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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)."
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!
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?
> The Reg is shamelessly used to push these views.
Exacty. That is why proposed laws against challenging settled science are so important. The scientists have already voted.
Voting creates truth? Scientists lie all the time when someone pays them enough money. They are all whores but their honour varies in price.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
You forgot to call him an anti-science shill for the oil companies.
Obama is always on the right side of history
Obama signed an extension of the PATRIOT act within two years of taking office. Pull your head out of your ass.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
What you're saying is that his conclusions are politically incorrect and don't agree with what you feel compelled to believe, for whatever reasons.
I am not qualified to say who's right and who's wrong here. But I keep an open mind and listen to reasoned argument. The extremes (flat out deniers on one side and cataclysm mongers on the other) do neither.
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.
What the AC failed to do, though, was explain why a climate scientist is more qualified to talk about relative scales of problems than anybody else is. Climate scientists are better at what they do than anyone else, but that doesn't mean they're good public policy makers, sociologists, economists... all of whom will need to be involved in determining what public policy should be.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
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.