FOR MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY...
... the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Princeton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country’s most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming “out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,” as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors’ letter boxes and Dyson’s own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as “a pompous twit,” “a blowhard,” “a cesspool of misinformation,” “an old coot riding into the sunset” and, perhaps inevitably, “a mad scientist.” Dyson had proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow. Then he added the caveat that if CO2 levels soared too high, they could be soothed by the mass cultivation of specially bred “carbon-eating trees,” whereupon the University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner looked through the thick grove of honorary degrees Dyson has been awarded — there are 21 from universities like Georgetown, Princeton and Oxford — and suggested that “perhaps trees can also be designed so that they can give directions to lost hikers.” Dyson’s son, George, a technology historian, says his father’s views have cooled friendships, while many others have concluded that time has cost Dyson something else. There is the suspicion that, at age 85, a great scientist of the 20th century is no longer just far out, he is far gone — out of his beautiful mind.But in the considered opinion of the neurologist Oliver Sacks, Dyson’s friend and fellow English expatriate, this is far from the case. “His mind is still so open and flexible,” Sacks says. Which makes Dyson something far more formidable than just the latest peevish right-wing climate-change denier.
something to be said for not climbin aboard the latest craze-y train
Freeman Dyson is one clever SOB. It doesn't hurt my feelings to see him agreeing with me.
On March 29, 2009, the RealClimate blog posted a piece titled Lies, Damn Lies and Science. They highlighted an article in EOS, a publication of the American Geophysical Union, about a study of about 10,000 “Earth Scientists on two questions. The first was whether, “compared with pre-1800 levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?” The second asked “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?”
The author did a bit of cherrypicking and claimed that the article in EOS said that “about 58% of the general public in the US thinks that human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing the mean global temperature, as opposed to 97% of specialists surveyed.” Of the over 10,000 Earth Scientists who were sent the questions, about 30% replied. They responded 90% “rising’ on question 1 and 82% “Yes” on question 2. The “specialists” who voted 97% “Yes”, were a sub-group of self-described climate scientists who had published peer-reviewed climate change papers. RealClimate ignored the 82% figure, which also means that they ignored the fact that almost 1 in 5 Earth Scientist did not answer “Yes” – meaning that 18% feel man’s contribution is not significant.
I sent in a comment, describing the study and the fact that only 82% of Earth Scientists felt that human activity was a significant factor. I opined that the study was virtually pointless because they only asked if human activity was a “significant” factor, not the major or most important factor. I suggested that significant is not at all the same as most important, and since proponents of AGW (I think I mistyped it “AGM”) declare that human causes are the most important (and almost sole) factor in climate change, the question was pointless. I went on to suggest that it was irresponsible for policymakers to be considering trillion dollar taxes or cap and trade schemes, especially when the economy is so fragile, when almost 1 in 5 Earth Scientists say man’s activities are insignificant.
I posted my comment and a couple of the usual snarky (but non-substantive) replies came in:
“(and almost sole) ”
A statement often made by denialists. I wonder where they get all the straw from and how the poor horses and cows manage without their winter feed.
Comment by Mark — 29 March 2009 @ 3:59 PM
And there’s a beautiful example of the problem — incomprehension by bobz (misunderstanding “significant” and not clear on the verb tense of “is” either). One poll question for him confirms his faith that everything published is wrong.
Comment by Hank Roberts — 29 March 2009 @ 4:21 PM
After a while, I went back to see if anyone had actually addressed my points, but to my shock, my post had been deleted! The comments by Mark and Hank Roberts remained (now totally bizarre because they refer to something that no longer existed) but the total number of comments had now been reduced and mine was not among them. I guess Gavin was more sensitive than usual, but I wonder if they may not have now decided that they will no longer broach any discussions by deniers. Has anyone else experienced anything similar at RealClimate?
It is, I think, quite appropriate that the title to the piece was Lies, Damned Lies and Science. How ironic. Call me a peevish right-wing climate change denier, but I would not censor other peoples' opinions. Apparetnly the powers that be at RealClimate are not open and flexible, unlike Prof. Dyson.
The tree weepers must be in a faint. The UN seeing castles fall. This is the begging of the end of their cinctures. Its a little late for these latter day inquisitors to do a Galileo on this venerable scientist.
they can't even see they are the ones with the hard minds with NO flexibility. This group of fanatic environmentalists are proving what a cult they are daily.
JMO
"Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds"
- Einstein -
Related: the Nashville post is reporting that the Gore mansion had its lights blazing during earth hour. (I'd provide a link but I'm on an iPhone)
Lefties - if you don't agree with them 100% then you must be mentally deficient and thrown out of the fold - even if you are one of the greatest scientists of the past 50 years. Ron Silver who was a lefty in every way except on the fight against Islamic Terrorism became an outcast from all his hollywood friends (see Coulter's last article). Sen. Joe Liberman who has almost as left wing of a voting record as Obozo was still cast out of the Democrat Party for daring to support the war in Iraq - he had to run in the last election as an Independent.
Lefties play hardball while us whimpy conservatives don't even realize there is game on. And we wonder why the education system, media, entertainment industry, wall street, foreign affairs departments, all government bureaucracies, most NGO's, PTA's and PAC's, most places of worship and even the hard sciences are completely controlled by lefties. I am surprised there is even one conservative left in the world.
You folk do realize that, based on the loose standards and the semantic imprecision followed around here, Dyson is a "lefty". From the same article, which is conveniently ignored, or worse was not even referred to,
"Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus."
I believe the beginnings of the Left’s animosity towards Dyson can be traced back to his futile attempts to disarm Skynet when he worked at Cyberdyne Systems. It was Dyson’s failure to do so that allowed the Left to become ‘self aware’. The Left has not forgiven him his meddling and apparently continues to hound him.
...and they attacked Antony Flew for flirting with Theism.
Your link Mr.Tulk http://politics.nashvillepost.com/2009/03/29/al-gore-will-leave-the-lights-on-for-ya/
From Freeman Dyson's 'HERETICAL THOUGHTS ABOUT SCIENCE AND SOCIETY'.
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge219.html#dysonf
[ The point of this calculation is the very favorable rate of exchange between carbon in the atmosphere and carbon in the soil. To stop the carbon in the atmosphere from increasing, we only need to grow the biomass in the soil by a hundredth of an inch per year.}
Easy to do with ample atmospheric concentrations of CO2. And more food to boot !!
[ When we are trying to take care of a planet, just as when we are taking care of a human patient, diseases must be diagnosed before they can be cured. We need to observe and measure what is going on in the biosphere, rather than relying on computer models. ]
AMEN !! Ya hear that IPCC ?
[ The warming effect of carbon dioxide is strongest where air is cold and dry, mainly in the arctic rather than in the tropics, mainly in mountainous regions rather than in lowlands, mainly in winter rather than in summer, and mainly at night rather than in daytime. The warming is real, but it is mostly making cold places warmer rather than making hot places hotter. To represent this local warming by a global average is misleading. ]
Cold Canada may warm a little - cool ! The hotter tropics won't change - cool also !!
[ The fundamental reason why carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is critically important to biology is that there is so little of it. A field of corn growing in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all the carbon dioxide within a meter of the ground in about five minutes. If the air were not constantly stirred by convection currents and winds, the corn would stop growing. About a tenth of all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is converted into biomass every summer and given back to the atmosphere every fall. That is why the effects of fossil-fuel burning cannot be separated from the effects of plant growth and decay. ]
So, our Farmers can grow more food by using the slightly higher CO2 conc - win win !! Don't worry be happy.
[ Another environmental danger that is even more poorly understood is the possible coming of a new ice-age. A new ice-age would mean the burial of half of North America and half of Europe under massive ice-sheets. We know that there is a natural cycle that has been operating for the last eight hundred thousand years. The length of the cycle is a hundred thousand years. In each hundred-thousand year period, there is an ice-age that lasts about ninety thousand years and a warm interglacial period that lasts about ten thousand years. We are at present in a warm period that began twelve thousand years ago, so the onset of the next ice-age is overdue. If human activities were not disturbing the climate, a new ice-age might already have begun. We do not know how to answer the most important question: do our human activities in general, and our burning of fossil fuels in particular, make the onset of the next ice-age more likely or less likely? ]
I don't know about you, but I vote NO!! No to a mile of ice over my head.
Overdue !!?? By two thousand years ?? Our sun turning quiet recently may soon fix that.
[ First, if the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is allowed to continue, shall we arrive at a climate similar to the climate of six thousand years ago when the Sahara was wet? Second, if we could choose between the climate of today with a dry Sahara and the climate of six thousand years ago with a wet Sahara, should we prefer the climate of today? My second heresy answers yes to the first question and no to the second. It says that the warm climate of six thousand years ago with the wet Sahara is to be preferred, and that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may help to bring it back. I am not saying that this heresy is true. I am only saying that it will not do us any harm to think about it. ]
Gore and Suzuki are telling our kids not to thing. And they should not listen to their parents either. The science has been settled by the Kult.
[ The humanist ethic accepts an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a small price to pay, if world-wide industrial development can alleviate the miseries of the poorer half of humanity. The humanist ethic accepts our responsibility to guide the evolution of the planet.]
Forget it - Paul Watson and Suzuki and Hansen hate people.
[ The natural ecology of England was uninterrupted and rather boring forest. Humans replaced the forest with an artificial landscape of grassland and moorland, fields and farms, with a much richer variety of plant and animal species. Quite recently, only about a thousand years ago, we introduced rabbits, a non-native species which had a profound effect on the ecology. Rabbits opened glades in the forest where flowering plants now flourish. There is no wilderness in England, and yet there is plenty of room for wild-flowers and birds and butterflies as well as a high density of humans. Perhaps that is why I am a humanist.]
Similar to Patrick Moore and his successful introduction of clear cutting - meadows with diverse biology - leading to healthy Forest rejuvination.
[ I will not attempt to summarize the lessons that my readers should learn from these heresies. The main lesson that I would like them to take home is that the long-range future is not predetermined.]
Whadaya mean !!?? The Kyoto Kult says it CAN predict ! (Even though it has got the last ten years all wrong.)
When the NYT rolls out a big gun like Dyson to question the pc version of climate change, you know it's curtains for CaT.
[ The Skeptic’s Handbook Spreads en masse: 150,000 copies!
A donor in the US felt The Skeptics Handbook was so worthwhile that they have paid to print and post 150,000 copies of the booklet. Just soak in that number. A “bestseller” only has to notch up 5,000 copies…]
http://joannenova.com.au/
Dyson suggests..."that climate change has become an “obsession” — the primary article of faith for “a worldwide secular religion” known as environmentalism. Among those he considers true believers, Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.”
“Al Gore’s just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers.”
Far from expecting any drastic harmful consequences from these increased temperatures, he says the carbon may well be salubrious — a sign that “the climate is actually improving rather than getting worse,” because carbon acts as an ideal fertilizer promoting forest growth and crop yields.
Hansen has referred to railroad cars transporting coal as “death trains.”
I suppose we should thus conclude that Hansen is a "climate coal Nazi".
Cheers
Hans-Christian Georg Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group "True North"
Al Gore Leaves The Light On For Ya
Wow! Another heckofacomback from Bill Stewart.
I guess if we don't agree with every single thought Dyson has ever expressed, we can agree with none of it!
This is because Bill does not think for himself, but relies on experts for the higher cognitive function. It is almost as if Bill is a "mind numbed robot"? Or maybe he is surprised that we are not. I don't know.
Bill, is it just possible that the parts about Dyson's politics were added to lend him credibility because otherwise people like *you* Bill Stewart would be accusing him of being in the pay of the oil companies.
Given that Al left his lights on, does that make him a poster-boy candidate for Human Achievement Hour? ;)
"Which makes Dyson something far more formidable than just the latest peevish right-wing climate-change denier."
I thought I was a peevish right-wing global warming denier?
Disagreement with the orthodoxy leads to ridicule and banishment. It has always been this way from the left.
And the reference to the
stalinist children is a wonderful analogy. I wonder if Jan Wong recognizes her young self in these children. This is not a criticism of her prsent self but the youth she was in communist china when she turned in her realtives (her parents I think)
Stephen: No, it was just some girl fellow-"student" who asked her for help escaping to the west.
Only a short remark on the post at March 29, 2009 11:57 PM.
It is just a strange alignment that the AGW is favored theism of the SFC* ideologies. AGW is in fact an ideology to control the masses. It employs the same methodology and tactics as SFC.
On the other hand, those that know there is no possible way that the ants that the humans are, relative to the ecosphere and atmosphere of this earth, can cause any more than a little bit of wind due to eating beans.
It is unfortunate that word “science” is being used as an ideological instrument in order to gain influence, power and control of people that on the whole are not interested in climate unless someone somewhere says that it is collapsing.
The climate is not subject to political leanings, stupid.
There is an excellent thought on the blog Posted by: ron in kelowna at March 30, 2009 1:08 AM :
Science is not a democracy, and natural laws don’t form because a UN committee decreed it.
By Joanne Nova
*Socialist, Fascist, Communist
"Which makes Dyson something far more formidable than just the latest peevish right-wing climate-change denier."
Note the political stigma attached to questioning scientific quackery..."climate change denial"...total fallacious premise. No one denies the climate changes, that's called "weather". What we who dissent from the latest "pop science" fads "deny" is alarmism. Climate change is not a "crisis" issue, they are natural cycles we cannot affect or control... and it certainly does not warrant making the population into subordinated expendable units to be regulated as needed by a pseudo-scientific global governing junta.
I mean, let's think about what the core quack science behind this hysteria and driving the draconian political solutions. They are essentially trying to deem carbon as an outlawed pollutant. Humans are carbon-based life forms, hence we are pollutants...source pollutants... which must be fiercely regulated into contained sustainability to minimize damage....that involves scheming up palatable "pop science" depopulating memes by an omnipotent technocratic governing oligarchy.
Sounds like cold-blooded Malthusian pathocracy to me...but if you want to call it "earth consciousness" I guess that's OK,...Orwellian terminology is in vogue in the quack-science political cabals these days.
An axion to survive 21st century "sustainability" governing:
"never assume you are being ruled by your moral or intellectual superiors"
Re: Posted by: ron in kelowna at March 30, 2009 1:08 AM
That's great! I think at least another 308 copies need to be printed. Anyone (else) in?
Religious fervor trumps logic every time....
Eg....Suicide bombers....
There is mention of Freeman Dyson's work for Bomber Command. One part of it was to analyse the much higher survival rates for crews of B-17s shot down than for Lancaster crews. Dyson concluded that there were only two factors which were important: that the B17s operated by day whereas the Lancasters operated by night - about which nothing could be done; and that the B17s had larger and more conveniently located exit hatches. He recommended increasing the size of the Lancaster escape hatches, and was ignored.
Dyson's article on climate change more or less defines what one needs to know, including the biological aspects.
One sees little mention of the reforestation of New England over the last century; surely it must have some effect; or the forestation of former polder land in the Netherlands, which in its original state was salt marsh.
Wow...which editor at NYT got fired for letting this through? I mean, they published something about a "denier" that was positive!
Agent Smith:
Are you saying he should have been terminated for his objections to dirt worshipers?
Lol had a good laugh at your post.
The Legend Of Al
(Sung to the tune of “blazing Saddles”)
He drove a blazing Prius, He was an Eco- star
His job to offer battle To carbon near and far
He conquered fear and he conquered hate
He turned our night into day
He made his blazing Prius A touch to light the way
My deepest apologies to Frankie Laine and Mel Brooks