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He was the sanest mind on climate change: https://e360.yale.edu/features/freeman_dyson_takes_on_the_climate_establishment https://e360.yale.edu/features/freeman

• nerpderp82 7y ago
  > 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. Forever the optimist!
  • 2ion 7y ago
    He put too much trust into mankind. I think it's a problem really good people have almost always; they underestimate how original they are.
  • logfromblammo 7y ago
    That is actually work-in-process. Biological engineers are trying to upgrade C3 plants to C4, improve rubisco efficiency, and other such performance enhancers for photosynthesis. It's not so much driven by climate changes as by potential agricultural profits, though. If it were the former, they'd make an algae 2.0 and drop it in the ocean. But as C3 to C4 modification could make a hotter, drier rice with 20%-50% higher yield, that's worth a whole lot of money. Of course, that work has been underway for decades--even before CRISPR/Cas9--and golden rice got stomped for no good reason, so even if someone made a super-Sitka-pine exclusively for carbon fixation, it could still get blocked by politics.