Not really. The idea that we can extract 37 gigatons of CO2 out of the air every year is pretty fanciful. It’s in the same realm of thought that says we should go ahead and keep dumping CO2 into the air but dump some other stuff in there, too, that contributes to cooling. That one is not just fanciful but downright crazy dangerous. The reality is that no scalable technology to safely and realistically do these things is even on the horizon, while at the same time burning fossil fuels has other deleterious side effects. For instance an EU study showed that around 35,000 people die prematurely every year there from the effects of air pollution. It’s a mystery to me why we’re grasping at these sci-fi straws when clean, renewable energy is clearly within our technological means.
Yes, it’s wrong. The idea that climate change is primarily characterized by a little bit’o’warmth is grossly misguided. The problem is that the rate of change is extreme and unlike anything seen in nature – during ice age transitions the climate takes thousands if not tens of thousands of years to transition through the kind of change we’ve forced on it in just the last century. Furthermore, the effects are just beginning to be felt. The beginning and end of ice ages is driven by a change in atmospheric CO2 of just around 100 ppm; we’ve already driven it 115 ppm higher than it has ever been since the dawn of humanity. The destabilizing effect on both the physical climate system and the biological ecosystem and its ability to adapt are both huge, leading to things like increasingly frequent extreme weather events, pest and disease migration, and the potential for massive food crop failures. And the negative repercussions are projected to be greatest in the poorest regions, such as Africa and other tropical areas, that are the least ecologically and economically resilient.
For a wide variety of reasons, this isn’t felt to be promising. CO2-fertilized plants often have serious issues and are, moreover, quickly limited by other factors like soil nutrients. And the CO2 sequestration is short-term, within an active carbon cycle, while the stuff we’re dumping into the atmosphere comes from permanent sequestrations that are hundreds of millions of years old.
On the topic of the OP, Dyson is a formerly brilliant physicist who’s turned into a elderly crackpot – this sums it up pretty well:
The problem is that Dyson says demonstrably wrong things about global warming, and doesn’t seem to care so long as they support his notion of human destiny. Brower reports that Dyson doesn’t consider himself an expert on climate change, has no interest in arguing the details with experts, and yet somehow knows that the experts don’t have any answers worth listening to. That doesn’t stop Dyson from making sweeping pronouncements, many of them so egregiously wrong that it would hardly have taken an expert to set him straight.
