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Freeman Dyson takes on the climate establishment (2009)
- mikelward 7y ago[2009]
- dang 7y agoAdded. Thanks!
- briantakita 7y agoHere's an interview of Freeman Dyson in 2015 re: APW & faith in models of complex nonlinear systems. Also goes into solar activity (electric, magnetic, & ion ejections) as a driver of climate change. Note that CMIP6 includes particle forcing to its model. CMIP5 & earlier versions did not include particle forcing. https://youtu.be/BiKfWdXXfIs https://youtu.be/BiKfWdXXfIs
- Causality1 7y ago>Dyson believes we can just do some genetic engineering to create a new species of super-tree that can suck up the excess. You can just stop reading right there. Not only do we not have the ability to do that, even if we had such a tree, we would destroy the biosphere by cutting down all the world's trees to replace them with our magical carbon capture trees.
- montalbano 7y agoYour point about genetic engineering capability is true (source: spent two years working in an advanced plant science lab). The latter one I'm not sure about, it's complicated. The downvoting of this comment seems a little strange to me. Edit: Thanks for explaining, I get it now, I shouldn't have mentioned it anyway, I was just interested in the scientific substance of parent comment and wondered why others seemed not to be (I get it now, it wasn't the scientific aspect of the comment which was against HN guidelines).
- dang 7y agoI imagine it was downvoted because of "You can just stop reading right there", which is an internet trope (-> repetitive -> bad for HN) and also needlessly aggressive. The comment would be just fine without that bit—well, plus the snarky "magical". Snark is deprecated on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- DenisM 7y agoCan you add sarcasm next to snark in the guidelines? I’ve never seen sarcasm improve a conversation and it inflames passions unnecessarily. Thanks for considering this, whatever you decide.
- dang 7y agoHow would you define the difference?
- DenisM 7y agoIt’s not to signify a difference, but to expand coverage. I wouldn’t want to argue with someone saying “I was sarcastic, but not snarky”. There are many comments ending with /s to signify sarcasm or even /sarcasm or such. It’s easier to point out a transgression when the user has agreed in his mind or his words that he was in fact being sarcastic.
- m0zg 7y agoSomeone 100 years ago: "You can stop reading right there. We do not have the ability to breed corn with the ears the size of a man's forearm." Yet here we are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpKlvxnspXs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpKlvxnspXs
- Gibbon1 7y agoWe don't have a 100 years anymore.
- m0zg 7y agoNone of us individually do, but I'm pretty sure there will still be 7+ billion people on this planet in year 2120. Irrespective of 2 degree rise in temperature or lack thereof.
- asveikau 7y agoI'm not an expert, but I think the sea level rise is going to be quite crappy in another 30 years or so. Sounds plausible that it could lead to people being displaced and pricey waterfront properties and adjacent losing a lot of value.
- ncmncm 7y agoA hundred years might enough to bring the population back up after civilization collapses. Collapse will put a damper on CO2 release, and the pulse of reforestation of formerly occupied areas would absorb a lot of the CO2 overburden. Anyway that's the optimistic view.
- akvadrako 7y agoI think one of the best things the alarmists do is say we only have ten years left. When those predictions are proven wrong again and again eventually people will notice the pattern.
- briantakita 7y ago
- dh37 7y agoTo me the funny thing is that he spoke about climate scientists in their ivory towers, yet dreams up genetic engineering plans that have no basis in current reality. It's even unclear he understands realities of DNA-based terrestrial life as we know it, if you look at his writings on seeding the solar system with life. In my day we called such people "bullshit artists."
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- inkaudio 7y agoClimate change is a red herring, air pollution is a clear and present danger. India and China have ignored this in the past and now they are making some efforts to correct course because people are dying from it.
- randie63 7y agoTrue, it's a fact. But what's not a fact, that CO2 is the reason for that. We humans can do nothing about it. How do you else explain some ice age with 10x the CO2 amount in the far past. But don't misunderstand that I am against a cleaner future. Efficiency should be always improved, in every field. But I am against unnecessary change just because of CO2. For example it's better for the environment to use your old car as long as possible instead building new electric cars. This is less efficient overall than repairing and maintaining the tech of today. The whole climate change topic is far more political than actually fact based.
- linuxftw 7y agoAir pollution is a big problem. The biggest problem IMO is water and soil pollution. We're putting far worse chemicals into our food and water (and in household products we absorb) than what we're putting into the air (in the developed world, anyway).
- ncmncm 7y agoIndeed, pollution with CO2 is the whole topic.
- bobbyd2323 7y agoAll models are wrong. Some are useful approximations for understanding and others for forecasting. In Econ for example, DSGE models are useful for asking counterfactuals but not great for forecasting. Lots of models are particularly susceptible to assumptions that can be tuned in an Upton Sinclair like way. Climate modeling appears to be one of these areas where the black box can be filled with all sorts of debatable assumptions, yet questioning what’s in the black box carries great reputational risk.
- TLightful 7y agoWould you rather proceed on blind faith? Proceed by testing and accepting or disproving hypothesis. Nothing more, nothing less.
- ximeng 7y agoWhat is the evidence that people who question the black box have great reputational risk? Dyson raises this point, but I don't really see that this would be different from any other area. There is more money at stake with climate change than most areas of science, which means it becomes a political issue. There would seem to be a very strong incentive to show existing models are not accurate, or to come up with scientifically plausible models with very different outcomes. However no arguments against climate change do this, presumably because it's not very easy to do so. Dyson here points out some areas that he thinks are not possible to model accurately or are not currently modelled accurately, such as the benefits and threats of various changes to the climate, the impact of climate change on sea level change, cloud modelling uncertainties, and the chaotic effects of different carbon reservoirs on each other. His points on the exact impact of climate change and what the ideal climate is are important, but they are also studied and discussed. The supposed political reasons for supporting or being against climate change theories do not change the facts. If there are real problems with the models these can be flagged up - sensitivity testing can be done for all of these issues. One major problem here is that the communication of the climate mainstream is very poor. The IPCC produces massive reports that are designed to be printed as PDF, and are targeted at policy experts. They're not really readable, the web versions don't really use hyperlinks and have minimal pictures and poor structure. They're slowly getting better, but still a long way from ideal. Example for reference: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/ https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/
- haunter 7y agoIt was strange to see on reddit that his death was celebrated as another climate change denier gone. I mean it never ouccured me people don't respect him or anything. Maybe I'm just too naive.
- vanniv 7y agoWhen your political power comes from the ability to regulate every aspect of life due to a supposed existential threat that comes from all economic activity, an educated, informed, and well-spoken critic of the supposed existential threat is dangerous.
- ximeng 7y agoThis works both ways. There is a very strong incentive to create plausible scientific models that show climate change is not a problem if that is in fact the case. Even Dyson says he doesn't know any informed people who disagree with the mainstream climate change theories. This interview shows that he accepts the key premise that there is likely to be significant warming. Realistically, the bigger problem is that massive changes to society are required to mitigate the risks of climate change. However as Dyson says, some people will likely benefit from climate change, or at least will be in a position where their personal costs of doing something about it are much more than what they stand to gain. This is the political problem: overall richer people are the greatest contributors to climate change, and they stand to lose the least from the bad effects of climate change. Trump and Scott Morrison come closer to admitting this than most, and politically it seems to have worked in their favour.
- vanniv 7y agoIf anybody were to produce such a model, they would be utterly destroyed. If anybody were to even attempt to apply for grants to do that work, they would be expelled from the university community, and their professional reputation immediately destroyed. There is no incentive to even look to see if you can find a flaw in the orthodoxy.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- keiferski 7y agoThis is a pretty decent article with a misleading headline. Dyson himself doesn’t claim to be the representative of any counter-movement, he simply raises some (admittedly interesting) questions. I don’t know enough about climate science to verify his claims, but pointing out that more people die from the cold than heatwaves (and thus warming will result in less deaths) was something that I hadn’t considered. That’s assuming his data is correct, of course.
- wwweston 7y agoAlso assumes that higher temps don't have secondary effects cascading into more extreme weather or disrupted ecologies with attendant resource issues.
- Gibbon1 7y agoWe can solve all that be having the central banks print more money. That's what we've been doing since the RTOI of oil and gas fell off a cliff in the early 2000's. Working so far.
- jakeinspace 7y agoNobody worried about climate change thinks that additional deaths from heatwaves are going to be a significant issue compared to ecological collapse, food shortages due to crop collapse, and of course rising sea levels causing mass migration.
- AndrewKemendo 7y ago"ecological collapse, food shortages due to crop collapse, and of course rising sea levels causing mass migration" Those statements are so vague in measurement as to mean nothing. I've read the IPCC report and the relevant section says nothing of generalized society ending collapses as people would seem to want you to believe. There's a few that you can read about: 1. A collapse in permafrost may occur (low confidence); 2. collapse of Maize in some regions, may exist under 3°C or more of global warming (low confidence) etc... Ok, those aren't great or desired things, and we need to mitigate that, but the world isn't ending. This isn't even close to a world war, a nuclear bomb going off, a massive solar event that takes out the grid etc... I'd love to see way less apocalyptic language used and more talk about tradeoffs and realistic possible future costs of how we produce and consume vs finding sustainable growth. [1]https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-3/ https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/chapter-3/
- kevinavery 7y ago> e360: Are there people who are knowledgeable about this topic who could do the job of pointing out what you see as the flaws? > Dyson: I am sure there are. But I don’t know who they are. > I have a lot of friends who think the same way I do. But I am sorry to say that most of them are old, and most of them are not experts. My views are very widely shared. One plausible explanation is that as people become knowledgeable, they no longer share his view.
- w3mmpp 7y agoAnother plausible explanation is those who share his view won't admit it publicly to not destroy their career.
- _Microft 7y agoSharing his view and still doing research and publishing results contradicting this view to advance their career seems unlikely to be honest.
- w3mmpp 7y agoWhy? The world is full of people doing an honest job at their level without believing in the direction their industry, as a whole, is taking.
- titzer 7y agoIt's not helpful when scientists share their views outside their specialty and get things wrong. As much as I appreciate and respect Freeman Dyson, I wish he would have kept his views to himself on this particular issue, as he was remarkably ill-informed and stubbornly so. But that said, there's a difference between sharing your view and going on a crusade, which he didn't really seem to do. Now, if he had gone on a crusade, that'd be a different matter.
- _Microft 7y agoArs Technica has an article about Mr. Dyson and in the comments, the author attempts to explain why Dyson might have had the view on climate science that he had. I found the suggested reasons plausible. https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/freeman-dyson-physicist-with-a-sci-fi-bent-has-died-at-96/?comments=1&post=38681790 https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/freeman-dyson-physic...
- cryptoz 7y ago> I have been to Greenland a year ago and saw it for myself. And that’s where the warming is most extreme. And it’s spectacular, no doubt about it. And glaciers are shrinking and so on. > But, there are all sorts of things that are not said, which decreases my feeling of alarm. First of all, the people in Greenland love it. They tell you it’s made their lives a lot easier. They hope it continues. I am not saying none of these consequences are happening. I am just questioning whether they are harmful. His arguments on the topic are bizarrely anecdotal and unscientific. He suggests that the happiness of locals over the past few years of warming is sufficient reason to doubt that it could get worse for Greenland in the future? Making dramatic changes to human environments is not good, people react poorly and things like resource wars can start / have started. Super weird to see such anecdotal experiences extrapolated to "locals love it, so what's the problem?" while dismissing decades of intensive scientific research (not even including modals) that suggest a global chaotic event is happening presently. Also, this: > There’s been a very strong warming, in fact, ever since the Little Ice Age, which was most intense in the 17th century. That certainly was not due to human activity. What does this mean? I went to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age and it lists multiple possible / probable causes of the little ice age that are directly human-related. He dismisses yet another field of scientific research as "certainly not due to human activity" without any evidence to back that up. He makes stuff up, dismisses decades of real science, and claims that major problems aren't real simply because local people don't understand large-scale chaotic events are are 'happy' with warming local climates for now. Bizarre.
- elorenz 7y agoI also went to that Wikipedia page. The “multiple possible / probable causes” listed are: “orbital cycles; decreased solar activity; increased volcanic activity; altered ocean current flows; fluctuations in the human population in different parts of the world causing reforestation, or deforestation; and the inherent variability of global climate change” Only one of those is human related. Bizarre.
- akvadrako 7y agoGreenland is one of the few places we have reasonably accurate temperature reconstructions for the recent past. And they show that during the past few thousand years, when human co2 output was negligible, the temperature changed over decades by 5C.
- sproketboy 7y agoJust use Nuclear and STFU about this useless topic.
- golemiprague 7y agoThere is a huge bias in funds allocation for research, I doubt skeptics get as much or any funding to prove their counter point. Another important point he makes that people from other disciplinaries like biologists are not that involved in the research. It is interesting that Bill Gates put 1 billion into tech companies trying to actually do something while Bezos pledged 10 billion into research and "advocacy", in other words, pushing a political agenda. I think we need a bit more balance in the research of this subject, at least divert 10% of the funds to try to prove the counter point.
- 8bitsrule 7y agoDyson (re Oak Ridge experiments): So if you change the carbon dioxide drastically by a factor of two, the whole behavior of the plant is different. Anyway, that’s so typical of the things they ignore. 'Different'. 'Ignore'. Not Dyson's best day. Oak Ridge was hardly a climate lab. Many studies have followed. This two year-old SA article, Ask the Experts: Does Rising CO2 Benefit Plants? [0]starts with this summary: "Climate change’s negative effects on plants will likely outweigh any gains from elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide levels" [0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-does-rising-co2-benefit-plants1/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-d...