Posted on 10/14/2015 4:32:39 PM PDT by xzins
Freeman Dyson, one of the world’s top theoretical physicists and a self-described “100% Democrat,” criticized President Barack Obama for his views on climate change, stating that he was on the “wrong side” of the issue and that Republicans were on the “right side” of the topic.
“I'm 100 per cent Democrat myself, and I like Obama. But he took the wrong side on this issue, and the Republicans took the right side,” Dyson told The Register last week.
Dyson’s name looms large in the scientific and political worlds. A contemporary of Albert Einstein, Dyson taught physics at Princeton University, worked as a civilian scientist for the Royal Air Force in World War II, and has advised the government on many scientific and technical matters.
Dyson is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London. Among the honors he has received over the years are the Enrico Fermi Award, the Templeton Prize, and the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize.
Climate change "is not a scientific mystery but a human mystery,” Dyson said in his interview with The Register. “How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to obvious facts?"
The physics professor studied climate trends at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 1980s before the topic appeared prominently on the political scene.
About models that predicted drastic climate change Dyson said, “What has happened in the past 10 years is that the discrepancies between what's observed and what's predicted have become much stronger.”
Dyson offered several of his own solutions for carbon dioxide policy.
“The rise of the oceans is a real problem and while they're not rising as fast as people say, they're still rising,” Dyson said. “That could be stopped if you could arrange that it snows a bit more in Antarctica. That's something that could be quite feasible, but it's not been looked at very much.”
Dyson also mentioned land management, “particularly building up topsoil.”
The physicist suggested that resolutions by the West to limit coal burning will not meet expectations.
“Whatever the rest of the world agrees to, China and India will continue to burn coal, so the discussion is quite pointless,” Dyson said.
He added, “Pollution is quite separate to the climate problem: one can be solved, and the other cannot, and the public doesn't understand that.”
Dyson said the lucrative nature of pushing a climate change agenda based on models predicting drastic consequences is only part of the problem.
“It is true that there's a large community of people who make their money by scaring the public, so money is certainly involved to some extent, but I don't think that's the full explanation,” he said.
Dyson compared the “mood of the times,” today to that of the pre-World War I period.
“It's like a hundred years ago, before World War I, there was this insane craving for doom, which in a way, helped cause World War I,” said Dyson. “People like the poet Rupert Brooke were glorifying war as an escape from the dullness of modern life. [There was] the feeling we'd gone soft and degenerate, and war would be good for us all.”
“That was in the air leading up to World War I, and in some ways it's in the air today,” Dyson said.
As a young man, Dyson earned a mathematics degree from Trinity College, Cambridge. He did his graduate studies at Cornell University in New York, under the direction of the world-renowned physicists Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who built the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, awarded Dyson a lifetime appointment to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1953.
Dyson, born in Britain, became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1957.
Although he clearly says that the “republicans are right.”
There aren’t many prominent republicans promoting a warmist agenda. Like Cruz, they consider it obvious that climate changes over time, and many are on board that the earth had been warming, but they also seem to be on board with the 17 year hiatus, the historic nature of warm/cold cycles, and the lessened solar activity.
So, that’s not much of a tipped hat to global warming.
I just read a reference to him being a Christian.
He’s a heavy hitter and yeah he was about 31 at Princeton when Einstein died.
Read his Wikipedia he has had some pretty creative ideas about how to colonize the outer solar system with genetically engineered plants growing their own greenhouses.
A moderate reduction in fossil fuel use over a very long time frame, basically.
Well OK I am tickled to be mistaken on that.
That could be part of why he is thinking hope, not mope.
Lazy people always indignantly hurl that challenge.
You vote and never heard of google?
Most Freepers could find more about Freeman Dyson in ten minutes on line than they could spend a week reading.
But that isn't really your problem, is it.
“How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to obvious facts?”
They aren’t blind. They deliberately ignore the science that says that any warming taking place is just the natural cycle of the earth because that doesn’t get them grant money.
It could also mean, I smell an attempt to shove something down my throat, so let’s put YOU in the dock....
Wrong side of the bed today, huh? Or is that normal for you?
It is possible that everyone knows about google, but that some have connected information.
Your momma never taught you that rude works much better when it’s also right?
See #48.
Which was my thought.
Here's a little WW2 memoir he wrote in 2006:
http://www.technologyreview.com/article/406789/a-failure-of-intelligence/
OMG!!
They all probably like tomatoes, too!
BAN TOMATOES!!
Our childrens' lives depend on it!
Thanks, cynwoody.
“Whatever the rest of the world agrees to, China and India will continue to burn coal, so the discussion is quite pointless,”
Maybe China and India are right.
Here is a terrific documentary about Project Orion, for which Freeman Dyson was the main theoretical brain.
It was a serious attempt to put thousand-ton satellites into earth orbit by means of a series of nuclear explosions.
Well worth watching.
Everybody except the top party members, that is...
Yes, that is true if you side with America.
.
Obama will have to revoke all of his degrees and honors for this misbehavior.
.
The creator of the dyson sphere concept and the creator of project Orion that would take us to Mars in weeks should be listened to.
I am having an unsettling feeling...
“Whatever the rest of the world agrees to, China and India will continue to burn coal, so the discussion is quite pointless,” Dyson said.
Bingo.
1 new coal-fired plant every 2 weeks, between the two countries’ output.
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