Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 03/25/2009 1:25:09 PM PDT by reaganaut1
...
Lately, however, since coming “out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,” as [eminent physicist Freeman] Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors’ letter boxes and Dyson’s own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective [...]. Dyson had proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow.
...
IT WAS FOUR YEARS AGO that Dyson began publicly stating his doubts about climate change. Speaking at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, Dyson announced that “all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.” Since then he has only heated up his misgivings, declaring in a 2007 interview with Salon.com that “the fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn’t scare me at all” and writing in an essay for The New York Review of Books [...] that climate change has become an “obsession” — the primary article of faith for “a worldwide secular religion” known as environmentalism. Among those he considers true believers, Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
How refreshing.
Freeman Dyson is a REAL Scientist!
Ping
[With apologies to Isaiah 14:12] How art thou fallen from truth, O Scientists!
Too bad Richard Feynman isn’t around anymore. His take on things would be priceless.
Don't worry. Dyson's orginal claim to fame was unifying Feynman's quantum electrodynamic work with two others, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Julian Schwinger.
Being able to do that required the big picture, and seeing the problem from different points of view.
And clearly Dyson has done that with the Hot Air Hoax.
Don’t forget Murray Gell-Mann.
And a truly great one.
The NYT writer concludes with, “...and then they were talking about windmills.”
Quixotic but profound; true genius lies in recognizing the depths of one’s own ignorance, not his abandonment of caution.
Gee Al Gore you are such an expert on global warming and are backed by a huge “consensus” of scientists, why don’t you publicly debate Dyson? It would be child’s play for you to dismiss his arguments. Excelsior! (heavy sarcasm)
Thanks for the post - Dyson is a most impressive individual, and it was great to read his opinions on AGW.
Most important, IMO, was his critique of climate modeling and the modeling community.
Most people think that direct absorption of infrared energy by CO2 is the basis for any hypothetical warming, but in fact, the amount of such absorption is limited (Beer’s Law, for all you who stayed awake during college chemistry), and is unlikely to lead to any significant problems.
The only way you get to catastrophic levels of warming is by positive feedback, and the only way we can currently deal with feedback processes is by modelling. And to rigorously model climate feedback, you have to take account everything from cosmic rays at the atomic scale (which affect cloud formation) to the earth’s albedo (or reflectiveness), which involves a scale of continental size, as well as scores of factors at intermediate scale.
No model can hope to do that - predicting the stock market ten years out would be easier. And (as Dyson points out) there are also really complex dynamic biological factors involved as well, which I don’t think modelers have even begun to apply.
How good the models are, I have no idea - but on an absolute temperature scale, they’d have to be reliable to about 1 part in 300 to predict a one degree rise in temperature - simple air pollution models (which treat much simpler problems) aren’t even good to +/- 1%.
So as far as I’m concerned (and I expect Dyson would agree), AGW = GIGO
(anthropogenic global warming; garbage in, garbage out for those acronymicly deprived).
James Hansen has a comfy government sinecure and political connections with the Goracle to put him in the spotlight and further his career. He knows which side his bread is buttered on. Fidelity to scientific principles is the hobgoblin of little, unambitious, minds...
Great post, and I followed the links to other articles. Took awhile, but thanks.
Yes, and the IPCC claims water vapor for that job, and doesn't explain why water vapor doesn't feedback on itself!
Excellent point, I hadn't thought of that one.
I believe this represents a “sea change”. When you have the NYT promoting an iconic figure such as Freeman Dyson as a Global Warming skeptic/denier, then there is real doubt about the reality of AGW.
This is a major change at the NYT, where many liberals get their marching orders.
For global warming with Dyson the denier maybe, but the NY Times often gives space to their opposition in their Sunday Magazine and their OpEd Contributor columns. Those contributors are guests, sometimes very prominent ones from the opposition.
ping-a-ling
NY Slime actually acknowledges another view. I think the cost of cap and trade may have hit home.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
Nicholas Dawidoff ..... Probably the first time this New York Times grand Pooh Bah ever spoke with someone who says global warming is a crock
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