some my be interested in these excerpts from the Yale 360 interview of him in 2009. (see http://e360.yale.edu/feature/freeman_dyson_takes_on_the_climate_establishment/2151/) Below I've lifted a part of the interview that to my mind accurately expresses His main points: I might add that I commented a number of times in ET regarding the very unscientific and unprofessional way the issue of AGW is being handled. To my way of thinking, this blatant cultivating of public sentiment before you know the answers is profoundly unscientific and potentially dangerous to one's reputation for impartiality before the facts. Those doing this, and here I include James Hansen as the chief offender, run a great risk of being made a fool and professionally ruined. Here are my selected excerpts from the interview. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Dyson explains his iconoclastic views and why he believes they have stirred such controversy. by michael d. lemonick On March 3, The New York Times Magazine created a major flap in the climate-change community by running a cover story on the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson that focused largely on his views of human-induced global warming. Basically, he doesn’t buy it. The climate models used to forecast what will happen as we continue to pump CO2 into the atmosphere are unreliable, Dyson claims, and so, therefore, are the projections. ...My objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have. I think that’s what upsets me. ...I think the difference between me and most of the experts is that I think I have a much wider view of the whole subject. I was involved in climate studies seriously about 30 years ago. That’s how I got interested. There was an outfit called the Institute for Energy Analysis at Oak Ridge. I visited Oak Ridge many times, and worked with those people, and I thought they were excellent. And the beauty of it was that it was multi-disciplinary. There were experts not just on hydrodynamics of the atmosphere, which of course is important, but also experts on vegetation, on soil, on trees, and so it was sort of half biological and half physics. And I felt that was a very good balance. And there you got a very strong feeling for how uncertain the whole business is, that the five reservoirs of carbon all are in close contact...They are all about equal in size. They all interact with each other strongly. So you can’t understand any of them unless you understand all of them. Essentially that was the conclusion. It’s a problem of very complicated ecology, and to isolate the atmosphere and the ocean just as a hydrodynamics problem makes no sense.... Thirty years ago, there was a sort of a political split between the Oak Ridge community, which included biology, and people who were doing these fluid dynamics models, which don’t include biology. They got the lion’s share of money and attention. And since then, this group of pure modeling experts has become dominant. I got out of the field then. I didn’t like the way it was going. It left me with a bad taste. Syukuro Manabe, right here in Princeton, was the first person who did climate models with enhanced carbon dioxide and they were excellent models. And he used to say very firmly that these models are very good tools for understanding climate, but they are not good tools for predicting climate. I think that’s absolutely right. They are models, but they don’t pretend to be the real world. They are purely fluid dynamics. You can learn a lot from them, but you cannot learn what’s going to happen 10 years from now.... ... the basic problem is that in the case of climate, very small structures, like clouds, dominate. And you cannot model them in any realistic way. They are far too small and too diverse. So they say, ‘We represent cloudiness by a parameter,’ but I call it a fudge factor. So then you have a formula, which tells you if you have so much cloudiness and so much humidity, and so much temperature, and so much pressure, what will be the result... But if you are using it for a different climate, when you have twice as much carbon dioxide, there is no guarantee that that’s right. There is no way to test it. We know that plants do react very strongly to enhanced carbon dioxide.,,, it has a drastic effect on plants because it is the main food source for the plants... 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. They are totally missing the biological side, which is probably more than half of the real system...it’s a fact that they don’t know how to model it. And the question is, how does it happen that they end up believing their models? But I have seen that happen in many fields. You sit in front of a computer screen for 10 years and you start to think of your model as being real. The whole livelihood of all these people depends on people being scared.” It is also true that the whole livelihood of all these people depends on people being scared. Really, just psychologically, it would be very difficult for them to come out and say, “Don’t worry, there isn’t a problem.” It’s sort of natural, since their whole life depends on it being a problem. I don’t say that they’re dishonest. But I think it’s just a normal human reaction. It’s true of the military also. They always magnify the threat. Not because they are dishonest; they really believe that there is a threat and it is their job to take care of it. I think it’s the same as the climate community, that they do in a way have a tremendous vested interest in the problem being taken more seriously than it is. ...No doubt that warming is happening. I don’t think it is correct to say “global,” but certainly warming is happening. 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. ...A lot of these things are not anything to do with human activities. Take the shrinking of glaciers, which certainly has been going on for 300 years and has been well documented. So it certainly wasn’t due to human activities, most of the time. 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. And the most serious of almost all the problems is the rising sea level. But there again, we have no evidence that this is due to climate change. A good deal of evidence says it’s not. I mean, we know that that’s been going on for 12,000 years, and there’s very doubtful arguments as to what’s been happening in the last 50 years and (whether) human activities have been important. It’s not clear whether it’s been accelerating or not. But certainly, most of it is not due to human activities. So it would be a shame if we’ve made huge efforts to stop global warming and the sea continued to rise. That would be a tragedy. Sea level is a real problem, but we should be attacking it directly and not attacking the wrong problem. ...one thing I don’t want to do is to spend all my time arguing this business. I mean, I am not the person to do that. I have two great disadvantages. First of all, I am 85 years old. Obviously, I’m an old fuddy-duddy. So, I have no credibility. ...What I do think I have is a better judgment, maybe because I have lived a bit longer, and maybe because I’ve done other things. So I am fairly confident about my judgment, and I doubt whether that will change. But I am certainly willing to change my mind about details. ...And why should you imagine that the climate of the 18th century — what they call the pre-industrial climate — is somehow the best possible? That’s sort of what I would call part of the propaganda — to take for granted that any change is bad. ... The ice was only in the northern regions, but it was also much colder at the equator in the Ice Age. That’s not true of this change in temperature today. The change that’s now going on is very strongly concentrated in the Arctic. In fact in three respects, it’s not global, which I think is very important. First of all, it is mainly in the Arctic. Secondly, it’s mainly in the winter rather than summer. And thirdly, it’s mainly in the night rather than at the daytime. In all three respects, the warming is happening where it is cold, not where it is hot. e360: Do you mind being thrust in the limelight of talking about this when it is not your main interest. You’ve suddenly become the poster child for global warming skepticism. Dyson: Yes, it is definitely a tactical mistake to use somebody like me for that job, because I am so easily shot down. I’d much rather the job would be done by somebody who is young and a real expert. But unfortunately, those people don’t come forward. ...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. ...Anyway, the ideal protagonist I am still looking for. I will do the job if nobody else shows up, but I regard it as a duty rather than as a pleasure.
Kim Kardashian and Global Warming The problem is, my science friend cannot take on board how the same mind can embrace the dangers of excessive quantities of CO2 as well as Kim Kardashian’s derriere. You see his problem? http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/25/kim-kardashian-and-global-warming-2/
Scientists going against science, is what makes the underlying science so strong. Ernst Gehrcke - experimental physicist, Professor Stjepan Mohorovicic and Rudolf Tomaschek - physicist, all opposed Einstein's theory of relativity due to mathematical abstractions used to prove the underpinning science. Albert Einstein considered physicist Ernst Mach at least to be his teacher if not a mentor, yet he would never completely accept Einstein's theory of relativity. Phillip Lenard was Nobel prize winner in 1905 and greatly admired by Einstein for his knowledge and understanding of experimental physics. Lenard didn't accept Relativity and thought 'Aether' was still the valid explanation. In hindsight that's the equivalent of an AGW denier with knobs on - only without the danger of tipping a whole ecosystem over the edge. Charles Guillaume, another Nobel prize winner, good friends with Einstein and a highly regarded physicist, failed completely to understand Einstein's relativity. The book 'A Hundred Authors Against Einstein' was published in 1931, full of every kind of criticism opposition and denial of Einstein's relativity. Websites like WUWT no doubt find themselves at home with it. As Einstein piercingly commented, if he were wrong, one author would have been enough. As with Einstein's Relativity, there are those, some of whom are also scientists though many not, who cannot get past the fact that based firmly on science, the scientific community has overwhelmingly agreed with the science that confirms AGW is real.
Stu, everything you have mentioned with regard to Einsteins relativity hypothesis is absolutely true. And although it seems there may be parallels in the case of the scientific community being initially split over relativity and the scientific community being split over AGW, the parallels are there only in a superficial way. I haven't time to go into detail here, but the main differences are that Einsteins work was entirely theoretical and broke radically from the then accepted classical physics. Naturally, there were detractors. Einstein did not hire a public relations firm to promote his unproven ideas among the public and politicians of his day. Nor did he demonstrate in favor of his unproven ideas in the street. There was no experimental confirmation until years later, at which point his hypothesis became widely accepted as theory. At that point Einstein did receive wide public acclaim and his detractors were silenced. The process took place in the physics community rather than on the political and media stages. In the present case of the AGW hypothesis, there are myriad experimental observations that are inconsistent with the hypothesis. There are myriad theoretical models; no two of which agree. And the entire business has become a circus event. Any parallels between the development of Relativity theory and the AGW hypothesis are purely coincidental and superficial.
In the present case of the AGW hypothesis, there are myriad experimental observations that are inconsistent with the hypothesis. Like? No, empirical observation is confirming the scientific principles. The earth is getting warmer. There has been no pause and feedback effects are accelerating the warming There are myriad theoretical models; no two of which agree. Duh, that's the nature of models. Ever see the models predicting hurricane tracks? And the entire business has become a circus event. Yes, largely because of disinformers and bullshit artists like you. Many of them professionals.
and while the historical points are nice . the reality is... that once again stu is bullshitting about science. Stu you can't back up what you stated. 1. link to peer reviewed science saying man made co2 causes warming. (you can't because there isn't any.) 2. link to statements by top climatologists even the agw nutters who state man made co2 is causing warming. (you be surprised if you can find a handful... very few scientists state this... even the paid nutters. what they do is restate the political crap the IPCC and political bodies write. ) Summary - Before you start claiming science and scientists are on your side. Link to the science and the scientists. Programming note... as this is Stu's M.O when he is asked to back up his statements... Stu will produce a lot of bullshit... but no links to peer reviewed science showing man made co2 causes warming... and a bunch of garbled crap from a few nutters but I doubt he can list even 5 nutters who declare man made co2 is causing warming. Stu may not even list one. Watch... stu troll and bullshit 5.4.3.2.1....
No piezoe, Einstein's work was not entirely theoretical. From the outset Einstein's special relativity (1905) enabled existing problems to be resolved in classical physics. Maxwell equations (1861) electric and magnetic fields, was straight away transformed by Special Relativity. Lorentz transformation (1887) turned into practical Lorentz symmetry by Special Relativity, and so indeed became understood as a fundamental law of nature. Special Relativity straight off opened up Quantum electrodynamics and provided the means for some practical experimentation. I take your point about the process which made Einstein's work valid. It needed to be undertaken within the scientific community rather than in the political or media domains. Which makes the point! AGW has been validated by science and massively endorsed by the scientific community. In that regard there is no split at all. Furthermore, there's nothing theoretical about CO2, or that it warms atmosphere. Yet those basic facts have their detractors for all sorts of reasons, just as Einstein's science did. The political and media stages are the only home for those who refuse that science, as the scientific stage is not the place for anti-AGW nonsense anymore than it is or was for Einstein Relativity deniers.