The Heretical Freeman Dyson

dublin writes "Big-thinker Freeman Dyson has written a new essay in which he points out the need for heretics in science, and goes on to gore some sacred cows, including global climate change: 'My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated ... There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global ... When I listen to the public debates about climate change, I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories ... All our fashionable worries and all our prevailing dogmas will probably be obsolete in fifty years. My heresies will probably also be obsolete. It is up to [the people of 2070] to find new heresies to guide our way to a more hopeful future.'"

Comments

It isn't a right vs. left issue

[Rix]

It's a science vs. anti-science issue.

The climate change denial movement

[Misty Steele]

Newsweek has an excellent review of the evolution and funding of the climate change denial movement. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20122975/site/newsweek / It's fine that Dyson encourages scientific skepticism and debate, but in life, we manage risk by taking actions according to best estimates of that risk. If, according to the latest consensus science, the likelihood of serious consequences for human-modulated climate change is, say, 1%, 5%, 10%, 20%, 50%, or 70%, our actions should reflect those likelihoods. The answer is not to do nothing until the likelihood is 98%. Policy should be proportional to risk, and there's a reasonable scientific consensus that human behavior is 70% to 80% likely to be part of the changes currently observed, and there's a higher chance that these changes are going to have some costly effects regardless of cause. It likewise seems reasonable to encourage more alternative fuels research.

Re:On heresy.

[ChatHuant]

So Einstein was an idiot to? [sic] He was quoted many times saying the same thing about science and deity.

Sigh. Here we go again. No, he wasn't. Here's a quote that should clarify Einstein's opinion: It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. This quote (also others, and more detail) can be found at the site linked above. And, if you cared to read Dyson's actual speech from the link in my initial post, you could have seen that his theology is very different from Einstein's.

Point, Counterpoint

[Bob9113]

The warming effect of carbon dioxide is strongest where air is cold and dry, mainly in the arctic rather than in the tropics, mainly in mountainous regions rather than in lowlands, mainly in winter rather than in summer, and mainly at night rather than in daytime. The warming is real, but it is mostly making cold places warmer rather than making hot places hotter. To represent this local warming by a global average is misleading. - Freeman Dyson

The recent warmth has been greatest over North America and Eurasia between 40 and 70N. - NOAA
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming. html

I don't know enough about the human involvement part yet to disagree with him (though I've been looking into it, and the research is compelling enough to keep me reading). But I have pored over the numbers on the temperature record, and when he says it is inconclusive, he is mistaken. I think he has not looked at the data very thoroughly, and that this fact is quickly demonstrated by his inaccurate statement that the effect has been greatest in the arctic.

More data here:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming. html
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/mpp/freedata.html
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/paleo data.html
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/

Mod parent down

[orzetto]

It was one data set that contained an error, and a fairly marginal one at that. At the cost of repeating myself, go take the corrected data, plot it, and see that not much has changed. Of course, saying "the hottest year is no longer 1998, it's 1934! Its teh climate illuminati!" makes more of a headline.

You conveniently seem to forget that:

1. This error is of no significant consequence to global warming theory. 1934 was a spike, 1998 is part of a trend.
2. There are bunches of other data sets, by NASA and other authorities. This is just one data set that happened to contain an error. Big deal.
3. The corrupted data set was valid for the USA only, not the world. It is not a determining data set for global warming.

Re:Prophets of Disaster

[Dr_Mic]

"I am old enough to remember when everybody railed about global cooling (about 30 years ago)."

And I am old enough to call bull on your pseudo memories.

Is this really the sum total of what "skeptics" bring to the table? Or was this entire post some truly subtle satire which I entirely missed?

Re:Heretics?

[krou]

Oh? Really? Well, here are some responses then.

From New analysis counters claims that solar activity is linked to global warming:

The data shows that even though the sun's activity has been decreasing since 1985, global temperatures have continued to rise at an accelerating rate.

The solar hypothesis was championed publicly in March by the controversial Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. [...] "The temperature record is simply not consistent with any of the solar forcings that people are talking about," said lead author Mike Lockwood at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire.

"They changed direction in 1985, the climate did not ... [the temperature] increase should be slowing down but in fact it is speeding up." [...] Nir Shaviv, an astrophysicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a proponent of the solar hypothesis, has tried to rescue the idea by invoking a time lag between changes in the sun and its effect on the Earth's climate. But Prof Lockwood dismissed this as "disingenuous".

"Nobody has invoked that kind of lag before. It's only been invoked now as a way out," he said. Even if the lag were 50 years then he believes we would begin to see the rise in global temperatures slowing down.

When asked to comment on this later finding, the show's producer, Martin Durkin, refused.

A statement from the British Antarctic Survey says:

Much of the programme was based around a diagram, shown several times, that purported to be world temperature for the last 120 years. This showed a curve, labelled "NASA", extending to the year 2003. The curve was produced by NASA nearly twenty years ago. Although it showed data only until 1987, it had been stretched and relabelled to suggest it showed the temperature record to 2003. The resulting distortion excludes the significant warming that has occurred since 1987. Other figures similarly misrepresented the current state of knowledge, especially as regards the influence of the Sun on climate, and the strength of the recent climate warming

Further evidence is presented here that the show intentionally mislabelled and distorted data. In addition to the "NASA" distortion above (which the producer admitted was "a fluff") there are others:

Other graphs used in the film contained known errors, notably the graph of sunspot activity. Mr Durkin used data on solar cycle lengths which were first published in 1991 despite a corrected version being available - but again the corrected version would not have supported his argument. Mr Durkin also used a schematic graph of temperatures over the past 1,000 years that was at least 16 years old, which gave the impression that today's temperatures are cooler than during the medieval warm period. If he had used a more recent, and widely available, composite graph it would have shown average temperatures far exceed the past 1,000 years.

The 1991 data comes from Friis-Christensen who has tried, several times, to prove the solar theory, but each time the theories have been debunked. For example, the journal Eos noted that Friis-Christensen's 1991 theories were based on "incorrect handling of the physical data". Later work seems to suffer from the same problems. Regardless, Friis-Christensen released a statement noting his concerns with usage of data, stating:

We have concerns regarding the use of a graph featured in the documentary titled 'Temp & Solar Activity 400 Years'. Firstly, we ha

Re:Here's the problem

[niiler]

Puleese! As I listed in a previous posting, there are certain bits of data that indicate that global warming is real. Everyone here seems to be of the mind that because "one bridge collapses, all engineering is useless".

• Ice shelves in the arctic are breaking up and falling into the sea.
• The north pole is melting.
• Glaciers all around the world are receding at an alarming rate.
• This has led a number of ski areas to fear for their futures.
• Indonesia's islands are being submerged by the rising oceans.

Now, it might be reasoned that the Earth is warming naturally and that humans can't possibly effect such a change on the environment. If you believe this, I have a bridge in Minnesota to sell you. Have you been to China lately? There, in an attempt to rapidly industrialize, they have churned up so much dust and smoke so as to make most of the air unbreathable. When on travels north from Beijing to Badaling (where the Great Wall is up in the mountains), the smog is so bad it makes LA at rush hour look like heaven.

The examples I have listed above are all things which have not happened in the last several thousand years (esp. the one about the ski areas :-) ) In some cases, one must go back tens of thousands of years to see such large scale changes in the environment. It may be that it's part of the natural cycle. However pundits on this side of the issue have yet to prove that they understand the ice age any better than those on the side of climate change. However, climate scientists *have* shown that increased CO2 can lead to warming in all kinds of closed systems, and the rapid industrialization of the world is contributing to the CO2 that's out there.

In short, if you don't trust the computer models which nobody sees as perfect, don't bury your head in the sand. Look around with your own eyes and you will see that there's tons of other evidence that the world is changing.

Re:Heretic!

[chrb]

He spoke out against global warming!

Actually he didn't. In TFA he says:

One of the main causes of warming is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting from our burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal and natural gas.

Re:We need more people like him

[krysith]

Freeman Dyson - a lousy risk manager?

Do you know what Freeman Dyson did before he became a physicist? He was an analyst for RAF bomber command in World War II! You know, the kind of job where you have to determine the probabilities of X people dying in order to accomplish Y goal. Yeah, I'm sure he doesn't know anything about risk management.

Re:Begin the Spin

[crashfrog]

Well, I wouldn't hire a geographer who thought the Earth was flat, either.

Science is a consensus endeavor. Someone who rejects the consensus, even though it's supported by a vast weight of data, because it doesn't agree with their politics should be marginalized from science.

They're called deniers in a sloppy but effective rhetorical trick to equate that kind of reasoning with holocaust denial.

The phenomena are markedly similar. Some people can't help but think that the stuff everybody knows is accurate (for good reason) is wrong, somehow. Some people get off on denial.

But look. If you're ignoring the vast weight of evidence that supports the contention of anthropogenic climate change, you aren't just a skeptic. A skeptic is someone who withholds support until they've seen the evidence. Someone who withholds support even after seeing the evidence is a denier, not a skeptic.