Freeman Dyson on global warming

[nancylebov]

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge219.html#dysonf

My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

The article backs up my feeling on the subject--we don't know enough about planetary climate to be very sure of our predictions.

I'm surprised that his last section (American dominance isn't gonna last) is heretical at all. I'd have thought it was obvious.

Comments

[supergee.livejournal.com]

"heretical" and "obvious" are not necessarily contradictories.

[madfilkentist]

The heretical and the obvious aren't mutually exclusive. Hans Christian Andersen knew that.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

How so?

[madfilkentist]

"The Emperor's New Clothes."

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

"Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do."

Bullshite. Total and absolute bullshite of the type that people working outside their field from young earth creationist electricians to HIV denying law professors. He ought to know better. And so should you.

[akicif.livejournal.com]

While not going quite so far, I'd consider this as prime facie evidence that Dyson's succumbed to Engineer's Syndrome (coined, I think, by major_clanger in an essay on Eric Laithwaite or James P Hogan)....

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

I probably should have unpacked that more. It is just that he, apparently unknowingly, is advancing a much more unlikely hypothesis than the climatologists. That for some reason there will be a combination of other effects that will nearly exactly counter the known physical properties of gas molecules with more than two atoms. What sort of evidence does he have that indicates that cloud cover and dust clouds will counter global warming rather than just allowing the earth to stabilize at a higher average temperature?

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Not to mention that the climatologists do actually get out of their 'air conditioned offices' to take actual physical measurements of average annual temperatures and changing conditions. And so far these measurements say that most climate models are wrong by being too modest rather than too radical.

[avram]

Without actually following that link, I'll tell you that Dyson's tone sets off my crank alert. People who proudly describe their own beliefs as "heresies" and characterize those they disagree with as some sort of priesthood ("holy brotherhood") or a mob or sheep, people who do that are generally just pumped up on their own self-image as iconoclasts. They're more devoted to being dramatically different than to being right.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Totally aside from Dyson being or not being a crank, here's a thought experiment.

Consider climate change as a problem in intelligence. We have intelligence of a threat. The intelligence is credible, but not confirmed, and cannot be confirmed in a reasonable amount of time. If the threat is real, and carried out, the consequences will be dire.

It seems to me that in this situation the rational approach is to prepare to meet the threat as if it were confirmed. To do otherwise is to court catastrophe.

If, perchance, the threat turns out not to be real, then we have wasted some effort and money -- except, that in the real case of which we are speaking, the effort and money won't be wasted, since the things needed to deal with this threat are generally things that most people would consider Good Things anyway, i.e., reducing air pollutants, decreasing dependency on oil, etc.

So in a very real sense, it doesn't matter whether climate change is "proven" or not; unless it can be shown to be implausible, the rational response is to deal with it.

H'mmm. I need to post this to my own LJ.

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

This is the 1% doctrine espoused by Cheney - any potential terrorist action that has a 1% chance of happening should be treated as a certainty. It hasn't worked in the War on rights terror and it won't work in climate change. The problem is that too many scenarios requiring contradictory solutions to stop them can reach the 1% threshold. If Dyson is correct in speculating that we may be entering a new ice age, for example, we will want to keep increasing the amount of CO2 in the air.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

No, it's different for a couple of important reasons, some of which have to do with the fact that terrorists (or people suspected of possible terrorism) are human beings; climate change isn't.

One effect is that we can't, or shouldn't, lock people up on the 1% suspicion that they might be terrorists. I hope I don't have to explain why that is.

The other is that the tactics for fighting terror have to be different from the tactics used to fight natural disaster, because terrorists (being intelligent agents) can change their tactics in response to ours; natural disasters can't.

A third point is that there's a lot larger chance than 1% that global warming is real & something policy can affect; certainly a lot larger than the chance that Saddam Hussein was going to unleash WMD on the West.

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

The problem is: if the threat is real, it requires very significant changes to our global economy or doing further radical surgery on our environment to counter the impacts.

Cost is always an element of risk assesment.

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

Dysons comments are reflections of a common problem: how do we respond to complex issues that are crucially important that we cannot fully understand, calculate, or predict the relevant variables? This is a problem in macroeconomics, a problem in medical research, and pretty much a problem for anything more complex than a high school text book. Just ask the folks losing a bundle in "quan funds" how well our complex economic modeling is going.

The one certainty is that we have never had an environment like this before in the history of our planet. So we need to guess. In this case, my money is one the models that have had the best predictive record to date, which are the ones that predict an overall increase in global temperature as a consequence of atmospheric change.