Climatologists Are No Einsteins, Says His Successor
by Paul Mulshine, The Star Ledger via the GWPF
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.
…
Then in the late 1970s, he got involved with early research on climate change at the Institute for Energy Analysis in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
That research, which involved scientists from many disciplines, was based on experimentation. The scientists studied such questions as how atmospheric carbon dioxide interacts with plant life and the role of clouds in warming.
But that approach lost out to the computer-modeling approach favored by climate scientists. And that approach was flawed from the beginning, Dyson said.
“I just think they don’t understand the climate,” he said of climatologists. “Their computer models are full of fudge factors.”
A major fudge factor concerns the role of clouds. The greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide on its own is limited. To get to the apocalyptic projections trumpeted by Al Gore and company, the models have to include assumptions that CO-2 will cause clouds to form in a way that produces more warming.
“The models are extremely oversimplified,” he said. “They don’t represent the clouds in detail at all. They simply use a fudge factor to represent the clouds.”
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.”
To show how uncivil this crowd can get, Happer e-mailed me an article about an Australian professor who proposes — quite seriously — the death penalty for heretics such as Dyson. As did Galileo, they can get a reprieve if they recant.
I hope that guy never gets to hear Dyson’s most heretical assertion: Atmospheric CO2 may actually be improving the environment.
“It’s certainly true that carbon dioxide is good for vegetation,” Dyson said. “About 15 percent of agricultural yields are due to CO2 we put in the atmosphere. From that point of view, it’s a real plus to burn coal and oil.”
In fact, there’s more solid evidence for the beneficial effects of CO2 than the negative effects, he said. So why does the public hear only one side of this debate? Because the media do an awful job of reporting it.
“They’re absolutely lousy,” he said of American journalists. “That’s true also in Europe. I don’t know why they’ve been brainwashed.”
I know why: They’re lazy. Instead of digging into the details, most journalists are content to repeat that mantra about “consensus” among climate scientists.
The problem, said Dyson, is that the consensus is based on those computer models. Computers are great for analyzing what happened in the past, he said, but not so good at figuring out what will happen in the future. But a lot of scientists have built their careers on them. Hence the hatred for dissenters.
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If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.
George S. Patton
Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.
Nikola Tesla
Excellent article. [And thanks to Simon for those quotes.]
Dyson says: “I think any good scientist ought to be a skeptic”. It appears that none of those scientists promoting the CO2=CAGW conjecture are good scientists. None of them. They are not skeptics. Rather, they have their conclusion in mind, and they are trying to justify it with always-inaccurate computer models, with cherry-picked regional weather changes, and, always, vague with hand-waving.
Dyson states: “Atmospheric CO2 may actually be improving the environment.”
Agree wholeheartedly. There is ample evidence for that view, while there is no evidence of global harm from the rise in CO2 — which is, after all, still a tiny, beneficial trace gas essential to all life in earth.
Here is Dyson explaining his views on global warming and carbon dioxide.
klem says: April 5, 2013 at 11:02 am
Dyson is my hero. I first heard about him when he was hired by NASA to investigate the Challenger disaster in the late 1980′s. They hired him because they knew he’d find the cause of the disaster and he wouldn’t sugar coat the findings. And that’s exactly what he did.
——————————————————
I have volumes 1, 2, and 3 of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident (Rogers Commission report). I don’t see Dr Dyson among the signatories. Perhaps you are referring to Richard Feynman, another great physicist.
Yeah, that’s all very well and good but where is he now? Just kidding… Freeman Dyson is great!
Pheew…this article made me feel sane…
The fellow with the parameters and the elephant was John von Neumann.
Who is the Australian professor who wants ‘sceptics’ put to death? Look at my address below and you’ll see why I ask. Maybe the heat got to him … You’d think my beloved country had enough nutters in it thanks to the appearance here of Peter Singer who thinks you can kill ‘abnormal’ babies (yes, babies, outside the mother’s womb). I was an abnormal baby by the way.
Re: Alacran, 11:27am
Johnny von Neumann, but it’s complicated:
“Attributed to von Neumann by Enrico Fermi, as quoted by Freeman Dyson in “A meeting with Enrico Fermi” in Nature 427 (22 January 2004) p. 297″
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann
dp says:
April 5, 2013 at 11:10 am
Who are you going to believe – an old crank like Dyson or a stellar young genius like Michael Mann?
If I don’t add /sarc there are those who will miss the fissionable sarcasm in that statement.
*
Soup, this time. This time I nearly sprayed my monitor with soup!
He is so right:
“I just think they don’t understand the climate,” he said of climatologists. “Their computer models are full of fudge factors.”
A major fudge factor concerns the role of clouds. The greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide on its own is limited. To get to the apocalyptic projections trumpeted by Al Gore and company, the models have to include assumptions that CO-2 will cause clouds to form in a way that produces more warming.
“The models are extremely oversimplified,” he said. “They don’t represent the clouds in detail at all. They simply use a fudge factor to represent the clouds.”
This is why models cannot even hindcast past climate variations. They treat the atmosphere between the surface and the top of the atmosphere where the radiation leaves the Earth as a constant. Which it is not. It is exactly here, through variations of the heat transfer, that huge variations in climate may happen and may explain the Bond events
“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.”
yes, we meet them again and again trolling around…and not only…
“It’s certainly true that carbon dioxide is good for vegetation,” Dyson said. “About 15 percent of agricultural yields are due to CO2 we put in the atmosphere. From that point of view, it’s a real plus to burn coal and oil.”
And considering we are 7 billion on this world that makes food for over 1 billion humans. That is what that 15% is.
Thank you. A privilege indeed to read Dyson’s comments and of particular interest because the man has also been involved in climate related science.
‘Simon’ (12:51) states ‘Stephen Hawking is very vocal in the other direction…’
What direction is that?
Hawking provides a rambling paragraph replete with ‘may’ this and ‘may’ that. The Polar Ice Caps may disappear, along with the Amazonian Rain Forest, in some runaway Climageddon. Simon finds this ‘interesting’ and wonders (rhetorically one hopes) whom to believe: Dyson or Hawking? Does he really need to pose this question or is this a good example of post modern posturing?
The answer Simon, is neither. It is instead, the science.
Exposure at this site and others like it, to the science and discussion, could furnish one with sufficient awareness of the evidence to lead one to confidently reject the Hawking ramble as just that. Hawking’s ramble is neither ‘interesting’ or ‘weighty’ in my view. You end by stating: ‘It’s a funny thing about this whole argument. No one is going to be 100% correct, so it’s more a case of who is going to be most right?’ No. The empirical evidence together with a growing understanding of factors that may influence global temperature, make it a 100% dead cert. that anthropogenic CO2 emission will not lead to catastrophic (runaway) global warming.
It is neither funny nor is it a case relativism. Take a trip to the North of England and visit an impoverished household whose stark choice is either food or electricity. Policies founded on arguments by authority based on post modern science do not lead to lead to a flourishing world.
Let us remember warmist ‘science historian’ Naomi Oreskes’ denigration of Freeman Dyson as being old, past his prime, lonely and just wanting attention, at an LA Book Fair covered by CSPAN, in reminder that it’s OK to denounce someone’s views based on their age (on national TV, no less) if they aren’t politically correct.
Somehow, I just don’t see Dyson ever getting so old as to drop to Oreskes’ level.
Oreskes’ Dyson remarks are at 50:55
http://www.booktv.org/Watch/12447/2011+Los+Angeles+Times+Festival+of+Books+Panel+Inconvenient+Truths.aspx
“They’re absolutely lousy,” he said of American journalists. “That’s true also in Europe. I don’t know why they’ve been brainwashed.”
How delightful it is to read the words of an intelligent thinker for a change. Freeman Dyson is a true Hero.
pesadia says:
April 5, 2013 at 12:27 pm
——-
Parncutt! Yes I remember that … mmm .. person. Since we are reminded of Parncutt I think it only fitting to take a moment out in silence gratitude to and appreciation of Viscount Monckton of Brenchley’s, who’s successful efforts forced Parncutt to retract his hate screed.
Simon says:
April 5, 2013 at 12:51 pm
Re: quotes from Hawking
Even a great mind can be so confined that wisdom cannot be generated. Hawking cannot spend a week hiking in the mountains or swimming at the beach. His mind processes facts, like a computer, but the knowledge of life is missing.
Do not be confused by layers of seemingly sophisticated science. Ask the “Warmist” the simple question, “If mankind is causing the planet to heat, why do the temperatures drop so drastically when the Sun goes down?”
When you see the puzzled look on their face, you know you are talking to a mind full of facts with no ability to reason.
John Coleman – “At it’s peak “. No, it’s “At its peak”.
.A) crops don’t always do better in the presence of ground level ozone as crop yields decline, B) crops can be destroyed by too much or too little moisture, and C) hear that about models. Sadly the empirical evidence does show increased air temperatures for many weather stations over the last 50 years.
Well, the first paragraph is partly wrong, in that at the Institute for Advanced STUDY Freeman Dyson’s responsibilities have not included teaching (other than informally). But that’s an understandable error.
While on the topic of the Dyson family, John von Neumann, etc., I’ll share a book recommendation that will be of interest to more than a few. Last year i heard his son George Dyson give a fascinating talk about his book on the pioneering computer research conducted in the 1940’s and 1950’s at IAS, where many major breakthroughs — including the invention of RAM, as I recall — took place. I ended up buying the book for a friend, but did a bit of skimming on my own, and will thus vouch for it. http://www.amazon.com/Turings-Cathedral-Origins-Digital-Universe/dp/0375422773/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1365201182&sr=8-1&keywords=dyson+alan+turing
Excellent post, Anthony! Cheers!
Simon says:
April 5, 2013 at 12:51 pm
“The danger is that global warming may become self-sustaining, if it has not done so already. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps reduces the fraction of solar energy reflected back into space, and so increases the temperature further. Climate change may kill off the Amazon and other rain forests, and so eliminate once one of the main ways in which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere. The rise in sea temperature may trigger the release of large quantities of carbon dioxide, trapped as hydrides on the ocean floor. Both these phenomena would increase the greenhouse effect, and so global warming further. We have to reverse global warming urgently, if we still can. ”
Simon, the Holocene has been warmer then it is now between 10000 bc and 4000 bc. The arctic was completely thawned and no runaway global warming happened.
It comes even better, the last 3-4 interglacials were all warmer then this one with a couple of degrees Celsius, and still no runaway global warming.
Still better, the Arctic and the Antarctic were completely melted millions of years ago and the content of CO2 in the atmosphere was double or triple to that of today but no runaway global warming happened.
On the contrary it is then, with double CO2 in the atmosphere that the Antarctic started to freeze. What mattered were the global ocean currents.
If we go further in the Earth history we find CO2 values going up to 10-15 times and more the mere quantiities we see today. Still no runaway global warming.
One of the coldest periods on Earth was when huge CO2 quantities were in the atmosphere.
The Earth is not flat and the Arctic does not get the same insulation as the Tropic does only in stupid models and scenarios. Please go and search water reflexibility, maybe you still can find something in the Internet, but it gets more and more difficult to find real measurement data. At 5° it is about 90% if I correctly remember. At 10° still about 30%.
But anyhow if with open unfrozen arctic & higher sun insulation the sea did not realease the CO2 and the methane, even with 3 times more CO2 in the atmosphere, therefore it will not start to do it now just to punish our sinns.
Then please search a bit about Bond events, the 8200 event, the Younger Dryas and so on. You’ll see the climate was not stable, it had huge variations that cannot be explained by the greenhouse theory. This will certainly help against the fear of runaway global warming.
John Parsons AKA atarsinc
geran says:
April 5, 2013 at 2:48 pm
““If mankind is causing the planet to heat, why do the temperatures drop so drastically when the Sun goes down?”
“The ‘puzzled look on their faces”, will be due to their wondering how someone could believe that the sun going down at night has something to due with Climate Change. JP
Freeman Dyson was interviewed by a journalist called Steve Connor in February 2011
During the course of the article – an exchange of emails between Connor and Professor Dyson – it became clear that Connor exhibited none of that quality suggested by the title of the publication – ‘The Independent’
There were several gems from Professor Dyson, notably:
“ … My impression is that the experts are deluded because they have been studying the details of climate models for 30 years and they come to believe the models are real. After 30 years they lose the ability to think outside the models. And it is normal for experts in a narrow area to think alike and develop a settled dogma.”
“ … On a smaller scale, we have seen great harm done to poor people around the world by the conversion of maize from a food crop to an energy crop
When Connor says, “It seems to me that although there are still many uncertainties, much of the science of climate change is pretty settled, more so than you will admit to”, Professor Dyson gives up in despair, saying,
“The whole point of science is to encourage disagreement and keep an open mind. That is why I blame The Independent for seriously misleading your readers.”
Professor Dyson was once asked whether there exists an integer such that when you take its final digit and move it to the front, its value will be doubled. He responded “Oh, that’s not difficult,” then, a couple of seconds later, “but of course the smallest such number is 18 digits long”
This is why I’m more likely to be impressed by Professor Dyson’s arguments than those, say, of Michael Mann or Stephan Lewandowsky
Freeman Dyson on stratospheric cooling:
“Stratosphere cooling is something we really know a lot about, because that’s easy to calculate. It’s a direct effect of carbon dioxide which cools the atmosphere just by radiation, independent of weather, and it’s very large. So that’s a measurable and known effect of carbon dioxide, which can be extremely serious because it immediately affects the ozone. When you cool the stratosphere that produces more ice crystals in the stratosphere and that has a very destructive effect on the ozone… That’s going to be a major disaster if we don’t do something about it.”
Does this sound somewhat alarmist to anyone else besides me?
We shouldn’t be suprised that Dyson and many other scientists were essentially pushed aside at places like Oak Ridge. There’s no chance that they would have knowingly supplied the thin patina of pseudo-science being sought by those holding the purse strings. During the last years of the Carter Administration nuclear and coal were going head-to-head to see who would replace oil as our primary fuel source for power generation. Billions were on the line. Nuclear could not compete on cost and then there was the messy unresolved problem of what to do with the waste. Enviromentalists favored renewables which simply weren’t viable. Coal won this fight on cost, nuclear went into the deep freeze, and renewables returned to the Whole Earth Catalog.
The coal generation plants would need expensive upgrades in 30 years. AGW which came to public notice too late to influence the first round was in full roar for the current round which nuclear and renewables are winning. These people are skilled, patient, and they play for big stakes.
A scientist of Dyson’s quality just won’t play ball. I know we have others here as well.
We’re in good company.