There’s a very interesting (and long) profile over at New York Times magazine:
Dyson is well aware that “most consider me wrong about global warming.” That educated Americans tend to agree with the conclusion about global warming reached earlier this month at the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen (“inaction is inexcusable”) only increases Dyson’s resistance. 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. The Nobel physics laureate Steven Weinberg admires Dyson’s physics — he says he thinks the Nobel committee fleeced him by not awarding his work on quantum electrodynamics with the prize — but Weinberg parts ways with his sensibility: “I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice.”
Dyson says he doesn’t want his legacy to be defined by climate change, but his dissension from the orthodoxy of global warming is significant because of his stature and his devotion to the integrity of science. Dyson has said he believes that the truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won’t come to pass. In “Infinite in All Directions,” he writes that nature’s laws “make the universe as interesting as possible.” This also happens to be a fine description of Dyson’s own relationship to science. In the words of Avishai Margalit, a philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study, “He’s a consistent reminder of another possibility.” When Dyson joins the public conversation about climate change by expressing concern about the “enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories,” these reservations come from a place of experience. Whatever else he is, Dyson is the good scientist; he asks the hard questions. He could also be a lonely prophet. Or, as he acknowledges, he could be dead wrong.
But he’s got a pretty good track record.
I would take one Freeman Dyson against five thousand James Hansens any day. I’ve known him for thirty years, and he is one of a kind. Would that we had even a handful more like him.
I thought the author took several back-handed slaps at skeptics, for example, “That educated Americans tend to agree with the conclusion about global warming…” Aside from those, the article was a fair story. He is an amazing person. I’m envious, Gary.
I’ve only met him once, many years ago, but he was an interesting guy. Very sharp, observant, aware, reflective. If he had a strongly expressed opinion on the price of tea in China, I’d listen carefully.
His work in QM is of course impressive. I think it’s fair to say the Dyson series underlies pretty much all nontrivial calculations these days, even if people do draw Feynman diagrams to explain them, ha ha.
My understanding of Dyson’s view on anthropogenic global warming is that he agrees it’s occurring, as both a qualitative result of human activities and a simple empirical fact (i.e., yup, the earth’s surface is heating up). His caveat, which I agree with, is that we don’t understand the factors involved in climate change well enough to make quantitative predictions. In other words, the general circulation models exclude too many factors, and parametrize too many factors that we’re not able to model accurately (the effects of albedo, cloud cover, etc.). It’s curve fitting, but searching through parameter space might not be physically meaningful if you don’t understand your parameters to begin with.
So, Dyson does agree that AGW is a reality…but so what? In fact, I’d hesitate to use the word ‘consensus’ to describe the science. Or any science, for that matter. It’s not a popularity contest. The science is rock solid, so what is the point of saying there is a consensus?
I can’t help but relate a personal anecdote from the late 1970s. One day while I was visiting, I asked if he wanted to have lunch. I figured a nice little Princeton bistro. Instead, we ended up at the campus vending machines eating those little wieners from a can. On another occasion when he and my wife and I were heading out to dinner and I asked where he wanted to eat, the answer came rather indifferently “McDonalds?” We ended up at a small Chinese place instead, since I wasn’t about to grant that request. To say he ignores what he eats is to understate matters. So I often wonder what fuels that great brain. 🙂
It’s all just glucose by the time the brain gets it, Gary. Filet mignon or shoe leather, fresh strawberries or Karo straight from the bottle. I’m thinking when you’re a pure ectomorph like FJD, who cares what your (vestigial) digestive tract thinks?
Jack, what charmed me about Dyson’s comments on AGW and its solutions is that he made the obvious observation that CO2 is in a cycle, a rather massive one, actually, between the atmosphere and the crust (including oceans of course). Gigatons goes back and forth every day. If there’s too much going up, there are therefore two ways to fix the problem: destroy your advanced technological civilization and 3/4 of your population, so you stop emitting so much — or, duh, take more out of the atmosphere.
It’s not like we don’t know how to take CO2 out of the atmosphere, or that it’s complicated, or requires lots of power. Grow green plants. Don’t let them decay in atmosphere (e.g. bury them). That’s it. A caveman could do it, as they say.
Since then, I’ve had zero respect for anyone who talks about solutions to AGW that only deal with the output part of the cycle, and pretend the input doesn’t exist. It bespeaks a conscious fraud (since they all know about the input side), a desire to accomplish something else in the name of solving AGW.
Which makes me wonder why someone would call the original Orion ‘Rube Goldberg’ with someone like Dyson behind it.
Have they ever looked at a modern auto engine?
157,894,736,842,105,263
All trees are carbon eating.
Why the focus on carbon when water vapor is by far the largest greenhouse gas? Cap and trade water, eh?