some reminders that climate change has already put New York and, more importantly, New Yorkers underwater.
So, Koonin is asking if climate change-driven sea level rise could be a problem for the city in the future, a full decade after climate change-driven sea level rise from Superstorm Sandy caused $8.1 billion in additional flood damages.
Yes, the waters did recede, and climate scientists aren't saying that the city will suddenly wake up one day entirely underwater. Instead, it works like this. First, storms like Sandy push water inland further than before. Then, as the sea rises, high tides will get higher and start to encroach on once-dry land, as we're already seeing in Miami , Louisiana , and… oh, hey, what do you know, New York City . By the time the sea has permanently risen over land, it has already temporarily done so for a while, first from extreme storms, then extreme tides, and then just regular high tides, so people and infrastructure have already been forced out before the water's there full-time.
Apparently Koonin (whose byline describes him as "a professor at New York University" and "senior fellow" at the Koch/Exxon/conservative billionaire-funded , Stanford-embarrassing , and misinformation-producing Hoover Institution) is unaware of how the passage of time works. And no one at the WSJ's opinion page thought to inform him that past and future are different.
Well we're no Obama scientists, but perhaps we can explain this concept to Steve.
In the past, things happened a particular way, due to the set of conditions at the time. But if something changes, like the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, and that in turn induces other changes, like a rapid melt of Greenland ice, then it is in fact possible that the future may actually differ from the past!
That changing past conditions leads to different future outcomes shouldn't be a hard concept for former scientist Steven Koonin to understand. But perhaps you can see why someone like him is having trouble with time, given that he's stuck in a past where his Obama-era credentials are impressive and not actually an admission that he hasn't done a day of honest work since.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/6/2145715/-Steve-Koonin-Wonders-if-Climate-Change-Can-Put-New-York-Underwater-10-Years-After-Sandy
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