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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.'"
We need more people to stand up against the global warming onslaught. On a more amusing note, the people that complain about global warming would be crying if we had an ice age.....
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Forget the heresey,
Check out SCIFOO 2007 (A Photo Essay by George Dyson) at the bottom of the page.
I wish I were there to see all these great minds together. Am I the only one?
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How many people here would get on an airplane if only about 90% of the principles behind aerodynamic science were understood? Or if the designers were only 85% sure it would fly?
Not many, huh?
Well, why are you so gung-ho about rewiring the Western world's economy based on degrees of consensus and confidence that aren't even that good?
Carl Sagan was quite the environmentalist himself, but he still believed that "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." I've never been a fan of that quote because it implies that scientific scrutiny should be applied only to a degree sanctioned by someone's value judgment. But I think a reasonable rephrasing would be, "Extraordinary demands require extraordinary justification."
Can anyone argue with that?
That being said, 99% of the time when people claim stuff against common sense, they are talking bullshit.
Agreed. That's why (good) scientists learn to think critically. Forget "famous" magazines, peer review, past research, etc. The bottom line is always - what supports these claims and DOES IT MAKE SENSE.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The question is, is Dyson being an Einstein, or a Bozo? For my money, on climate change, I'm going with the latter.
Well, with all due respect for Dyson and his past work, I'm inclined to agree here. First, I read his essay and he doesn't seem to have any real arguments, backed by real numbers. He's basically arguing from personal incredulity, and explaining at length how that makes him a heretic, and therefore right. Second, I was at one of his talks quite recently (he was promoting one of his books), and somebody in the audience asked him about Dawkins' The God Delusion (just published). Dyson almost exploded; his (very volubly expounded) thesis was that Dawkins does immeasurable harm to science, and, if I understood him correctly, he almost said that one can't be an atheist and a scientist. I was quite surprised, so I went and did a Google search on Dyson; I found a number of things, among which this. So, sadly, I believe Dyson has suffered a bad attack of the Brain Eater in his old age.
Your comment is a dupe http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/1 0/1530251.
3 &threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=2018607 3 points out that the other 6 were in the past 10 years, and we're talking the bug causes a lead by a very small difference.
And this user comment http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=26646
"The 1930s are down at 5th and 6th place. 2005 and 2006 are left out because you can't calculate a 5-year window around them yet."
Another user comment pointed out that the temperatures lately have been in the neighborhood of the Dust Bowl era, and that should be unsettling.
Look, this isn't rocket science. Does carbon dioxide reflect certain infrared wavelengths or does it not? It does. Is the amount of co2 in the atmosphere increasing or decreasing? It is increasing. Are human beings producing co2 or are we removing it from the atmosphere? We are producing it. There you go, the facts minus any political bias. Draw your own conclusions.
The real problem is that huge american companies are NOT willing to find out the truth, whatever it is. Why? Because if it turns out that global warming COULD be caused by them, and that it COULD have negative consequences for the rest of the world, they COULD lose their big buckets o' money.
Remember the case of the girl that wasn't given an MRI scan to see if she *COULD* have cancer, even when she was bleeding and had awful headaches? One month later she was dead. Why? Negligence. The same is happening to the planet. Floods here, floods there, and the people who can make a difference, don't give a damn.
It's completely fine to try out heresies in science. Say there wasn't a big bang. Say black holes don't exist. Say the Earth is flat. Say we have two moons, I couldn't care less! But right now, and specifically with global warming, we're talking about the destiny of the whole planet. The planet needs to be diagnosed, and fast. Is it ok to be an alarmist? To announce doomsday news? To scare everyone?
If it turns out that Global Warming isn't true, that we can pollute the air as much as we want without consequences, I'd be REALLY glad to be wrong! I'd celebrate! You can kill all the global warming theory supporters, including me. Fine by me. But if we're right... what will happen if the US doesn't listen? And we're running out of time. Is the corporations' money worth destroying the Earth? Is it?
In the end, it's all about money. Science isn't relevant, unfortunately.
Yes. T.M.Gerlach (1991, American Geophysical Union) notes that human-made CO2 has dwarfed the estimated global release of CO2 from volcanoes by at least 150 times. The small amount of global warming caused by eruption-generated greenhouse gases is offset by the far greater amount of global cooling caused by eruption-generated particles in the stratosphere (the haze effect). Greenhouse warming of the earth has been particularly evident since 1980. Without the cooling influence of such eruptions as El Chichon (1982) and Mt. Pinatubo (1991), greenhouse warming would have been more pronounced. As those eruption-generated particles leave the stratosphere, the haze effect will diminish, and the original greenhouse effect will be more pronounced.
Yes, but not enough to counter our influence. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/09/0409
Yes and yes.
For example, if most of your talking points come from conservative "think tanks" rather than planetary climatologists. Please cite your assertions and be sure that all come from scientific journals and the like as opposed to the aforementioned think tanks or political pundits.
Honestly. I'd love to see your evidence that calls global warming into question. I will read it and give it an honestly critical eye. I only ask that you cite your sources.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
i'm yet to see a single intelligent response to any of the points made in that video. i suspect you will be more of the same.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Uh ... how about Heidi Cullen's call to have any meteorologist who questions AGW decertified? Or when Governor Ted Kulongoski of Oregon considered firing the state's climatologist George Taylor because Taylor asserts that humans aren't the principle cause of climate change? Or when the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control sought to remove state climatologist David Legates because he didn't support the politically convenient alarmism over AGW? The Governor of Virginia told his state climatologist to make it clear that his views do not agree with the state's official policy after an investigation into removing that climatologist proved fruitless. Colorado state climatologist Roger Pielke writes about this censorship on his weblog. Note the players ... state climatologists who oppose the alarmist position are being intimidated for their views. How much money has gone into research on global warming? Where has it come from? What happens to the funding for those scientists who disagree with the "consensus" views? And what kind of consensus do you really have, when this many state climatologists are bullied into submission over the space of a handful of months?!
And then, to top it all off, anyone who dares to question the faith aren't referred to as skeptics any longer. They're called deniers in a sloppy but effective rhetorical trick to equate that kind of reasoning with holocaust denial. The politics of AGW are deeply flawed.
Did you even read the link? In it, the findings indicate that cirrus clouds behave in the opposite manner as they are modeled. Now, I would expect some changes and so do they:
"To give an idea of how strong this enhanced cooling mechanism is, if it was operating on global warming, it would reduce estimates of future warming by over 75 percent,"
Wow, 75%. Not trivial. Oh yeah. These aren't "opinions" these are measurements. Argue that one away.
As for out of his field of expertise, the article interviews Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist in UAHuntsville's Earth System Science Center. Not exactly a guy with no understanding of, you know, climate.
Me? I'll take his advice: "I know some climate modelers will say that these results are interesting but that they probably don't apply to long-term global warming, but this represents a fundamental natural cooling process in the atmosphere. Let's see if climate models can get this part right before we rely on their long term projections."
http://www.dailytech.com/NOAA+Global+Warming+Data
http://www.dailytech.com/New+Scandal+Erupts+over+
Basically, a meteorologist went out and examined a bunch of National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) (who are part of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)) temperature sites and he found that many of the sites did not meet the criteria of the NCDC.
After the head of the NCDC got quizzed about this on the radio, the NCDC pulled their list of sites off the internet, so that nobody could go investigate the rest of them. Naturally, a stink was raised and the list was put back online. It turns out that the NCDC had started to validate their network of sites, but stopped when they realized what the results would show.
It's really a quite sordid tale.
-Trust, but verify.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
They are not interested in trying to present all the information of GW, they are interested in pushing the case that it is real and humans are causing it.
Right. Because that's the side that is substantiated by scientific evidence, and the position against anthropogenic climate change is substantiated by no facts.
I think you need to re-evaluate your idea of what "balance" means. If you think that it means pretending like both sides of an issue are the same, you've been watching too much Fox Noise.
So sorry, but I remain unconvinced and a site like realclimate.org does nothing to change that.
If the fact that the person sharing the data with you has been convinced by it is enough to lead you to be distrustful of the data, you've simply set yourself behind the same bulwark of invincible ignorance with the rest of the climate change deniers. Good luck with that.
What I need is what I consider to be good, unbiased research. So far, I've had real trouble finding it.
Because you defined it out of existence before you even started. Not uncommon when people are thinking with their politics hat on instead of their science hat.
I never have frustrations, the reason is, to wit:
If at first I don't succeed, I quit!