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Heretics are sometimes right, but not every time. Few know that Manabe’s 1972 paper proposed a solution of reducing insolation to offset a doubling in carbon di
by westcort 2y ago
Heretics are sometimes right, but not every time. Few know that Manabe’s 1972 paper proposed a solution of reducing insolation to offset a doubling in carbon dioxide levels. And that could still work, but like the solution of carbon sequestration in topsoil, probably will not be done in time before tipping points are irreversibly triggered.
Dyson believed that, like Hari Seldon in the Foundation series, suppressing doom-saying would help bring about a desired future of galactic conquest for humanity.
It is worth noting that he engineered the firebombing of Berlin. The pattern of bombing was designed by him to start a kind of fire tornado to consume the city. With that experience, perhaps he knew something about the importance of influencing scientific opinion to steer things toward a desired end.
Edit: I was wrong on a few details (the firestorm was not in Berlin, it happened in Dresden and Hamburg; some of Manabe’s publications were published in 1971; and Dyson was not the only one to work on the firebombing math)
- defrost 2y agoThe Manabe paper was Estimates of future changes of climate due to increase of carbon dioxide concentration in the air ? That's cited as 1971 (four papers in 1971, five in 1972) [1] Worth mentioning his 1967 paper Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity [2] was considered "most influential climate science paper of all time" [3] unlike this Dyson essay. IIRC Dyson built upon the work of Jacob Bronowski [4] whose work on bombing optimisation remained classified until well after his death. [1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=GPkBB-YAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=GPkBB-YAAAAJ... [2] https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atsc/24/3/1520-0469_1967_024_0241_teotaw_2_0_co_2.xml?tab_body=pdf https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atsc/24/3/1520-04... [3] https://theconversation.com/the-most-influential-climate-science-paper-of-all-time-169382 https://theconversation.com/the-most-influential-climate-sci... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Bronowski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Bronowski EDIT: FWiW I gave westcort a vote for a good comment- out by a year and incorrect German city are minor mistakes we all make. I chased up the details as the coment piqued my interest about a Manabe paper that wasn't one of the few I'd read, etc.
- _dark_matter_ 2y agoFor anyone else wondering about this, it was the bombing of Hamburg, not Berlin (also called Operation Gomorrah). I found one source that does say Dyson was acting as an analyst for the RAF at the time: https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/apocalypse-dresden-february-1945 https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/apocalypse-dr...