A scientist who's skeptical about climate science, or at least about a lot of what passes

for climate science, which would of course make him another crack-bought conservative.

Or not.

He served as under-secretary of the Department of Energy in the Obama administration, Stephen

Kunin on Uncommon Knowledge Now.

Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge, I'm Peter Robinson.

Now a professor at New York University and a fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stephen

Kunin received a Bachelor of Science degree at Caltech and a doctorate in physics at MIT.

During a career in which he published more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers and

a textbook on computational physics, Dr. Kunin rose to become provost of Caltech.

In 2009, President Obama appointed him under-secretary of science at the Department of Energy, a

position Dr. Kunin held for some two-and-a-half years, during which he found himself shocked

by the misuse of climate science in politics and the press.

In 2021, Dr. Kunin published Unsettled, what climate science tells us, what it doesn't,

and why it matters.

Steve Kunin, welcome.

I'm going to be talking with you, Peter.

The shaken secretary.

In Unsettled, you write of a 2014 workshop for the American Physical Society, which means

it's you and a bunch of other people who I can't even begin to follow.

Students, professional scientists, in which you and several colleagues were asked to subject

current climate science to a stress test, to push it, to prod it, to test it, to see

...