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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.'"
He spoke out against global warming!
BURN HIM!!!!
also, first
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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
Hmm, this seems like a rather easy prediction to make: that all the arguments for, and against, the current view on global warming will be obsolete in 50 years.
Unfortunately, the debate on global warming has been so politicized that I can indeed believe that any theories currently present will be obsolete in a small number of years. Has it occured to anyone else that the huge right-vs-left debate over global warming has actually repressed all of the scientific facts on global warming? I'd love to see original scientific research on the question on global warming, but it seems that everyone with an opinion on global warming is merely a pundit for either the right or the left.
Perhaps, somewhat arrogantly, I consider myself an intelligent scientist (though not a climatologist). I would love to read the research on the subject of global warming, minus the political punditry, and make my own decisions on the problem.
He is correct. It is important that people speak against the common wisdom, otherwise we would never learn anything. That being said, 99% of the time when people claim stuff against common sense, they are talking bullshit.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
This was the man I first thought of when reading the /. summary (I haven't read TFA).
I guess maybe Lomborg has done some good things, started some good things, but all in all he did nothing good for the global warming debate but make it less scientific and more political. Then again he is actually a statistician with a lot of knowledge about economics and little real knowledge about geology etc.
My point is just that people like Lomborg tend to make something that was before something that could be debated scientifically in open forums like these something that starts a flame war almost right away as soon as it is brought up.
I am not sure this makes the science that we really need to be done well any better, what should have been arguments about scientific evidence ends up in economic and political arguments which never really lead to any good.
"They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan
The question is, is Dyson being an Einstein, or a Bozo? For my money, on climate change, I'm going with the latter.
are getting warmer."
Doesn't that quote suggest he's just been confused by the term global warming and doesn't understand the basic issue at all? I'm convinced it's because of people like him that the popular term was modified to "Climate Change". It's about the energy the heat adds to the system, not the fact that it gets warm everywhere. It could well get colder in a lot of places, all it does is make things more extreme. Like pushing a swing just that little bit harder, it might go up higher but unless you move it's the back swing that will have you not fathering any children.
We need more people to stand up against the global warming onslaught.
I wear my eyepatch and parrot every day. What do YOU do to prevent global warming?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
How can you defend this guy? He's responsible for Skynet, for God's sake! Either that or he sells vacuum cleaners. Either way, he's dangerous and must be stopped.
Ultimately what he attacks is being stuck in an ideology, and that heresies are essential for science. He isn't claiming that his heresies are true - just that scientists are too stuck in an ideology to even give them proper attention.
The Raven
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.
It's a science vs. anti-science issue.
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.
This is apples to oranges.
Let me apply an anology to your comment that has the same effect. . .
How many people would get on a medical protocol if it had only a 90% cure rate? What if the designers were only 85% sure it would help you live past the next week?
Well, why are you so gung-ho about not rewiring the Western world's economy based on degrees of consensus and confidence that are 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 you provide Your argument? I still haven't seen apples to apples.
Burning him will release more greenhouse gases, you insensitive clod!
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.
Medical protocols are a bad analogy, too. The resulting bad outcomes:
Procedure doesn't work: Death
Procedure isn't attempted: Death
Obviously in a case like that, even a 10% chance is worth taking.
What if it's a new foot anti-fungal with a 10% chance of causing death? You'll find the 90% confidence somewhat lacking (I hope).
And ignore the melting glacier behind him. Do not look at the measurements of sea level and ice caps at the poles. Ignore all those measurements. They mean nothing. It is only the heretic who tells you to ignore your common sense that you must listen to. All those scientists with their electronic instruments and historical charts are of no consequence. Listen to the nay-sayer who speaks the truth because he must be trusted as the only truth just because he speaks differently and just because just because. Any declaration by anybody who claims to know from observation and meticulus detailed record keeping is suspect. We need to put our trust in the nay-sayer who has no obsrvations and no scientific method, but just gut instinct to tell us the truth.
Follow Brian, he has the shoe!
I really don't think so. What I read said "I studied the models, and they don't take x, y, or z into account, because we don't understand them, but certainly x, y and z have an effect on climate, therefore the models are oversimplifications and cannot be trusted"
He is not arguing from incredulity, he is stating that the models don't take important factors into account because they are extremely hard to model, or we have never measured them and therefore don't have a dataset to put into a model.
The models as he states do a great job with fluid dynamics, but they suck at clouds, dust (probably smoke from forest fires and volcanoes too), and anything else that doesn't fit in a fluid dynamics world... which is quite a lot really. And I'm sure you'll come back with "well, if we wait to see if the models are right or not, it'll be too late, so we have to ACT NOW!" That is the default response from any global warming nazi when challenged with "why don't we try to really figure out whats happening before we spend trillions of dollars fixing a problem that might not exist?"
I swear you environmentalists are crazy. What you are proposing would be like you go to the doctor, you have a slight fever, he does a single test that is incorrect 50% of the time, and then recommends you spend $1,000,000 to get a liver transplant, kidney transplants, heart transplant, bone marrow transplant, and just for fun, chemo cause it might be cancer too. Or, maybe you should just take a Tylenol and call him in the morning? But no, if we wait for just 10 minutes and think about it, and try to get a better diagnosis, well if the first diagnosis is right then you'll be dead, so better just go with that!
You are accepting the answers realclimate.org provides as absolute truth. Guess what? That's also a politically motivated site. 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. So if you take that as your only information source, yes I'm sure you think it is all settled, there aren't any issues. However not everyone sees it that way. I've done some research and before becoming overwhelmed by all the bad science and bullshit, I came to the conclusion that it is NOT as clear cut as many people want to present. I found an awful lot of data being used incorrectly, a massive amount of using computer models to "prove" things (models don't prove things, they help you figure out what should happen so you can test it for proof), a great deal of appeal to "consensus" and a continual demonizing of anyone who wasn't a believer.
So sorry, but I remain unconvinced and a site like realclimate.org does nothing to change that. What I need is what I consider to be good, unbiased research. So far, I've had real trouble finding it. Things that sounded reasonable in the new bite fall apart when you read the actual journal article and investigate it a bit.
If you've reviewed the data and find it to be clear and convincing, that's great, but don't assume everyone has to agree with you, or that a person who doesn't is an idiot.
1) The fact that the models may be wrong only means we have to lean *harder* on carbon output. We now know from the ice core records that the climate is not metastable and can in fact shift rapidly when you push it like we are *right now*. The fact that the models aren't perfect doesn't *decrease* the risk it *increases* it. If you're driving on a road where a bridge may have collapsed (e.g. let's say you're in the US on an interstate and the president is a Republican
2) The business with top soil is amusing but hardly very useful. There's lots of complicated data about topsoil out there (go google young man...) but pretty much all of it suggests that we're loosing megatons of it in the US. In the rest of the world we're loosing it much faster. So what's Freeman's suggestion? Increase topsoil. Really helpful that one. By saying "saying that the problems are grossly exaggerated" he's going to get the giant corrupt corp. agribusiness interests of the world to change all their short-term profit-oriented processes to increase topsoil? No. They'll point to the "what me worry?" part of his article and ignore the rest just like the parent.
I hope we get really lucky and somehow there's some hidden feedback loop in the climate that bails us out. Cause the way every off the reservation comment by some cranky old scientist gets played up by the media means there's no way in hell we're gonna get out of this by rational planning
One final word: No computer model of atmosphere and ocean can hope to predict the way we shall manage our land. Actually you don't need a computer model. Just work for a big corporation (instead of say, the eden-like Institute for Advanced Studies for most of your life), know that large corporations are who are going to be managing that land, and the answer is clear. We're gonna *rape* it. Cause next year's topsoil doesn't effect this quarter's profits so it's not material.
When you're a sociopath waiting for marriage don't enter into the equation, if you know what I mean...
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.
At least you do if you are doing real science. Really doing science isn't about running a computer simulation to show something, saying "This proves it," and then shouting down anyone who disagrees with you as an idiot. Real science is in fact bending over backwards to try to find anything you can wrong with your theory and testing it. Because you see we don't prove things true, we show them to be not false. That's not the same thing. Doing an experiment that supports a theory doesn't show the theory is true, it provides evidence it isn't false. Every time you test it again, you are more sure it is true, every time you come up with an alternate hypothesis and falsify that, you are more sure it is true. Once you've done everything you (and others) can think of to try and prove your theory false and failed, then you say its true (though you may be proven wrong later).
Real science, proper science, is going for proof to a very high standard. I'll quote Richard Feynman since he said it very well:
"It's a kind of scientific integrity,
a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of
utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if
you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you
think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about
it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and
things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other
experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can
tell they have been eliminated.
Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be
given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know
anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you
make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then
you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well
as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem.
When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate
theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that
those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea
for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else
come out right, in addition.
In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to
help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the
information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or
another."
If you want to argue for a much lower standard, ok, but understand that isn't good science, that's pseudoscience. Pseudoscience is where you have some experiments, maybe contrived maybe not, to support your claims and that's all. You don't try to prove them false, in fact you ignore any contrary evidence. Instead you rely heavily on personal testimony and showing how many people agree with you (a large consensus). You don't go for strong evidence, you go for strong persuasion.
You can do that if you like, but please don't confuse it with good science.
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
. html
. htmlo data.html
The recent warmth has been greatest over North America and Eurasia between 40 and 70N. - NOAA
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming
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
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/mpp/freedata.html
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/pale
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
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:
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
"We all know that everyone who doesn't believe as we do is evil and wants to kill babies." ... "Can't we just stick with insulting people etc.."
Unfortunately science has to contend with being performed by humans. So human bias can creep in.
One of the parent posts shows this...
"All scientists by definition are aiming for heretical status every time they write a paper or perform an experiment."
That's the ideal of science, but unfortunately humans rarely live up to ideals.
That statement about "every time they write a paper" etc. also overlooks the pressure on scientists, who's career can be seriously damaged by them speaking out against current accepted ideas in science. This leads to a tendency forcing scientists to, toe the line, so to speak. We are pack animals after all and unfortunately that pack mentality creeps in. (A pack is only a pack when everyone stays in the pack. So packs form with behavioural pressures on the members of the pack, which bias them to staying in a pack). Fear is a good motivator and fear of being thrown out of the pack is something a pack animal will try hard to avoid. (Being thrown out of a pack means you are easy prey). Unfortunately pack behaviour still persists in humans.
We need heretics to stress test every idea not just in science, but also in society. Every idea needs to be continuously stress tested to find faults in it and find holes in it.
The stress testing forms the role of feedback in a system keeping it from going widely out of control. Loose feedback and the system fails by going to an extreme. (The corrupted thinking of the Taliban prove this with the extremes they went to before 911 with how they were silencing anything which could tell them they were wrong. The Nazis also proved this with again silencing anything which could tell them they were wrong. One a religious belief the other a political belief, (like so many other examples from history of extreme beliefs), yet underneath the specifics of the belief, a behaviour which leads to a system failing by going to an extreme). (A system, as in a group of people).
Unfortunately the ones who seek to be the pack leaders want people to stay in their pack. They want people to toe the line. Dissenters will be thrown out of their pack or publicly discredited or even destroyed as a warning to others to toe the line.
This pack behaviour works against science. Scientific progress can only be achieved, if people step outside of the pack. Hence they are identified and labelled as heretics.
What Freeman Dyson is saying about the need for heretics in science makes complete sense.
Our societies need heretics because without them our whole social system is a machine without feedback, so it will go wrong and run to extremes.
The unfortunate thing is that with the ever present pressure from the pack leaders to get people to toe the line, we face a growing danger in the years to come. The Internet provides the pack leaders with an unprecedented level of identifying and controlling dissenters. We need heretics more than ever. As soon as people can no longer speak out against other beliefs, the social system fails by going to extremes and there are no good extremes, as for every winner there are loosers. Create too many loosers and you head towards civil unrest and even wars.
We need heretics more than every to identify and prevent injustice. Yet in a world rightly fearful of terrorists, we have a world running to the other extreme of Big Brother. A world that will not allow heretics. The irony is the terrorists are run by pack leaders who want people to toe their line.
Science is getting caught up in the global battle for power over which beliefs will dominate the planet. The irony is the pack leaders "toe the line" behaviour which results in a social loss of feedback, which occurs in all societies, is ultimately the central cause of the worlds problems. And we have had this problem throughout human h
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
"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?
"...but he's a lousy politician..."
I should damn well hope so. Honesty is a prerequisite for any serious scientific work.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
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.
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.
I never have frustrations, the reason is, to wit:
If at first I don't succeed, I quit!
Sure, but it just highlights the disparity between the press releases and the actual research. The research you've linked to doesn't actually dispute any aspect of any climate model that shows warming; but put it in the hands of the deniers, and suddenly it's the source of a hundred press releases and interviews saying "there's no scientific consensus on global warming."
You know, like you just did. Have you even read the article? I went and looked it up in my campus library. Did you just read the abstract?
You also presented me with a handy "etc." that you claim makes an easy out, although the examples you cited might be just as easy to prove as rocks don't fall down and the sky isn't blue.
Well, look. You can't claim that something isn't falsifiable just because it isn't false. Those two things aren't the same at all. You can falsify the contention that rocks fall down; you're just going to have a hard time doing so, since that's not a false contention.
Things are unfalsifiable when there could be no conceivable way of knowing whether they were false or not. If anthropogenic climate change is fundamentally false we would discover that pretty quickly. There'd be a very good, obvious reason why the enormous tonnage of human CO2 emissions just disappeared in apparent violation of physical law, for instance.
'm sure there are long-term measurements coming from other sources, but I never see them in discussions about climate.
Who don't you go look up what you're looking for? Why are you still paying more attention to debates among laypeople than to the scientific evidence? If you want to know what's actually going on, then go to the primary research - on your own, instead of when asked to do so. If you just want to keep trying to score points in internet debates, you'll keep on doing what you've been doing, I guess.
Do you even know who John Christy is?
Sure. He's the guy who once said:
and discovered this warming trend in satellite-measured surface temperatures, over the same period that the Earth's total insolation (the energy incoming from the Sun) has been decreasing.
Your problem is that you allow the climate change deniers to blow the smallest level of scientific discourse and disagreement vastly out of proportion. A minor quibble in terms of how cloud cover should be modeled becomes a vast schism between enviro-nuts and oil barons.
The creationists do the exact same thing in their field, of course.
You might do well to understand something about the people you're dismissing as "selfish greedy bastards" who don't take the time to do the research.
And you might do better to present evidence instead of personalities. The fact that you're still more concerned about who is talking rather than what they're saying (and what data they're presenting) keeps on proving my point - that climate change denial has nothing to do with the evidence and everything to do with feeling like you're part of the "elite" who, unlike the stupid masses, have got it "right."
I never have frustrations, the reason is, to wit:
If at first I don't succeed, I quit!