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.
The “Australian” professor wouldn’t be the Austrian professor Richard Pamcutt, would it?
uk
I never thought about it like that; just imagine Dyson agrees with me… 😉
Our civilization will not be great until we learn to harness 100% of the suns output.
I’ve recently retired from a near-30 year career in newspaper editorial work, most of it in a manager/editor role. From my perch, there are certainly many problems in journalism. ‘Laziness’ is but one – though I wouldn’t call it ‘laziness’. Most journalists I’ve worked with are hardworking and sincere. Journalists are normal human beings whose simplest wish is to earn a living in a profession they love. However, a lot of newsrooms are unionized, and it necessarily follows that ‘start times’ and ‘finish times’ and ‘overtime’ and ‘job description’ are key workaday benchmarks, muddling benchmarks, in these workplaces; and when the factory whistle blows, like normal people, journalists want to go home, feed the kids, etc. (There are other problems, but that could be for another time.) At the top of the list, in my view, is a lack of ‘expertise’. Most journalists are generalists. They know how to construct a story, most often in a ‘pyramid style’, where a copy editor can cut from the bottom to make a story fit. A newsroom is in many respects a factory, folks. Unless they cover a beat, and that beat is related to their own personal interests in life, most journalists have little expertise in anything, certainly not something that requires the research and time of ‘global warming’, and must rely on the opinions of well-spoken and AVAILABLE experts. One or two successful calls made to ‘experts’ – at the university, in local government, a mouthpiece for a cause – for a quote and they can be ‘outta there’ and home to the kiddies. It would be my wish that local scientific skeptics, everywhere, would make themselves available and instantly quotable. Get your phone numbers out there. Get on tv. That’s what the other side is doing, through any number of fervent organizations, working at the local level. This is the way the game is played and those carrying the science forward as expressed on WUWT must learn to play it just as well, grassroots style. That includes calling your local editors by phone, as often as is required, to either redirect or complain or explain. Editors are always on the hunt for ‘follow-ups’ too. Sorry for the long post.
Lars P says “Simon says”
Ummm … no I didn’t. It was a quote from Stephen Hawking. I am and never will be as sharp as he is.
“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
>>>>>>>>>>
Exactly my point! They will have no clue. They somehow don’t understand “It’s the Sun, stupid”.
(Thanks for amplifying my comment.)
Jimbo says:
April 5, 2013 at 11:02 am
Warmists have often told me that we can’t carry out an experiment to see if AGW is valid as we don’t have 2 Earths.
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If you took 2 earths, identical in all respects, and ran the forward in time they would very quickly diverge. There would be storms on 1 earth and at the same location on the second clear skies. Over time one earth would be cooling while the other is warming, then for awhile they would move in sync, and then again out. The failure of the models exists because there is no “right” answer for the future.
Reblogged this on tallagency and commented:
Every story has two sides. Freeman Dyson and William Happer are two of the world’s leading physicists. When they speak it’s worth listening.
Cheers Michael
Stephen Hawking is very vocal in the other direction…
We have to reverse global warming urgently, if we still can.
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temps have been flat for 15 years. hawking is suggesting we reverse this process. what is the reverse of “no change”? is he suggesting that we want temperatures to change?
A true and great scientist indeed. What we are now intoning on WUWT, Dyson said in the 70s right at the start of the AGW business. It was immediately obvious to Dyson that AGW and inductive model based climate simulation is transparently rubbish. He has been courageous and consistent in this position ever since – no band-wagon jumping – even while temperatures were sharply rising in the 90s, the high water mark of AGW. We are all standing on his shoulders.
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.”
That statement expresses common, ordinary panic. All such statements should be treated as what they are, namely, wholly irrational.
There is no imaginable mechanism through which global warming could become self-sustaining.
@ur momisugly hasuess….It’s not my job to train these biased, uneducated dumb-asses. I certainly wont buy their inane product, willingly.
DesertYote says: April 5, 2013 at 4:24 pm
Our civilization will not be great until we learn to harness 100% of the suns output.
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Are you waiting for someone to point out that Dr Dyson outlined how that could be done? Lots of SF readers know what a Dyson Sphere is. … more surface area than a Ringworld, and harder to build too.
Theo Goodwin says: April 5, 2013 at 5:10 pm
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.”
That statement expresses common, ordinary panic. All such statements should be treated as what they are, namely, wholly irrational. There is no imaginable mechanism through which global warming could become self-sustaining.
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A common alarmist refrain is “That’s what happened on Venus!” I admit I don’t have a good concise answer to that.
Here is an example. A story written by a reporter working for The Canadian Press, which is Associated Press in the the north, a story now being repeated across Canada, by all news outlets. This is a straight up reporting job, pyramid style and the squeaky wheel gets heard Richard D whether you like it or not. Be the squeaky wheel. Otherwise, you forfeit the field to the opposition.
http://www.canada.com/health/Group+concerned+about+climate+change+proposes+warning+labels/8197532/story.html
Dan in California says: “Our civilization will not be great until we learn to harness 100% of the suns output.”
April 5, 2013 at 5:25 pm
Wow, I thought California schools are right up there with Mississippi, but you want a perfect heat engine that violates the first form of the second law of thermodynamics per Kelvin and Planck….really??? Now I know…
Funnily enough, Freeman Dyson is not “officially” a Ph. D. He graduated with a
B.A. in mathematics, from Cambridge. I am quite sure by now he has been given
honorary Ph.D.’s from many universities.
I met him once. While a strong supporter of nuclear power, he is a fierce opponent
of nuclear weapons. It’s probably apocryphal that his idea of using nuclear weapons
for outer space propulsion–Project Orion–came about as his solution for what to do
with all the excess nuclear weapons!
@ur momisugly heysuess says:
April 5, 2013 at 5:39 pm
Heysuess, I will look at this, thank you. My apologies, as my frustration is with a lot of the crap I read day in and day out…best to you.
RE: “I think any good scientist ought to be a skeptic,” Dyson said.
That is really the art of good science; trust nothing, verify everything and continue to be open to other possibilities.
Richard D says: April 5, 2013 at 5:39 pm
Dan in California says: “Our civilization will not be great until we learn to harness 100% of the suns output.”
April 5, 2013 at 5:25 pm
Wow, I thought California schools are right up there with Mississippi, but you want a perfect heat engine that violates the first form of the second law of thermodynamics per Kelvin and Planck….really??? Now I know…
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I said no such thing. I was quoting DesertYote who was quoting Dyson. Harnessing 100% of the sun’s output has nothing to do with cycle efficiency of a putative heat engine, and Dyson’s statement infers no such thing. It is a reference to an advanced civilization that can capture more than the microscopically small fraction of radiation that falls on a tiny planet in its orbit about its star.
Though it has no relevance to the thread, I do in fact have a well-grounded familiarity with Carnot efficiency and real-world attempts to approach it with Brayton, Stirling, Otto, Diesel, and other thermodynamic cycles. While I have been living in California for several years, my education is not from this state.
At my http://cosy.com/y12/NewsLetter201212.html , which incidentally shows that for Venus’s surface temperature to be explained by the energy it receives from the sun , it would have to be 10 times as reflective in the IR as aluminum foil , I link to the “Most Brilliant talk I’ve seen in a long time : Freeman Dyson: Heretical Thoughts About Science and Society” : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xFLjUt2leM .
Hello Greenpeace? I’m doing a story on climate change. Oh? Ok. Do you have the number for the Sierra Club? Great! Thanks.
Simon, the difference in perspective between Dyson and Hawking is that Dyson, unlike Hawking, has investigated the subject matter and not relied upon the opinions of others.
Daily air temperature fluctuations on Earth are tempered by Earth’s atmosphere (as well as latent heat released by water and other surfaces)–these fluctuations would likely be more extreme in the absence of the atmosphere we depend on today. Solar radiation is necessary but not entirely sufficient to explain diurnal air temperature fluctuations–an atmosphere that re-radiates outgoing long wave radiation helps moderate air temperature.
Very recent research (abstract at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6124/1198) shows that “…the planet today is warmer than it’s been during 70 to 80 percent of the last 11,300 years.”