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Freeman Dyson Talks Interstellar Travel, Climate Change, and More (theregister.co.uk)
New submitter Tulsa_Time writes with this interview in The Register with Freeman Dyson. They cover a wide range of topics including climate change to which Dyson says Obama has picked the "wrong side". The Reg reports: "The life of physicist Freeman Dyson spans advising bomber command in World War II, working at Princeton University in the States as a contemporary of Einstein, and providing advice to the US government on a wide range of scientific and technical issues. He is a rare public intellectual who writes prolifically for a wide audience. He has also campaigned against nuclear weapons proliferation. At America's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Dyson was looking at the climate system before it became a hot political issue, over 25 years ago. He provides a robust foreword to a report written by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change cofounder Indur Goklany on CO2 – a report published [PDF] by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF)."
Obama is always on the right side of history. Therefore, be definition, he cannot be on the "wrong side" of climate change.
He also said that climate models were a joke, and are getting worse and are deviating more and more from what is actually happening. But he is only one of the worlds most distinguished physicists. I trust Al Gore more. His carbon trading system will save the planet!
Always interesting to hear Freeman Dyson, but can't help thinking The Register asked for an interview just for the climate quotes - both the interviewer and the current editor are climate change deniers, and The Reg is shamelessly used to push these views.
Why should one be ashamed of publicizing his own sincerely-held views?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Since climate change (aka global warming) isn't pictured as bad, end of all that is diverse and liberal ... slashdot will not make a huge fuss of it.
It's easy to not worry about climate change when you'll probably be dead in a few years anyway.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
After doing a lot of reading about this man, I have come to this conclusion about his views: Basically he has said "you're {climate scientists} all wrong because I don't like your models and if you try to ask me about specific technical flaws in those models I will defer to my status as a physicist and not a climatologist" So which is it? Are the models flawed, and if so, how? OR are you just a contrarian old codger whose views on climate science are about as reliable as my plumber's opinions on thermonuclear generators? Here is an interesting exchange
He is just pissed he was on the wrong side of the vote.
Is this the guy that invented the vacuum cleaner?
I have respect for Freeman Dyson and would not call him a climate science denier but a "lukewarmer". He admits that increased CO2 will have effects but doesn't think they will be so bad that it won't be a major disruption to our civilization. I think he is wrong in that judgement and wish he'd take the time for some deep talk with actual climatologists but he may be to set in his ways for that to have an effect.
He is wrong to challenge it.
You sound like a religious nut job. Your religion is what scientists tell you to believe.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Maybe he is trying to start an honest debate. Just kidding. You know he is just doing this because he is a media whore.
I agree that fusion is unlikely to solve any of our problems in the near future, but what I've read about thorium reactors is very promising.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Science is never settled.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Which is pretty interesting itself, is filter effect on the current slashdot community. It's amazing how many people who are always flocking to anything AGW related just stayed away. Have to wonder if being denied their favorite weapons (anti-science etc etc) just soured them on the fight.
An utter climate denier, Freeman Dyson follows the footsteps of many Nobel Laureates gone bonkers, such as the illustrious Kary Mulis (invented PCR, denies HIV-AIDS causality), Francis Crick (discovered the DNA helix, denies HIV-AIDS causality, the hole in the ozone layer, AGW), Ivar Giaever (worked on superconductivity, denies AGW). Given their age, maybe they're getting senile?
James Hansen:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/hansens-1988-projections/
JASONs and National Academy of Sciences, 1979:
In 1979 the subject was addressed by the JASON Committee, the reclusive group of scientists with high-level security clearances who gather annually to advise the U.S. government; its members have included some of the most brilliant scientists of our era.
The JASON scientists predicted that atmospheric carbon dioxide might double by 2035, resulting in mean global temperature increases of 2 to 3 degrees Celsius and polar warming of as much as 10 to 12 degrees. This report reached the Carter White House, where science adviser Frank Press asked the National Academy of Sciences for a second opinion. An academy committee, headed by MIT meteorologist Jule Charney, affirmed the JASON conclusion: "If carbon dioxide continues to increase, [we] find no reason to doubt that climate changes will result, and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/31/AR2007013101808.html
And then there is of course the big one, Roger Revelle writing in a report to Lyndon Johnson on ecological problems. 1965.
http://www.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2015/02/president-johnson-carbon-climate-warning
In 1979 and 1965 there was not significant and reliable data firmly indicating global warming (we now know that greenhouse forcing was compensated by increased pollution in N hemisphere); the predictions were made entirely from basic physics and thermodynamics, and their underlying principles still stand today. The fundamental predictions: increased infrared emissivity from additional carbon dioxide, warming surface and troposphere, cooling stratosphere, global warming, and relatively higher in polar regions, are all specific markers of increased global warming from increased greenhouse forcing (vs aerosols and increases in solar forcing), and subsequent major observational programs showed them to be true.
Reminds me of Al Gore's speech back in 2007, when he was accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo:
Last September 21, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the North Polar ice cap is "falling off a cliff." One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as 7 years.
Seven years from now.
---Al Gore's Nobel Peace acceptance speech, December 10, 2007 (transcript at http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2007/gore-lecture_en.html)
Al Gore's work in climate change was inspired by his Harvard professor Roger Revelle, considered the "grandfather of global warming" (or in Revelle's own words "grandfather of the greenhouse effect"):
Roger Revelle's most consequential act, however, may have come in his role as a teacher, during the 1960s at Harvard. Dr. Revelle inspired a young student named Al Gore.
Dr. Revelle would change Gore's life, particularly since the climate-change field had become cutting edge, with Dr. Revelle adding to the excitement by giving his students advance notice of the fruits of his research.
"It felt like such a privilege to be able to hear about the readouts from some of those measurements in a group of no more than a dozen undergraduates," Gore later explained. "Here was this teacher presenting something not years old but fresh out of the lab, with profound implications for our future!"
...
Calling him "a wonderful, visionary professor" who was "one of the first people in the academic community to sound the alarm on global warming," Gore thought of Dr. Revelle as his mentor and referred to him frequently, relaying his experiences as a student in his book Earth in the Balance, published in 1992. Gore's warmth for Dr. Revelle cooled, however, when it became clear that he had misunderstood his former professor
While Gore in the late 1980s was becoming a prominent politician, loudly warning of globalwarming dangers, Dr. Revelle was quietly warning against taking any drastic action.
In a July 14, 1988, letter to Congressman Jim Bates, [Revelle] wrote that: "Most scientists familiar with the subject are not yet willing to bet that the climate this year is the result of 'greenhouse warming.' As you very well know, climate is highly variable from year to year, and the causes of these variations are not at all well understood. My own personal belief is that we should wait another 10 or 20 years to really be convinced that the greenhouse is going to be important for human beings, in both positive and negative ways." A few days later, he sent a similar letter to Senator Tim Wirth, cautioning "... we should be careful not to arouse too much alarm until the rate and amount of warming becomes clearer."
Then in 1991, Dr. Revelle wrote an article for Cosmos, a scientific journal, with two illustrious colleagues, Chauncey Starr, founding director of the Electric Power Research Institute and Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite. Entitled "What to do about greenhouse warming: Look before you leap," the article argued that decades of research could be required for the consequences of increased carbon dioxide to be understood, and laid out the harm that could come of acting recklessly: "Drastic, precipitous and, especially, unilateral steps to delay the putative greenhouse impacts can cost jobs and prosperity and increase the human costs of global poverty, without being effective. Stringent controls enacted now would be economically devastating, particularly for developing countries for whom reduced energy consumption would mean slower rates of economic growth without being able to delay greatly the growth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Yale econo
If that was true, then why is it only Republicans challenging it rather than scientists?
Don't you get it?
Freeman Dyson
Freeman Dyson
Freemason!
The denialists want to claim him as one of them, but if you read what he actually says (and not what other people rephrase what he says), he's not; he's a skeptic, all right, but not a denier, or, at least, he doesn't parrot the deniers' (mostly stupid) talking points. His arguments are more complicated than that.
He does, however, think that climate models are not reliable. When you dig down into why, you see that he admits taht he hasn't actually studied them, he's just distrustful of numerical models in general.
A large part of his argument, however, is that global warming just isn't a problem, and if it is, it's one we can solve. (In the very short interview referenced, for example, he says that we should look at ways of increasing snowfall in Antarctica as a solution.)
I think, unfortunately, that there is a complete contradiction here. You can't solve a problem if you don't have a model that tells you the effect of your prposed actions. So-- if you don't believe the models, then you can't model what the effect of your solution is. Contrawise, if you are asserting that you can solve the problem (by, for example, increasing snowfall in Antarctica), this means that you think that you can model the problem, and be confident that your solution the effect of solving the problem. So: you can assert that you don't believe the models, or you can assert that we can solve the problem, but you can't logically assert both.
Martian, I generally like your contributions so I'm going to help you out. Note:
I trust Al Gore more.
See any "fallacious appeal to authority" there regarding someone who is not a climatologist?
As someone else said: whoosh.
Uh, you do understand that the statement "I trust Al Gore more" was sarcasm right?
Who needs fish if corn has better yield. Those stupid oceans are not acidic enough. It is like touting fluorocarbons and insisting that removal hurts poor people because refrigeration becomes marginally more expensive, and never mind the skin cancer. Maybe he really needs his own sphere by now.
"Dyson contends that since carbon dioxide is good for plants, a warmer planet could be a very good thing. And if CO2 does get to be a problem, Dyson believes we can just do some genetic engineering to create a new species of super-tree that can suck up the excess." ref
...in which distinguished elderly physicist becomes convinced that the entirety of a "lesser" field is wrong and its practitioners fools. See Penrose, Roger.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Didn't read the article, did you?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Uh, no
I don't really care, who you trust. But if you want to convince and force me to change my ways, the burden of proof is on you, not on "denialists".
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
When the Cold War was winding down, the National (Weapons) Labs were looking for something to do to justify their budget -- they branched out into alternative energy, environmental research, etc. Freeman Dyson was doing climate research before you were even born.
The truth remains — there have not been many climate-related predictions published, that came true in due time. In fact, I can't find even a single one such prediction
Actually, an interesting question. The oldest "scientific consensus" I can find that gives a number that can be used as a prediction is the 1979 National Academy of Sciences report. This predicted that the climate sensitivity was between 1.5 and 4.5C per doubling: that is, 3 plus or minus 1.5. Citation: Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 1979. http://www.nap.edu/catalog/121... (you can go back earlier than this, but this is the first one where a panel of scientists came together to evaluate all the models available at the time, and not just a single team making a model.)
That's 36 years ago, so it's long enough to compare prediction to reality. In 1979, carbon dioxide (annual average) was 336.8 ppm; in 2014 concentration was 398.6 ppm. citation: http://co2now.org/Current-CO2/... That's an increase of 118%, log(2) of that is 0.243. So given that CO2 increase, the predicted temperature rise between 1979 and 2014, if the NAS value was correct, is 0.81 plus or minus 0.4.
Actual temperature rise, according to the GISS temp, is 0.17 above datum in 1979, 0.75 above datum in 2014, for a temperature rise of 0.58C. citation: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gist...
The prediction of 0.81 plus or minus 0.4 is within the error bars of the actual measurement, 0.58. So I will rate this as a correct prediction.
... Freeman Dyson is an Idiot.
Yes it's true that climate models do have some issues (as any science does), and are constantly refined. It's also true that, from a scientific perspective, the earth will be quite habitable even under the most dire predictions.
This is NOT where the major problems associated with global warming come from. It's the changing of natural resources everyone is used to. It could require massive engineering projects or moving tens of millions of people and abandon whole cities near sea level. It could cause massive heat waves that could kill tens of thousands like what is starting to happen in India. It could require whole regions to abandon the familiar agriculture practices, and in some areas leave no alternative production. It could destabilize whole regions of the world and cause massive wars killing millions - far worse than any direct effect.
This is the real danger of global warming, not simply a few degrees of temperature rise on an otherwise bearable average value.
Do you agree with the statement that "a butterfly flying a China will cause a storm in USA"?
Because if you do, you will agree that climate is a non-linear system and modeling non-linear system is pretty hard if you do not know the precise inputs of the system. The problem of modeling the climate is also that there are so many inputs, including possibly a lot of unknown inputs and involving other possibly non-linear subsystems (like how does the ocean hold and absorb carbon) that make modeling unreliable.
Before you shout "denier spotted", I do not discount the possibility that we are all wrong, the world will overheat tomorrow killing everything that is living, or the earth will freeze the day after tomorrow.
"He also said that climate models were a joke, and are getting worse and are deviating more and more from what is actually happening. But he is only one of the worlds most distinguished physicists. I trust Al Gore more. His carbon trading system will save the planet!" ref
"More Than 400 U.S. Cities May Be 'Past The Point Of No Return' With Sea Level Threats: But there are still cities that could be saved by reducing carbon emissions..
Yeah, no offense, but I think I will take the opinion of one of the greatest award winning distinguished physicist over yours.
You can drive a truck through a variance that large.
Confusing weather with climate. Denier spotted!
All of your assertions are conjecture.
If only you had some evidence, or that observations could support your claims.
This is why Ben Carson shouldn't be president.
The Register chose the following title for the Freeman Dyson article:
"Top boffin Freeman Dyson on climate change, interstellar travel, fusion, and more"
The Register article calls Mr. Dyson a "top boffin". On the right hand column titled "Spotlight" the Register apples the adjective boffin to other scientists.
The evidence, strictly from the language of the titles is that the editors of the Register chopped up an interview article for an editorial purpose.
I feel the editing of the article was a deliberate effort to placate a readership. The primary readership of the Economist is a whole bunch of people anxiously watching the jetstream and polar ice caps collapse and they don't know how to switch their investments. So the Economist makes an old, respected and misdirected scientist look like a boffin, which is a cue to the very most astute investors.
The supposed 'scientists' that spew on 'climate change' are LYING JEWS and co-cons. The jew CHEMTRAILS dictate the climate, the jew fraud 'government' spraying us with nano chips has also formed fiber optics inside everyone but jews, They made the nano chip self assembling particles so they don't form inside jews who are race, a separate genetic group, but do form inside the rest of us. The nano chip fiber optics so the jews control everyone else by 'wireless'. Ipv6. That is what it is really for.
They also sprayed a virus that's going to kill other races but not jews. newworldwar.org/chemical.htm - ignore notes at bottom, skip rest of site.
They've been spraying and controlling the weather for almost a decade, they cause the drought, storms, floods. jew monsanto control of the food supply. Also the towers everywhere are part of the chemtrail/weather weapon system. They are NOT 'cell' towers. All cell is satelite. If you fell for the 'haarp' bs it's disinfo. The towers are the weapon system, direct wind, cause lighting, also earthquake. The stole the inventions from Tesla and killed him. People are idiots, the jews kill the important thinkers and idiots sit around listening to bogus jew front 'scientists'.
thezog.info
http://jewishcrimenetworkdid911.blogspot.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20100825152627/http://jewishfaces.com/banking.html - see all pages at top
Chemtrails, No one is going to save you. Give links to other. Stop 'following' bogus 'leaders'. Make your own tribes and stop the jew tribe fraud 'government'. Chemtrails virus kill coming.
We are being SPRAYED with CHEMTRAILS by the fraud jew 'government'. There is no natural 'climate' now they control it all, chemtrails weather weapons. They control the weather, cause the drought and storms and more. The 'climate scientists' are jews and jew fronts, they are frauds so are all the jews in media covering up the deadly chemtrails. The sprays have done nano chip implants in us, they also sprayed a virus.
willthomasonline.net/Nano_Chemtrails.html
thezog.info
you should discount it, according to anything measurable that is not going to happen tomorrow or day after tomorrow. or maybe you don't discount the possibility of batman being a documentary either - but that would make you a loonie.
the butterfly is a favorite among simplicists who want to sound intelligent. the literal butterfly effect does not happen, a butterfly flying in china does NOT cause storms across the globe. a brain parasite in the head of a sub commander MIGHT cause a nuclear war though.. but that's not really what is commonly described as the butterfly effect.
it's bullshit.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Keep in mind that 2 degrees C is a global average; the warming effect is greater at the poles. Alaska (and the Arctic, generally) is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world. Fairbanks has seen a 50% increase in frost-free days since 1900, and glacial ice is melting at a mind-blowing rate.
The catastrophic type stuff is (hopefully) unlikely, but any of the large ice sheets melting would be seriously unpleasant and hard to stop. Similarly, most of the Arctic is underlain by permafrost, which will likely add gigatonnes of CO2/CH4 to the atmosphere if and when it melts. If one is willing to discount any ongoing warming in the Arctic, then 2 degrees C is probably survivable for most of humanity, assuming nothing else goes wrong. The concern is about reaching a "tipping point" where more powerful natural forces take over. And it's not like global oil consumption is declining.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
The settled, high school science part is that CO2 causes warming (3.7W/m^2 per doubling). It's either that or almost all physics is wrong. The nearly-as-certain part is that water vapor provides a strong positive feedback loop. It holds true in both simple and complex models, and attempts to disprove that have failed. Frankly the alternate hypotheses never made sense; it's just wishful thinking to think that the climate is self-regulating. Beyond that things get complicated. The Earth will get warmer, and there are some possible scenarios that we'd really rather avoid, but the specifics are not high school science.
I hate to be the one to point it out, but if you're ignorant of which part of climate science is at the secondary education level, it seems your education is deficient. Any undergraduate text on Atmospheric Science would answer these questions. Also do note that Dyson is only arguing against the models' predictive power, not the underlying principles.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
"settled" is an odd word. I'm not sure what it means. If new data comes in that contradicts the theories we have now, the science will change. This is the way science works: science is "settled" until it is overturned by data, or by better understanding of the old data.
What is "settled" about climate is that the null hypothesis-- that human-produced carbon dioxide doesn't produce warming-- has been rather convincingly rejected by data.
If you want to overturn the current consensus, you need to come up with a mechanism by which carbon dioxide won't produce warming... and show that it fits the data (and there is a lot of data. Those curves you see are only the tiniest bit of it). A lot of people have been looking for that theory for a very long time, and so far have been unable to come up with any plausible mechanisms.
Science is never settled.
Rubbish. The laws of motion are settled for anything humans are currently capable of creating or even observing.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Since when is "could" an assertion? If I had said "will" or "does" maybe you would have a point.
Dyson has succeeded in destroying his reputation as a serious and credible observer and commentator of society and his times by propagating pseudo-science around climate change. His actual scientific achievements are of course spared.
Freeman Dyson is not a climate scientist. He's a scientist who dabbles in theorizing about the climate because he wants to. He is trading on his name and reputation, to the detriment of both. It doesn't matter how smart you are or how accomplished you are in other areas; if it's not your specific area of expertise, then you're in over your head.\
If you want to see Dyson's theorizing on climate systematically and thoroughly destroyed - (amongst other things he gets caught in just plain old logical fallacies) by actual climatologists, here's what that looks like:
http://www.realclimate.org/ind...
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
http://initforthegold.blogspot...
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
A question for everyone who thinks that CO2 controls the climate. How long with rising CO2 and flat or falling temperatures before you admit your theory is wrong? 20 years? 30? Never?
Both of the satellite datasets (RSS, UAH) show no warming for over 18 years. In that time CO2 has risen 8-10%.
Why do I use the 2 satellite measurements?
First they have the greatest coverage. RSS goes from 82.5N to 82.5 S and UAH, 85N to 85S.
Second they are the least adjusted. Unlike NOAA which makes completely unjustified adjustments by raising good data (ARGO bouy temps) to match what they themselves admit is bad, corrupted data (ship engine intake temps).
Lastly they are run by 2 scientists with good credentials (Dr Mears & Dr Spencer respectively) and despite looking at what is almost the same data come to different conclusions. Dr Mears thinks CO2 does control the climate and Dr Spencer does not. I like that. Not only does it keep them honest it makes me think and read both sides to see why they are so different in their conclusions despite almost identical data. So far I side with the position of Dr Spencer.
If you want to read a great explanation of why the IPCC models are broken beyond belief there was a great article describing that and all the other problems with climate science by Dr Brown of Duke university
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/10/06/real-science-debates-are-not-rare/
Dyson doesn't believe that humans are contributing to atmospheric CO2 or that the Earth is warming. These are not things that can be reasonably denied. - http://www.independent.co.uk/e...
It could also increase crop productions, growing seasons, greening of the earth and eventual just start getting cold again.
So tell me why we should fear this slight increase in temperature again, when there is no evidence it is a problem?
Dr James Hanson, formerly of NASA Goddard and patron saint of the AGW movement is, like Dr Dyson, a PHYSICIST and NOT a guy with a climate science degree.
Al Gore is NOT a climate (or ANY OTHER TYPE of) scientist.
Bill Nye is NOT a scientist; he's an engineer (designed parts for Boeing, IIRC before branding himself "the science guy" and using government-funded TV to propagandize the youth)
Most of the people at the IPCC who push out these reports are NOT climate scientists; they are mostly globalist ideologues who specialize in communications, and such things which is how they have been caught using things like travel magazine articles as scientific "evidence" for AGW.
Almost NONE of the government officials and politicians in the Western nations who are pushing this garbage have ANY sort of science degree. Most are just people who are good at making a living by talking and shaking hands without ever having done a productive thing in their lives; they are far better at stopping other people from being productive than at being productive themselves.
The only reason why scientist do these studies are to get paid. ...
So they come out with a new study that says that they should do a new study to study this.
First it was Global Cooling, then Global Warming, then Climate Change, then
The truth of the matter is that 99.99999% of all "Climate Change" comes from that big ball in the sky we call the Sun.
The Sun emits 3.86 x 1026 watts of energy at any moment.
The same can be said about oil companies' profits if the AGW is real. But any sceptic today is immediately suspected of being on Big Oil's payroll anyway. What's good for the gander, is good for a rooster.
In 2012 US Federal government budgeted $19.78 bln for climate change research and "clean energy". In 2014 the figure was already $21,408 bln (and it was even greater in 2013). The $1.5 bln would buy a lot of scientists — especially those, who already think AGW is a real concern and whose conscience would thus be a lot cheaper.
But that delta is insignificant compared to the rise in expenditures compared to prior years — in 1998, for example, the US has only spent about $8 bln, if I read the CBO-document correctly — and that was when AGW was believed to be a concern.
You are right, that interest in the subject will not "vanish overnight". But the expenditures will most certainly fall to before 1998-levels and that will mean a lot of unemployed "climate scientists" — at least a half of them. Any judge or politician with a conflict of interest of such magnitude, that wouldn't recuse himself, would be impeached — and for a good reason.
I do not doubt, that you share the concerns over the fabled "Military-Industrial Complex" influencing the government towards "perpetual war" so it can forever sell the armaments. Why can't you recognize the same thing in other walks of life?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
What make him think that his grandchildren will get to 50 years in the future? If I had children (obviously, not being malicious, I don't) I wouldn't bet on them reaching 50, let alone on the next generation reaching 50.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"