Online lecture by Dr Steven E Koonin
Dr Koonin achieved international headlines on publication of his book “Unsettled? What Climate Science tells us, what it doesn’t, and why it matters”, advocating climate science objectivity. In recent interviews, he has argued that the “climate change Armageddon narrative” is starting to unravel, as people increasingly question the claims of an existential crisis, further urging a return to realism. In this key lecture, he will address “scientific realism” ‐ the nature and magnitude of the alleged threat from anthropogenic climate change ‐ and then “energy realism” – where the costs and disruption of a rapid energy transition are impacting people’s lives quite visibly and immediately. This challenging lecture is highly anticipated.
Event details
- Date: 21 January 2026
- Location: online
- Entrance fee: request via email jim@jimobriencsr.com
Dr Steven E. Koonin is the Edward Teller Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He served as Under‐Secretary for Science in the US Department of Energy from 2009 to 2011. Before joining the government, he spent five years as Chief Scientist for BP. For almost thirty years, Koonin was a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech, where he served for nine years as Vice President and Provost. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and is currently an independent governor of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, having served in similar roles for the Los Alamos, Sandia, Brookhaven, and Argonne National Laboratories. Koonin has a BSc in Physics from Caltech and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from MIT. He has published some 200 peer‐reviewed papers in the fields of physics and astrophysics, scientific computation, energy technology and policy, and climate science.
Watch the lecture here
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