Freeman Dyson, he’s the guy who invented the vacuum cleaner with the orange ball, right? Pretty smart to come up with such a nifty gadget, I’d say.
Don’t see how it qualifies him to dismiss the work of actual climate scientists just on his own say-so, though.
[Off-Topic]That orange ball in the vacuum cleaner; is that the Dyson Sphere that the sci-fi writers like to gas on about?[/O-T]
He has a point. I think politics and ideology have infested science more than at any time post WW-II to the point where I hardly trust most scientists. But I don’t care when it comes to global warming. The derived benefits that comes with tackling the climate issues are well worth pursuing - global warming or not.
At 91 he’s not a practicing scientist any longer to my knowledge, but I’m not one to say he wasn’t a true scientist because he’s later said stupid things. Scientists can be really smart about some things and really dumb about others–they aren’t a different species of creature.
As Max Planck said, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” It is not surprising that there are some older scientists who prefer the certainty of what they thought was true when they were young–even though in the case of Dyson that seems to be debatable at best.
I have seen the Planck quote referenced in relation to climate denialists–and then denialists using the quote to imply that climate scientists are going to kill the denialists because they’re ON TO THE CONSPIRACY.
In any event a key point is that Pauling advocated Vitamin C for everything from cancer to the common cold and the vast majority of it was pure quackery.
I read the full interview, and he does, I think, have some interesting things to say. First, he thinks it’s a mistake to confuse the two issues of climate change and pollution. He points out that the climate has been trending warmer for quite dome time, and this might be a mixture of hood and bad with maybe more good in the long run, I.e. Yes we lose some islands, but maybe we gain a usable Greenland. He also says that we are trying to model a very complex system, and are unlikely to have the model correct. It could be a lot worse or better than we predict. This resonates with me, as I am a consumer of economic predictions professionally, and that has taught me to be very suspicious of consensus, especially when it is delivered emphatically. To me, the idea that we have reliable models for climate change is pretty funny.
He points out that plants react very strongly yo increased carbon dioxide, and that may create a buffer or otherwise alter our predictions.
He in no way says that climate change isn’t occurring, I read his article as more really an argument that we don’t know what we think we know.
Full disclosure, I’m totally against waste and pollution, but I think the whole climate change thing is a moot argument. There is a lot of people. There is going to be a lot more. We are not going to stop consuming, until we have no choice.
And again, it is also old news that The Register is a source that should not be used for information about climate change.
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Last week [Dec 14, 2010] a paper by researchers at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies led to sensational headlines that the Earth will only warm by as much as 1.64 degrees centigrade -- in a couple of centuries. Sound too good to be true? Of course it does.
Mankind is certainly affecting the climate, and seemingly is the sole cause of the increase in CO2 from ~0.028% of the atmosphere to ~0.040% of the atmosphere in the last 150 years.
However, my strong impression is that the climate models are crap. There are countless variables at play in Earth’s climate, and their interaction is poorly understood at best. (N.B. The greenhouse gas effect of CO2 is fairly well understood, but that alone doesn’t get us to catastrophe levels of warming–for that, you have to have positive feedback effects.)
It’s hard to find an unbiased source discussing climate model accuracy. The most notorious catastrophic warming propaganda site discusses them here: How reliable are climate models?
Tellingly, the catastrophic warmist explanation here starts off immediately with a flagrant falsehood, asserting that “If [the climate models] get the past right, there is no reason to think their [future] predictions would be wrong.” While it is important for a climate model to be able to accurately “predict” the past, this is just a barrier of entry to be taken seriously. Any mathematic function can be tweaked to fit a temperature curve of known, prior data. This is a process that all models have to go through, but it doesn’t mean they will be accurate in the future. Anyone can fit data to a curve.
A critical take of climate models and their failings can be found here:
The graph on the page of above looks absolutely terrible for a batch of IPCC climate models, showing they’ve missed the mark badly on future predictions. What’s not clear to me is whether this graph relies on all models from a particular time period (which would be damning indeed), or just some.
TLDR; “Global warming isn’t real” is a bundle of sticks. But so is “we’re going to hell in a handbasket and we know so because some model predicts +5C warming in 90 years”.
Full stop as linking to WUWT as a source is just like a creationist linking to Answers in Genesis in a biology discussion.
More from Ars Technica:
As for “anyone can fit data to a curve” the reality is that it is the denier sources the ones that have made a sport with that, scientists are not doing that with their models.
I agree that even today Dyson is neurotypical. I’ve seen him link to a chart indicating higher CO2 emissions. He agrees that the earth is warming. He appears to agree that there’s a causal link between the two. He wrote about global warming in 2007, and still appeared to believe these things IIRC.
Most climate denialists have gone on the record against all these scientific observations… and then turned around and said that they’ve never claimed such things!
Still, when he says that losing islands but gaining Greenland is going to be a net gain, he is venturing into the land of social sciences.
Well, Hanson’s 1981 paper is strikingly accurate: it makes an out of sample forecast that you simply could not obtain with a straight line extrapolation. It’s a beautiful piece of science. This isn’t a total shock though, as the reality that CO2 warms the atmosphere is straightforward physics. It’s the dose-response relationship that can be tricky (as well as confounding factors of course).
But yes, there is uncertainty. But the downside risks are pretty bad. So spending resources on insurance seems prudent. For the moment, CO2 is priced at… zero. If bread was priced that way, conservatives would freak. But soot or CO2? They think that’s ok.
The other line of argument for CO2 mitigation is that human institutions have a rather imperfect record of dealing with physical realities. We build homes on the shore and when a hurricane hits expect the government to pick up the tab. I understand that few informed experts think that New Orleans has been rebuilt in a rational manner, cost/benefit wise. It’s highly unlikely that the country of Bangladesh will happily empty out and move to Antarctica or Greenland.
Ok. This is another flag. One flag was that Dyson talked about island nations (which are small in population) rather than Bangladesh (which is large). The other flag relates to a 1990s investigation of CO2 fertilizer. In the laboratory it works. But tests in the forest show much weaker results, mainly because the limiting factor facing most plants is not CO2. Now I’m not saying that result is set in stone. I’m saying it needs to be addressed.
So we therefore should set the price of bread and CO2 at zero, right? Or is it just CO2 that should be wildly mispriced?
How seriously should we take a fantasist? This is someone known for proposing that human beings could live inside genetically engineered plants growing on comets.
Do Harlan Ellison and Cordwainer Smith want to chime in?
ETA: Wait, let me back up. It’s not bad that Dyson thinks in highly speculative terms. It’s telling, though, that he’s a techno-optimist of a high order; that implies a slant in his world-view–shiny, happy, rose-colored glasses.
To price anything that imposes substantial costs on society - or even potential costs and potentially catastrophic costs at zero basically defines irresponsibility. I don’t care if we’re discussing bread, trucks, computers or CO2. Anybody who pretends to admire markets but insists on pricing pollutants at zero is a phony.
I’m still carving out some space for the techno-optimist Dyson, because his approach at least shows an understanding of science. It is not an especially prominent position and so hasn’t received detailed refutation by thousands. I remain pretty dubious though.
Dyson is right, in that science has become politicized. look at all the bogus “studies” that our taxes pay for…like "pre-teen girls lack self-esteem’, or “attitudes of teen girls formed by supermodel ideals” kind of crap. Global warming “science” is designed to advance a social agenda, to wit:
-keeping the peasants from travelling
-enforcing the cult of “sustainability”
-enriching the priestly class
-making the fedral EPA the arbiter of all business decisions
It is all about control.
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Of course since vitamin C isn’t patentable, so there’s no money to be made here and drug companies have no incentive to conduct further research.
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As noted, there is plenty of vitamin C research going on, including potential IV use in cancer therapy (although evidence to date suggests a very limited role at best). As for Linus Pauling, I don’t recall him having much to say about high-dose intravenous vitamin C. What claims he did make for vitamin C have overwhelmingly failed to pan out.
There has been a ton of research into use of aspirin, which also is not patent-protected.
Lots of research has been done and is ongoing into potential medical uses of various plants, which we are told constantly by alties are being ignored by Big Pharma because they cannot be patented.
Obviously there is a huge disconnect from reality here.
Something that often gets missed is that derivatives and particular formulations of these supplements/plants are eminently patentable. We have developed numerous plant-based cancer drugs (including taxol and vincristine) despite this “no one is interested because they can’t be patented” trope, which needs to be retired because it is erroneous, insulting and stupid.