Man has the largest artificial structure ever conceived NAMED after him!!! He deserves respect!
Posted on 04/05/2013 10:12:35 PM PDT by Rocky
Freeman Dyson is a physicist who has been teaching at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton since Albert Einstein was there. When Einstein died in 1955, there was an opening for the title of “most brilliant physicist on the planet.” Dyson has filled it.
So when the global-warming movement came along, a lot of people wondered why he didn’t come along with it. The reason he’s a skeptic is simple, the 89-year-old Dyson said when I phoned him.
“I think any good scientist ought to be a skeptic,” Dyson said.
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Dyson said his skepticism about those computer models was borne out by recent reports of a study by Ed Hawkins of the University of Reading in Great Britain that showed global temperatures were flat between 2000 and 2010 — even though we humans poured record amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere during that decade.
That was vindication for a man who was termed “a civil heretic” in a New York Times Magazine article on his contrarian views. Dyson embraces that label, with its implication that what he opposes is a religious movement. So does his fellow Princeton physicist and fellow skeptic, William Happer.
“There are people who just need a cause that’s bigger than themselves,” said Happer. “Then they can feel virtuous and say other people are not virtuous.”
(Excerpt) Read more at wattsupwiththat.com ...
Dyson says CO2 has been beneficial to plant growth.
Dyson is considered the best physicist without a Nobel Prize, or a Ph.D. Interesting distinction.
Uh, Paul? Did you forget about your first two sentences when you write the third? Seems like asked and answered to me.
“Dyson says CO2 has been beneficial to plant growth.”
Of course. CO2 is plant food, and they can’t get enough of it. If you increase the amount of CO2 they have access to, plants grow faster, and in growing, extract more CO2 from their environment to be stored in their cells. So, it’s a feedback loop that is one of the things that prevents a “runaway” greenhouse effect from happening on Earth.
Another feedback loop is the oceans. If the temperature were to rise enough for the glaciers to melt and raise the sea level, it would increase the volume and temperature of the oceans, both of which are factors that would increase the amount of CO2 that would dissolve in the oceans, and be taken out of the atmosphere.
I thought Brawndo's got Electrolytes, it's what plants crave.
Way back in the 1960’s, Norman Augustine famously said that any computer model that cannot be explained on the back of an envelope is worse than useless, it’s dangerous.
Events have proven him correct.
I wish Dyson's friend and colleague Richard Feynman was still around to back him up.
Feynman was great.
Nice, I love obscure movie quotes.
Looks like he skipped a grade or two.
From the article:
When Einstein died in 1955, there was an opening for the title of “most brilliant physicist on the planet.” Dyson has filled it.
BTW, he has a daughter, Esther, who is a Silicon Valley VC and former gf of Mr. Bill.
I agree with everything you wrote with the following caveat: the oceans may be critical to the absorption of CO2 regardless of the ocean levels, in particular the phytoplankton - the single-cell plants that provide the foundation of the ocean food chain. If the rise in ocean temperatures or fall in salinity due to glacial melting starts to kill off the phytoplankton, a big part of the planet’s ability to absorb CO2 goes away. On the other hand, if the rise in temperatures promotes growth in the phytoplankton population, happy days are here again. Who knows?
Surely you’re joking Mr. Feynman is one of my favorite books
Man has the largest artificial structure ever conceived NAMED after him!!! He deserves respect!
Not to be pedantic, but it's what they call a "reverse feedback loop."
Regards,
Perfect description of the entire Left-Liberal movement.
“Can you imagine the Engineering just to design such a structure?!”
Solubility of gasses in water generally decreases with increasing temperatures, which is why bubbles form in pots of water being boiled, that aren’t boiling yet. (Those are the air coming out of solution.) There are some exceptions but I don’t think CO2 is one of them. That said, I am not an alarmist.
Assuming that it were large enough to hold Mercury, Venus and Earth (and the Moon), I'd think it'd require the raw materials found in all the outer planets and the asteroid belt, and then some. Building a Ringworld would probably be easier.
Actually, for anyone interested in the subject, there was a ST:TNG novel called "The Dyson Sphere", which was okay reading, but had an appendix, which was about 1/4 or 1/3 of the book about the science of such a thing. (I have to admit that I didn't read too much of that either because it was a little dry or little over my head or both.)
“The closer you get to Canada, the more things there are that’ll eat your horse”
I’ve been saying for years that we have really needed Feynman around to eviscerate the AGW Warmist crowd.
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