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The Global Warming Heretic - NYTimes On Freeman Dyson

71 points by eisenkr 18y ago

patrickg-zill 18y ago
Subject matter - interesting. Purple prose by author earnestly trying to convince you of his erudition, and constant asides that do nothing but distract - not interesting.
- 1gor 18y ago
  No, general public needs to learn about his integrity, erudition and impeccable scientific standing. This is important because Dyson's opponents as a rule try some sort of character assassination instead of sticking to the subject matter.
  - kingkongrevenge 18y ago
    Still, the writing is horrible.
    - prewett 18y ago
      Having gone to the article hoping for details on why Dyson disbelieves global warming, I'm disappointed like you. On reflection, I think the author intended the article to be about Dyson himself, and as such, I kind of like the writing. But, yeah, I'm disappointed about the lack of details.
      - electromagnetic 18y ago
        The title of the article here is misleading. He isn't the global warming heretic, he's always been a heretic in everything that he's done or talked about. The simple fact is he's quite often accurate.
    - dschobel 18y ago
      The article is more of a character study and description of modern science when it crosses into politics / pop-culture. Dyson's view is simple: he thinks the doom & gloom predictions of those who are forecasting the end of life within the next hundred years is simply not borne out by the facts.
Rod 18y ago
Quoting the great Bertrand Russell: "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." Interesting how so many people who know NOTHING about Science are SO sure that global warming is caused by man. Such dogma reminds me of the times of the 16th century Inquisition: no amount of evidence will ever convince the nutcase warmists that there MIGHT be a possibility that global warming is not caused by humans. Dyson is a top physicist. Just because he dared to go against the mainstream dogma, people seem to want to lynch him. I thought that we, humans, had evolved from our tribal and primitive ways. But we still get carried away by mass hysteria and delusion. There's no place for politics or ideology in Science. Only observation and experiment matter. Dyson is not alone. Many other physicists have been cautious and warned that we should not jump to conclusions based on noisy, ambiguous and incomplete data. They, too, were ostracized. So much for tolerance...
- DanielBMarkham 18y ago
  Quoting the great Bertrand Russell No need to do that. Socrates was saying the same thing two thousand years ago. I've come to the conclusion from watching other people that some people just have to know. I guess I can understand. It has to be hard to spend your life studying in a certain field and end up with "Well gee. It sorta looks this way guys, but we don't really know." When people slam the church for all the bad things they did in the past, they miss an important point -- the common denominator isn't religion, it's people. Certain people want to believe their stuff fervently. They want to believe that their belief system holds critical truths, and they want to persecute and ostracize those who fail to fall in line. It's not a problem with religion. It's humans that are the cause of this behavior. So it's not surprising to see church attendance down and scientific religious-thinking up. All those folks had to go somewhere, right?
  - Rod 18y ago
    OK, I attributed the quote to the wrong philosopher ;-) Science is not perfect. After all, Science is a human activity and humans are not perfect. Ideally, there should be no place for dogma in Science. In practise, there is some. Still, let us put things in perspective: Science is inherently non-dogmatic, while Religion is inherently dogmatic. I am not diminishing one nor the other. I am observing that they have entirely different essences and domains. The goal of Science is not to attain an "absolute truth". Indeed, one may study Quantum Mechanics for a lifetime and still feel uneasy about it. But the truth is that just as long as we can explain experimental results and observations with our scientific theories, we are making progress. No scientist will ever know everything about his field, but that does not mean he can't contribute to it. For centuries Newtonian Mechanics dominated. Then Einstein came up with his Theory of Relativity that could explain, for instance, the anomalous orbit of Mercury. In a few years, his theory was accepted. There was dogma, but it was not a big obstacle. By contrast, many religious fanatics in the U.S. in the 1960s still believed the Earth was flat, and when confronted with photos taken from Space they replied "OK, it looks a bit roundish at the edges." That is dogma. That is close-mindedness. It's not Religion's fault, it's a problem with us, humans (like you mentioned). In Science one should always keep a fresh mind and be willing to accept what goes against the dogma. Otherwise, we will end up in a new dark age where we have advanced technology but no true knowledge.
eisenkr 18y ago
I just posted an essay where Freeman Dyson explains his own views about the topic (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=532426 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=532426 or, more directly, http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html )
hhm 18y ago
"A group of scientists will be sitting around the cafeteria, and one will idly wonder if there is an integer where, if you take its last digit and move it to the front, turning, say, 112 to 211, it’s possible to exactly double the value. Dyson will immediately say, “Oh, that’s not difficult,” allow two short beats to pass and then add, “but of course the smallest such number is 18 digits long.”" So how did he know that?
- byrneseyeview 18y ago
  Some people investigate stuff like that, and hold on to the answer for a long time. For this one, I guess you'd start by narrowing it down. The number must have the start-end pair of 1,2; 2,4; 3,6; or 4,8. That narrows it down to 4E16. Then you can narrow it down further by looking at what other digit-pairs are possible. You might assume it has a palindrome in the middle, but that digits near the end are not palindroms (e.g. it could have ...1001..., but couldn't be 101....102). At some point, you might have enough simple rules like that to just use a computer. Edit: I'm also interested in exactly how he figured it out, though.
  - byrneseyeview 18y ago
    Maybe you'd lop off the last few digits to make it easier: Let A be the highest digit, B be the lowest, and X be the ones in the middle. Find X, A, and B, where 2(X-A*E16+A+BE16-B)=X That way, you can at least get each digit on one side, which might make it a more tractable problem. This is very frustrating! It's easy to narrow it down a whole lot, but it's still going to be intractable.
    - shrughes 18y ago
      Spoiler Alert! The number in general (I said, Spoiler Alert!) can be written as _y_ _x_ where 0 <= x <= 9 and the value of the number is 10y + x. Then it must satisfy for some k 2(10y+x) = (10^k)x + y Simplify that and you can show that 10^k - 2 must be divisible by 19, which means k=17 (or 35, or 53, ...). Once you have that, pick x = 2, 3, or 4 and solve for y, and you have your 18-digit number. (Letting x = 1 gives you an 18-digit numbers whose first digit is 0, which doesn't count.)
ruby_roo 18y ago
I personally feel that it is better to err on the side of caution in regards to global warming. I say "feel" because I'm just not smart enough to navigate fact from fiction on this issue anymore. There's going to be extremes on both sides, but I don't see what we have to gain by not taking better care of our planet. Even if global warming is only partially manmade, shouldn't we do what we can to minimize the effect? And plain old pollution is a visible problem regardless of warming effects; it's now in our food and water supply. That is how I see this issue. Hope that is a reasonable approach considering all the FUD out there. I don't see how society is harmed by erring on the side of caution on this one.
- eugenejen 18y ago
  I personally feel it will be futile to be cautious. Instead, we should always prepare for adapting to changes.
- robotrout 18y ago
  "I don't see how society is harmed by erring on the side of caution" Let me try to help you see then. Even though it's extremely important that you prevent tooth decay, and even if you have a huge chunk of "Jolly Rancher" stuck between your teeth, it would be a non-optimal use of resources to use your last match as you were shivering on the side of a mountain with a broken leg, to dislodge the offending piece of candy. I'm sure you'll agree with this, in this extreme case. But what you are missing, is that humans have a limited supply of productivity that we use to feed and house the populations of our respective countries, and hopefully, to build infrastructure for the next generation to feed and house their populations. When you siphon off that productivity to dislodge a piece of candy, you better be damn sure the candy is going to harm you. In the case of the warmists, since you are literally stealing food and medicine from people's mouths with your demands of what is necessary, you better be damn certain you're right.
  - cgranade 18y ago
    Given how much we spend on entertainment and other luxuries, is it really fair to say call spending money on what is likely essential to the preservation of our species "literally stealing food and medicine from people's mouths?" Hell, given what we spend on killing each other over oil and religion, how is it that spending money on understanding and dealing with climate change is stealing? In the United States alone, we have spent over $600 billion on the Iraq war-- even a few of those billions could make the difference between action and inaction on climate change.
cliffw 18y ago
Dyson was originally a mathematician and is judging global warming by the standards of a mathematical proof. Of course, no proof outside mathematics can meet that strict standard. Hence, his global warming doubts.
dejb 18y ago
Quick summary Dyson isn't so sure that global warming is cause by rising levels of CO2. Either way he doesn't see this as being a big problem as global warming would be a good thing for the world. He is more a Global Warming Embracer rather than a Global Warming Denier.
LargeWu 18y ago
I think Dyson's biggest hangup seems to be that much of the doomsaying surrounding global warming is based on computerized models, which is not, strictly speaking, science. You probably can't empirically test most of the climate models being produced.
- cgranade 18y ago
  Not science? Better tell the computer scientists and the computational physicists... Science is, at its most basic, our attempt to understand the world. As such, science employs many different tools and approaches, including numerical modeling. In particular. numerical analysis is a very well understood field of mathematics that allows us to rigorously analyze complicated problems by using one of the most innovative tools ever devised: the computer. Of course, one can make an inaccurate model as easily as one can write down an inaccurate equation or make a mistake in a derivation. That doesn't mean that the tool isn't a part of science.
  - LargeWu 18y ago
    I'm not saying models aren't tools of science. They are very important. However, the most important part of science is the part about independently recreating and verifying results. You simply cannot do that with long range climate models without waiting for that time to elapse and seeing if the model predicted what it was supposed to predict. I'm not saying the models are wrong, or that climate change doesn't exist. What I'm saying is that calling the predictions of these models "science" is a bit misleading. The underlying factors maybe be based on scientific knowledge, but the models themselves are based on statistics, not science, because they can't be empirically verified.
    - joeyo 18y ago
      It sounds like you are arguing that science needs to be observational to be "real." I'd argue that science needs both observations and theory and that either half alone is incomplete. Think of the models as a manifestation of the theory. It would be nice if you could solve a set of equations for the atmosphere in closed form, wouldn't it? But you can't so you run a numerical simulation. Anyway, it's hardly surprising that so much effort has gone into theoretical climate science, since, as you observed, it's difficult running a controlled experiment with the atmosphere.
anamax 18y ago
Speaking of data, we've been dropping probes into deep water for almost a decade now. Since the heat capacity of the oceans dwarfs that of the atmosphere, surely the temperature of the water is relevant. What are the oceans doing? If they're getting colder, the earth may well be losing heat, even if the atmosphere is getting warmer (which it hasn't been for almost a decade). It would also be nice to know the temperature of the earth because its heat capacity dwarfs that of the oceans.
galactus 18y ago
Lets be honest, the REAL problem here with the idea of global warming caused by humans is that it can not simply be solved by the market. This possibility seems to make hardcore libertarians so uncomfortable that they can only hope no such problem exist.
- tome 18y ago
  This is an incredibly astute point, and shows great awareness of human factors. I'm very pleased to see it on hacker news.
jacoblyles 18y ago
The use of the word "heretic" is telling. This issue has long since taken on the overtone of a religious debate rather than a scientific one. I don't think someone should be considered a "heretic" when he has on his side an MIT climate physicist, a former director of climate science at NASA, a Nobel physicist, IPCC participants, and hundreds of other relevant intellectuals. Whoever said "the debate on Global Warming is over" ought to be forever considered a disingenuous political hack.
- dejb 18y ago
  Yes it is telling of the way the journalist hoped to frame the story. A good way to spice up an otherwise ordinary story. Better than 'Aged Physicist disagrees with dominant theory'. I'd call it a piece of disingenuous hack work but it worked so well I have to admire it.
samas 18y ago
Unless I am mistaken, acidification of the oceans has been demonstrated. So has the loss of large volumes of fresh water stored in glaciers, as well as the loss of coastal land as sea level rises. Natural systems are fragile, and we continue to poke and push them, with damages (for example, loss of biodiversity) that are not clearly obvious and that are in many cases simply irreparable. I won't belabor this point, although obviously much more could be said. Burning carbon based materials to generate energy is, in the long term, unsustainable--there is a finite supply, and getting at the remaining sources will continue to become more expensive and more environmentally invasive (see: mountaintop removal). But enough about the environment, there are more important considerations (After all, we will eventually leave this planet, right?). Our eventual shift to renewable sources of energy is inevitable. Worries about the consequences of climate change are finally gaining momentum in the public conscious. That means that now is the time to go full speed on development and roll-out of renewable energy. Mr. Dyson mentions that "By restricting CO2 you make life more expensive and hurt the poor." Interesting comment from the man described as looking "like a person taking the longer view," because (given time) cheap abundant energy would do an incredible amount for the poor and starving. Deserts could be irrigated and farmed with desalinized water, pumps could preserve our coastal cities, really, the applications of cheap and abundant renewable energy are limited by our imaginations. Why leave that for our childrens' or grandchildrens' generation? What are we waiting for? There is always a place for some healthy skepticism, but I fear that with respect to this particular issue skepticism has given the world plenty of motivation to procrastinate.
- robotrout 18y ago
  With all due respect, I could have cut and pasted your post from any global warming website. I note this is your first comment on this group. Did you come just for this topic? In this utopia you describe, you neglect to explain what miraculous devices will produce this infinite energy supply. I think that's an important point that you left out. If you're wrong on that point, then we've hurt people for nothing, right? Since we're cutting and pasting from web sites, let me just paste the following from http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html , Everything else is just philosophy. ________________ Water vapor constitutes Earth's most significant greenhouse gas, accounting for about 95% of Earth's greenhouse effect (4). Interestingly, many "facts and figures' regarding global warming completely ignore the powerful effects of water vapor in the greenhouse system, carelessly (perhaps, deliberately) overstating human impacts as much as 20-fold. Water vapor is 99.999% of natural origin. Other atmospheric greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and miscellaneous other gases (CFC's, etc.), are also mostly of natural origin (except for the latter, which is mostly anthropogenic). Human activites contribute slightly to greenhouse gas concentrations through farming, manufacturing, power generation, and transportation. However, these emissions are so dwarfed in comparison to emissions from natural sources we can do nothing about, that even the most costly efforts to limit human emissions would have a very small-- perhaps undetectable-- effect on global climate.
dschobel 18y ago
You have to admire Dyson's blunt honesty: If what he says were obviously wrong, he wouldn’t have achieved what he has. But Hansen has turned his science into ideology. He’s a very persuasive fellow and has the air of knowing everything. He has all the credentials. I have none. I don’t have a Ph.D. He’s published hundreds of papers on climate. I haven’t. By the public standard he’s qualified to talk and I’m not. But I do because I think I’m right. I think I have a broad view of the subject, which Hansen does not. I think it’s true my career doesn’t depend on it, whereas his does. I never claim to be an expert on climate. I think it’s more a matter of judgement than knowledge. I especially love the point about Hansen's career hinging on his theory being borne out which seems to be a general issue with science which crosses over into the mainstream consciousness.
electromagnetic 18y ago
I find it interesting that the planet is presumed to be warming at roughly 0.02C a year, yet we pump out [enough energy to raise the temperature by 20C a year]. (Ed: Sorry, I'd mistaken my numbers. Our potential to raise the temperature of the atmosphere is actually 200 times what I'd mistakenly put (originally 0.1C). Our potential to raise the temperature of the oceans is 0.1C a year, when in fact the oceans temperature raises at 0.01C. Sorry for the mistake folks!) I have several problems with all the eco-energy projects. Namely wind turbines are likely to cause more ecological problems than solve, I'm sorry but they're killing off bats in phenomenal numbers and killing a species high up on the food chain causes problems. We do it to seals, but we eat the fish that they would so ecologically it's not all that harmful... unless we're going to start eating millions of tons of bugs a year, I think killing off the bats might cause a serious problem. I mean the last thing we need are plagues of locust. The other problem with wind turbines is that they slow local wind speeds, if this is produced on a global scale this could inhibit the transfer of energy to the night-side of earth to be radiated away. This is the same problem that wave-energy will produce, mass use of this technology will cause a reduction in water flow, which in turn will cause more energy to be stored by the water. This one is particularly unpredictable: reduced tidal action will reduce the cooling effect of water vaporisation, however this will likely be balanced by an increase in evaporation, yet this could potentially be disastrous because hotter water = stronger storms, so mass use of wave-power technologies could drastically increase tropical storms, more than global warming ever could. Hopefully the wind turbines can slow these down! I haven't even touch on the fact that wind turbines place angular stress on the ground they sit on, which on a large scale has never been predicted. I mean we're talking about placing angular forces on entire tectonic plates that will change as the direction of the wind. The effect of this is inherently unknown, and I don't want to know what could happen at stressed fault-lines. My problem with solar power is that it reduces the albedo of the planet and ultimately turns the electrical energy into thermal (infrared) energy, which is then trapped by CO2! Lowering the planets albedo will increase global warming even if we decrease the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, this problem will be compounded if they ever get the holy grail of solar energy, the orbital solar power plant. Placing solar power plants into space won't increase the planets albedo, however it will transfer ridiculous amounts of energy to the planet and to be viable they only need a 20-30% efficiency due to the sheer abundance of energy. However, the other 70-80% will still be absorbed by the atmosphere and convert to thermal energy. (If anyone doubts this, please put a cup of water in the microwave and this is essentially the result as 70-80% of the energy will be absorbed by the atmosphere, which is roughly equivalent to a 10 meter layer of distilled water) Global Warming is (95% probable) a byproduct of human civilization in one way or another. However the solution proposed by environmentalists is a planet wide geo-forming project. I think the potential for harm could be much, much greater from geo-forming the entire planet than sea levels rising. We know what global warming could do to the planet, we don't know what geo-forming could do to the planet and no one is looking at it. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person on the planet that realises the solutions to the problem are potentially worse than the problem itself.

71 points by eisenkr 18y ago

Subject matter - interesting. Purple prose by author earnestly trying to convince you of his erudition, and constant asides that do nothing but distract - not interesting.

1gor 18y ago
No, general public needs to learn about his integrity, erudition and impeccable scientific standing. This is important because Dyson's opponents as a rule try some sort of character assassination instead of sticking to the subject matter.
- kingkongrevenge 18y ago
  Still, the writing is horrible.
  - prewett 18y ago
    Having gone to the article hoping for details on why Dyson disbelieves global warming, I'm disappointed like you. On reflection, I think the author intended the article to be about Dyson himself, and as such, I kind of like the writing. But, yeah, I'm disappointed about the lack of details.
    - electromagnetic 18y ago
      The title of the article here is misleading. He isn't the global warming heretic, he's always been a heretic in everything that he's done or talked about. The simple fact is he's quite often accurate.
  - dschobel 18y ago
    The article is more of a character study and description of modern science when it crosses into politics / pop-culture. Dyson's view is simple: he thinks the doom & gloom predictions of those who are forecasting the end of life within the next hundred years is simply not borne out by the facts.

Rod 18y ago

Quoting the great Bertrand Russell: "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." Interesting how so many people who know NOTHING about Science are SO sure that global warming is caused by man. Such dogma reminds me of the times of the 16th century Inquisition: no amount of evidence will ever convince the nutcase warmists that there MIGHT be a possibility that global warming is not caused by humans. Dyson is a top physicist. Just because he dared to go against the mainstream dogma, people seem to want to lynch him. I thought that we, humans, had evolved from our tribal and primitive ways. But we still get carried away by mass hysteria and delusion. There's no place for politics or ideology in Science. Only observation and experiment matter. Dyson is not alone. Many other physicists have been cautious and warned that we should not jump to conclusions based on noisy, ambiguous and incomplete data. They, too, were ostracized. So much for tolerance...

DanielBMarkham 18y ago
Quoting the great Bertrand Russell No need to do that. Socrates was saying the same thing two thousand years ago. I've come to the conclusion from watching other people that some people just have to know. I guess I can understand. It has to be hard to spend your life studying in a certain field and end up with "Well gee. It sorta looks this way guys, but we don't really know." When people slam the church for all the bad things they did in the past, they miss an important point -- the common denominator isn't religion, it's people. Certain people want to believe their stuff fervently. They want to believe that their belief system holds critical truths, and they want to persecute and ostracize those who fail to fall in line. It's not a problem with religion. It's humans that are the cause of this behavior. So it's not surprising to see church attendance down and scientific religious-thinking up. All those folks had to go somewhere, right?
- Rod 18y ago
  OK, I attributed the quote to the wrong philosopher ;-) Science is not perfect. After all, Science is a human activity and humans are not perfect. Ideally, there should be no place for dogma in Science. In practise, there is some. Still, let us put things in perspective: Science is inherently non-dogmatic, while Religion is inherently dogmatic. I am not diminishing one nor the other. I am observing that they have entirely different essences and domains. The goal of Science is not to attain an "absolute truth". Indeed, one may study Quantum Mechanics for a lifetime and still feel uneasy about it. But the truth is that just as long as we can explain experimental results and observations with our scientific theories, we are making progress. No scientist will ever know everything about his field, but that does not mean he can't contribute to it. For centuries Newtonian Mechanics dominated. Then Einstein came up with his Theory of Relativity that could explain, for instance, the anomalous orbit of Mercury. In a few years, his theory was accepted. There was dogma, but it was not a big obstacle. By contrast, many religious fanatics in the U.S. in the 1960s still believed the Earth was flat, and when confronted with photos taken from Space they replied "OK, it looks a bit roundish at the edges." That is dogma. That is close-mindedness. It's not Religion's fault, it's a problem with us, humans (like you mentioned). In Science one should always keep a fresh mind and be willing to accept what goes against the dogma. Otherwise, we will end up in a new dark age where we have advanced technology but no true knowledge.

eisenkr 18y ago

I just posted an essay where Freeman Dyson explains his own views about the topic (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=532426 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=532426 or, more directly, http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html )

hhm 18y ago

"A group of scientists will be sitting around the cafeteria, and one will idly wonder if there is an integer where, if you take its last digit and move it to the front, turning, say, 112 to 211, it’s possible to exactly double the value. Dyson will immediately say, “Oh, that’s not difficult,” allow two short beats to pass and then add, “but of course the smallest such number is 18 digits long.”" So how did he know that?

byrneseyeview 18y ago
Some people investigate stuff like that, and hold on to the answer for a long time. For this one, I guess you'd start by narrowing it down. The number must have the start-end pair of 1,2; 2,4; 3,6; or 4,8. That narrows it down to 4E16. Then you can narrow it down further by looking at what other digit-pairs are possible. You might assume it has a palindrome in the middle, but that digits near the end are not palindroms (e.g. it could have ...1001..., but couldn't be 101....102). At some point, you might have enough simple rules like that to just use a computer. Edit: I'm also interested in exactly how he figured it out, though.
- byrneseyeview 18y ago
  Maybe you'd lop off the last few digits to make it easier: Let A be the highest digit, B be the lowest, and X be the ones in the middle. Find X, A, and B, where 2(X-A*E16+A+BE16-B)=X That way, you can at least get each digit on one side, which might make it a more tractable problem. This is very frustrating! It's easy to narrow it down a whole lot, but it's still going to be intractable.
  - shrughes 18y ago
    Spoiler Alert! The number in general (I said, Spoiler Alert!) can be written as _y_ _x_ where 0 <= x <= 9 and the value of the number is 10y + x. Then it must satisfy for some k 2(10y+x) = (10^k)x + y Simplify that and you can show that 10^k - 2 must be divisible by 19, which means k=17 (or 35, or 53, ...). Once you have that, pick x = 2, 3, or 4 and solve for y, and you have your 18-digit number. (Letting x = 1 gives you an 18-digit numbers whose first digit is 0, which doesn't count.)

ruby_roo 18y ago

I personally feel that it is better to err on the side of caution in regards to global warming. I say "feel" because I'm just not smart enough to navigate fact from fiction on this issue anymore. There's going to be extremes on both sides, but I don't see what we have to gain by not taking better care of our planet. Even if global warming is only partially manmade, shouldn't we do what we can to minimize the effect? And plain old pollution is a visible problem regardless of warming effects; it's now in our food and water supply. That is how I see this issue. Hope that is a reasonable approach considering all the FUD out there. I don't see how society is harmed by erring on the side of caution on this one.

eugenejen 18y ago
I personally feel it will be futile to be cautious. Instead, we should always prepare for adapting to changes.
robotrout 18y ago
"I don't see how society is harmed by erring on the side of caution" Let me try to help you see then. Even though it's extremely important that you prevent tooth decay, and even if you have a huge chunk of "Jolly Rancher" stuck between your teeth, it would be a non-optimal use of resources to use your last match as you were shivering on the side of a mountain with a broken leg, to dislodge the offending piece of candy. I'm sure you'll agree with this, in this extreme case. But what you are missing, is that humans have a limited supply of productivity that we use to feed and house the populations of our respective countries, and hopefully, to build infrastructure for the next generation to feed and house their populations. When you siphon off that productivity to dislodge a piece of candy, you better be damn sure the candy is going to harm you. In the case of the warmists, since you are literally stealing food and medicine from people's mouths with your demands of what is necessary, you better be damn certain you're right.
- cgranade 18y ago
  Given how much we spend on entertainment and other luxuries, is it really fair to say call spending money on what is likely essential to the preservation of our species "literally stealing food and medicine from people's mouths?" Hell, given what we spend on killing each other over oil and religion, how is it that spending money on understanding and dealing with climate change is stealing? In the United States alone, we have spent over $600 billion on the Iraq war-- even a few of those billions could make the difference between action and inaction on climate change.

cliffw 18y ago

Dyson was originally a mathematician and is judging global warming by the standards of a mathematical proof. Of course, no proof outside mathematics can meet that strict standard. Hence, his global warming doubts.

dejb 18y ago

Quick summary Dyson isn't so sure that global warming is cause by rising levels of CO2. Either way he doesn't see this as being a big problem as global warming would be a good thing for the world. He is more a Global Warming Embracer rather than a Global Warming Denier.

LargeWu 18y ago

I think Dyson's biggest hangup seems to be that much of the doomsaying surrounding global warming is based on computerized models, which is not, strictly speaking, science. You probably can't empirically test most of the climate models being produced.

cgranade 18y ago
Not science? Better tell the computer scientists and the computational physicists... Science is, at its most basic, our attempt to understand the world. As such, science employs many different tools and approaches, including numerical modeling. In particular. numerical analysis is a very well understood field of mathematics that allows us to rigorously analyze complicated problems by using one of the most innovative tools ever devised: the computer. Of course, one can make an inaccurate model as easily as one can write down an inaccurate equation or make a mistake in a derivation. That doesn't mean that the tool isn't a part of science.
- LargeWu 18y ago
  I'm not saying models aren't tools of science. They are very important. However, the most important part of science is the part about independently recreating and verifying results. You simply cannot do that with long range climate models without waiting for that time to elapse and seeing if the model predicted what it was supposed to predict. I'm not saying the models are wrong, or that climate change doesn't exist. What I'm saying is that calling the predictions of these models "science" is a bit misleading. The underlying factors maybe be based on scientific knowledge, but the models themselves are based on statistics, not science, because they can't be empirically verified.
  - joeyo 18y ago
    It sounds like you are arguing that science needs to be observational to be "real." I'd argue that science needs both observations and theory and that either half alone is incomplete. Think of the models as a manifestation of the theory. It would be nice if you could solve a set of equations for the atmosphere in closed form, wouldn't it? But you can't so you run a numerical simulation. Anyway, it's hardly surprising that so much effort has gone into theoretical climate science, since, as you observed, it's difficult running a controlled experiment with the atmosphere.

anamax 18y ago

Speaking of data, we've been dropping probes into deep water for almost a decade now. Since the heat capacity of the oceans dwarfs that of the atmosphere, surely the temperature of the water is relevant. What are the oceans doing? If they're getting colder, the earth may well be losing heat, even if the atmosphere is getting warmer (which it hasn't been for almost a decade). It would also be nice to know the temperature of the earth because its heat capacity dwarfs that of the oceans.

galactus 18y ago

Lets be honest, the REAL problem here with the idea of global warming caused by humans is that it can not simply be solved by the market. This possibility seems to make hardcore libertarians so uncomfortable that they can only hope no such problem exist.

tome 18y ago
This is an incredibly astute point, and shows great awareness of human factors. I'm very pleased to see it on hacker news.

jacoblyles 18y ago

The use of the word "heretic" is telling. This issue has long since taken on the overtone of a religious debate rather than a scientific one. I don't think someone should be considered a "heretic" when he has on his side an MIT climate physicist, a former director of climate science at NASA, a Nobel physicist, IPCC participants, and hundreds of other relevant intellectuals. Whoever said "the debate on Global Warming is over" ought to be forever considered a disingenuous political hack.

dejb 18y ago
Yes it is telling of the way the journalist hoped to frame the story. A good way to spice up an otherwise ordinary story. Better than 'Aged Physicist disagrees with dominant theory'. I'd call it a piece of disingenuous hack work but it worked so well I have to admire it.

samas 18y ago

Unless I am mistaken, acidification of the oceans has been demonstrated. So has the loss of large volumes of fresh water stored in glaciers, as well as the loss of coastal land as sea level rises. Natural systems are fragile, and we continue to poke and push them, with damages (for example, loss of biodiversity) that are not clearly obvious and that are in many cases simply irreparable. I won't belabor this point, although obviously much more could be said. Burning carbon based materials to generate energy is, in the long term, unsustainable--there is a finite supply, and getting at the remaining sources will continue to become more expensive and more environmentally invasive (see: mountaintop removal). But enough about the environment, there are more important considerations (After all, we will eventually leave this planet, right?). Our eventual shift to renewable sources of energy is inevitable. Worries about the consequences of climate change are finally gaining momentum in the public conscious. That means that now is the time to go full speed on development and roll-out of renewable energy. Mr. Dyson mentions that "By restricting CO2 you make life more expensive and hurt the poor." Interesting comment from the man described as looking "like a person taking the longer view," because (given time) cheap abundant energy would do an incredible amount for the poor and starving. Deserts could be irrigated and farmed with desalinized water, pumps could preserve our coastal cities, really, the applications of cheap and abundant renewable energy are limited by our imaginations. Why leave that for our childrens' or grandchildrens' generation? What are we waiting for? There is always a place for some healthy skepticism, but I fear that with respect to this particular issue skepticism has given the world plenty of motivation to procrastinate.

robotrout 18y ago
With all due respect, I could have cut and pasted your post from any global warming website. I note this is your first comment on this group. Did you come just for this topic? In this utopia you describe, you neglect to explain what miraculous devices will produce this infinite energy supply. I think that's an important point that you left out. If you're wrong on that point, then we've hurt people for nothing, right? Since we're cutting and pasting from web sites, let me just paste the following from http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html , Everything else is just philosophy. ________________ Water vapor constitutes Earth's most significant greenhouse gas, accounting for about 95% of Earth's greenhouse effect (4). Interestingly, many "facts and figures' regarding global warming completely ignore the powerful effects of water vapor in the greenhouse system, carelessly (perhaps, deliberately) overstating human impacts as much as 20-fold. Water vapor is 99.999% of natural origin. Other atmospheric greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and miscellaneous other gases (CFC's, etc.), are also mostly of natural origin (except for the latter, which is mostly anthropogenic). Human activites contribute slightly to greenhouse gas concentrations through farming, manufacturing, power generation, and transportation. However, these emissions are so dwarfed in comparison to emissions from natural sources we can do nothing about, that even the most costly efforts to limit human emissions would have a very small-- perhaps undetectable-- effect on global climate.

dschobel 18y ago

You have to admire Dyson's blunt honesty: If what he says were obviously wrong, he wouldn’t have achieved what he has. But Hansen has turned his science into ideology. He’s a very persuasive fellow and has the air of knowing everything. He has all the credentials. I have none. I don’t have a Ph.D. He’s published hundreds of papers on climate. I haven’t. By the public standard he’s qualified to talk and I’m not. But I do because I think I’m right. I think I have a broad view of the subject, which Hansen does not. I think it’s true my career doesn’t depend on it, whereas his does. I never claim to be an expert on climate. I think it’s more a matter of judgement than knowledge. I especially love the point about Hansen's career hinging on his theory being borne out which seems to be a general issue with science which crosses over into the mainstream consciousness.

electromagnetic 18y ago

I find it interesting that the planet is presumed to be warming at roughly 0.02C a year, yet we pump out [enough energy to raise the temperature by 20C a year]. (Ed: Sorry, I'd mistaken my numbers. Our potential to raise the temperature of the atmosphere is actually 200 times what I'd mistakenly put (originally 0.1C). Our potential to raise the temperature of the oceans is 0.1C a year, when in fact the oceans temperature raises at 0.01C. Sorry for the mistake folks!) I have several problems with all the eco-energy projects. Namely wind turbines are likely to cause more ecological problems than solve, I'm sorry but they're killing off bats in phenomenal numbers and killing a species high up on the food chain causes problems. We do it to seals, but we eat the fish that they would so ecologically it's not all that harmful... unless we're going to start eating millions of tons of bugs a year, I think killing off the bats might cause a serious problem. I mean the last thing we need are plagues of locust. The other problem with wind turbines is that they slow local wind speeds, if this is produced on a global scale this could inhibit the transfer of energy to the night-side of earth to be radiated away. This is the same problem that wave-energy will produce, mass use of this technology will cause a reduction in water flow, which in turn will cause more energy to be stored by the water. This one is particularly unpredictable: reduced tidal action will reduce the cooling effect of water vaporisation, however this will likely be balanced by an increase in evaporation, yet this could potentially be disastrous because hotter water = stronger storms, so mass use of wave-power technologies could drastically increase tropical storms, more than global warming ever could. Hopefully the wind turbines can slow these down! I haven't even touch on the fact that wind turbines place angular stress on the ground they sit on, which on a large scale has never been predicted. I mean we're talking about placing angular forces on entire tectonic plates that will change as the direction of the wind. The effect of this is inherently unknown, and I don't want to know what could happen at stressed fault-lines. My problem with solar power is that it reduces the albedo of the planet and ultimately turns the electrical energy into thermal (infrared) energy, which is then trapped by CO2! Lowering the planets albedo will increase global warming even if we decrease the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, this problem will be compounded if they ever get the holy grail of solar energy, the orbital solar power plant. Placing solar power plants into space won't increase the planets albedo, however it will transfer ridiculous amounts of energy to the planet and to be viable they only need a 20-30% efficiency due to the sheer abundance of energy. However, the other 70-80% will still be absorbed by the atmosphere and convert to thermal energy. (If anyone doubts this, please put a cup of water in the microwave and this is essentially the result as 70-80% of the energy will be absorbed by the atmosphere, which is roughly equivalent to a 10 meter layer of distilled water) Global Warming is (95% probable) a byproduct of human civilization in one way or another. However the solution proposed by environmentalists is a planet wide geo-forming project. I think the potential for harm could be much, much greater from geo-forming the entire planet than sea levels rising. We know what global warming could do to the planet, we don't know what geo-forming could do to the planet and no one is looking at it. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person on the planet that realises the solutions to the problem are potentially worse than the problem itself.