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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)."
I saw predictions before the end of 2014 that it would be the hottest year on record. Those predictions were right.
Similarly right now I am seeing predictions that 2015 is going to be the new hottest year on record - it has already set record for 6 months of the year being the hottest ever.
I think these predictions are out there, you just have your head in the sand.
Because these predictions are talking about the global average temperature, they are climate predictions. When you put a decade of "hottest year on record" years together, the average thinking person should start asking for an explanation - whether that be Sun spots or anthropogenic warning, there should be some explanation.
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
Consider that Dyson, an AGW denialist ...
Dyson is NOT a denialist. He accepts that climate change is happening and that it is caused by humans. But he also feels that humanity has much bigger problems, and AGW is getting far more attention than it deserves ... and he is right. If we focus on population control, 3rd world poverty, eradicating malaria, and raising literacy rates, then AGW will be a much easier problem to deal with in the future. My wife got a $10k taxpayer subsidy on her Tesla. That could have paid for a thousand anti-malaria bed nets. That is misplaced priorities.
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...
Several times I've pointed out to you a scientific paper that compares temperature and sea level rise projections to observations up to 2011. Link You reject it since it is not in your required format. That's arguing like a lawyer not a scientist. You should care more about the information that is presented than how it's formatted.
In the realm of more general predictions scientists have said that increased CO2 would cause temperatures to rise. Temperatures on the Earth have risen and continue to rise. They said that the warming would cause land and sea based ice to melt. Land and sea based ice has melted. They said the combination of melting land based ice and warming oceans would cause sea level to rise. Sea level is rising (over 3 inches since 1993) and continues to rise. They said that increased CO2 in the atmosphere would cause ocean acidification. The oceans continue to acidify.
You can argue about it all you like but the real world and physics just doesn't care. It will do what it will do regardless of your (or my) feelings. I just don't see any good reasons to disbelieve the climate scientists.
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.
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.
Those several times should've been enough for you to understand the point: predictions lauded after coming true aren't acceptable. That — despite several months of being challenged, you remain unable to come up with a prediction publicized before its "success", tells everyone, that no such predictions exist.
WTF are you talking about? The projections in that paper were made in the IPCC AR3 (2001) and IPCC AR4 (2007) which were published well before the paper was written. You can read those reports to verify that.
Well, the obvious conflict of interest would be one reason — if climate is not a problem, there go their grants and the very employment. But even besides such dark suspicions, their seeming inability to make a falsifiable statement, that is not eventually falsified, is a reason for scepticism in itself.
If there were no global warming we would still be studying climate and scientists would still be getting grants to do so. Maybe the attention to the subject has increased the money going into it but by no means would there be no grants for study of climate if AGW wasn't happening.
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.