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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)."
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.
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, but there really ought to be many by now. We see new ones made in the press quite often...
Don't call me a troll — simply try to put together a list of such predictions, and you too will come to realize, it is an impossible task... The list must consist of pairs of links: first link in each pair will be to a prediction, the second — to its confirmation within, say, 80% of predicted value (if applicable). The linked pages must be dated a few years apart — that is, a "prediction" celebrated after coming true does not count.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
He doesn't need to be a climatologist to look at climate models and see that their predictions firstly do not hold after a certain point and second that for more recent models, that the amount of deviation after some threshold is larger than it was for earlier models.
I don't know whether that statement is actually true (but it is testable) but I suspect that neither of us are climatologists, but we could both gather and analyze the data and could ourselves reach the same conclusion. There's a difference between saying all of climatology is bunk and pointing out that the predictions made by their models have been wrong and that also that the magnitude of the error is larger for newer models. The only potential error made is that we're trusting that as a scientist he really has conducted a rigorous study (i.e. looked as as much available data as possible) to reach his conclusions. I would almost expect that if he went to the trouble of actually looking into this himself, that he would have documented his methodologies and published his findings.
Also, just because all of the models have been wrong or imperfect does not imply that we can't create a working one, simply that it might take a long time so it's not a good idea to put a lot of faith into an arbitrary model unless it starts to show good long-term prediction abilities. It supposedly took Edison hundreds of attempts to get a working light bulb. It may take that many failures in our climate models until we can accurately account for the things that we're currently missing.
Thank you for that link! When I was reading TFA, I found his assertion that climate change was doing more good than harm rather startling, and was wondering if there was some research that I was unaware of which might change my opinions somewhat. From that exchange you linked to:
"Second, we do not know whether the recent changes in climate are on balance doing more harm than good. The strongest warming is in cold places like Greenland. More people die from cold in winter than die from heat in summer." ...which is just a really special kind of logical fallacy. Special like it rides the short bus to school. He might be a brilliant physicist and/or mathematician, but when it comes to climate change he is just (as another suggested) an old codger.
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.
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."