Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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?
Video Production Support
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.
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.
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!