Beam me to Planet Gore !
How refreshing.
Freeman Dyson is a REAL Scientist!
Ping
[With apologies to Isaiah 14:12] How art thou fallen from truth, O Scientists!
The NYT writer concludes with, “...and then they were talking about windmills.”
Quixotic but profound; true genius lies in recognizing the depths of one’s own ignorance, not his abandonment of caution.
Gee Al Gore you are such an expert on global warming and are backed by a huge “consensus” of scientists, why don’t you publicly debate Dyson? It would be child’s play for you to dismiss his arguments. Excelsior! (heavy sarcasm)
Thanks for the post - Dyson is a most impressive individual, and it was great to read his opinions on AGW.
Most important, IMO, was his critique of climate modeling and the modeling community.
Most people think that direct absorption of infrared energy by CO2 is the basis for any hypothetical warming, but in fact, the amount of such absorption is limited (Beer’s Law, for all you who stayed awake during college chemistry), and is unlikely to lead to any significant problems.
The only way you get to catastrophic levels of warming is by positive feedback, and the only way we can currently deal with feedback processes is by modelling. And to rigorously model climate feedback, you have to take account everything from cosmic rays at the atomic scale (which affect cloud formation) to the earth’s albedo (or reflectiveness), which involves a scale of continental size, as well as scores of factors at intermediate scale.
No model can hope to do that - predicting the stock market ten years out would be easier. And (as Dyson points out) there are also really complex dynamic biological factors involved as well, which I don’t think modelers have even begun to apply.
How good the models are, I have no idea - but on an absolute temperature scale, they’d have to be reliable to about 1 part in 300 to predict a one degree rise in temperature - simple air pollution models (which treat much simpler problems) aren’t even good to +/- 1%.
So as far as I’m concerned (and I expect Dyson would agree), AGW = GIGO
(anthropogenic global warming; garbage in, garbage out for those acronymicly deprived).
Great post, and I followed the links to other articles. Took awhile, but thanks.
I believe this represents a “sea change”. When you have the NYT promoting an iconic figure such as Freeman Dyson as a Global Warming skeptic/denier, then there is real doubt about the reality of AGW.
This is a major change at the NYT, where many liberals get their marching orders.
ping-a-ling
NY Slime actually acknowledges another view. I think the cost of cap and trade may have hit home.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
Nicholas Dawidoff ..... Probably the first time this New York Times grand Pooh Bah ever spoke with someone who says global warming is a crock
Is there one Republican officeholder (or candidate) to call
on the Bolsheviks? Are we actually standing by to watch the economy get flushed down the latrine of history on the Carbon Credit Scam?
