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.
geohydro2011 says:
April 6, 2013 at 7:15 am
“Have not seen an effective refutation of Marcott et al–it is what it is. Mean global annual air temperature today is about to eclipse the air temperature variation maxima of the Holocene.”
Don’t be obtuse, geohydro. Marcott’s PhD thesis was what Marcott etal 2013 should have been. And you can’t deduce that today’s temperatures are about to eclipse historical Holocene temperatures because the Marcott resolution is too low to show any historical temperature spikes. Why does Marcott start precisely at the end of the Younger Dryas? Could it be because the reconstruction is of such low resolution that the younger Dryas would not even appear in a reconstruction if extended back to the start of the Holocene? Note how severely attenuated or non-existent are the Medieval, Roman, Mimoan warm periods in the Marcott reconstruction. Marcott is simply a very low frequency reconstruction of the Holocene that shows a slow cooling trend extending from the Holocene optimum to the mid 20th century. The inclusion of the sharp 20th century spike is a travesty and there is no possibility that Marcott etal were unaware of its spuriousness and its political implications.
geohydro2011 says:
April 6, 2013 at 7:15 am
“Have not seen an effective refutation of Marcott et al–it is what it is. ”
You haven’t looked far.
http://climateaudit.org/2013/03/16/the-marcott-shakun-dating-service/#comments
Notice that Shakun describes the uptick in the end as “not robust” in this video interview with Revkin:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/scientists-find-an-abrupt-warm-jog-after-a-very-long-cooling/#more-48664
Basically I would say that Shakun refutes any claim of the uptick being real himself. Then merrily goes on talking as if it where. Neither Revkin nor Shakun ponder how this fits to the temperature plateau of the last 15 years. No deep thinkers the two of them obviously.
Reblogged this on This Got My Attention and commented:
“Climatologists are no Einsteins,” says physicist Freeman Dyson.
geohydro2011:
I write to help you to correct your problem which has resulted in your obtaining what you call “ad hom. attacks”.
Your post at April 6, 2013 at 8:00 am claims you are a “sceptic”, but the contents of your other posts suggest you are an AGW-believer. And people have been responding to that dichotomy.
For example, your immediately subsequent post to the one where you claim to be a “sceptic” is at April 6, 2013 at 8:01 am and it says in total
Let me explain the problem with that, geohydro2011.
The denizens of WUWT are genuine sceptics. We adhere to the principle of
Trust but verify.
Therefore, we want to verify by checking the facts when some anonymous person (e.g. you) makes an unsubstantiated assertion that a dubious source (e.g. Hansen) has made an empirical finding. This is especially true when the cited source is infamous for having corrupted empirical data; e.g. see this
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/giss/hansen-giss-1940-1980.gif
But we cannot verify your improbable assertion because you don’t provide a reference for it.
You then go on to say you don’t know if Dyson has examined “Marcott or Hansen”. You don’t say what ‘work’ of Marcott and Hansen should have been “examined” by Dyson or why. In fact, Marcott has only had one publication and it has already been flushed where all similar matter goes. But Hansen has published much and done much which has been “examined” on WUWT and found to be wanting.
Do you see the problem, geohydro2011?
You claim to be a “sceptic” and your posts indicate you are not.
Actions speak louder than words and what you call “ad hom. attacks” are the normal responses to people whose actions refute their claims about themselves.
Richard
Without senses, the brain or mind, if you so desire, stands alone in isolation from the ‘external world’ or “other.” Berkeley, Locke, and others understood this.
Some seem confused as to the definition of informal fallacies such as ignoratio elenchi.
Kosso describes Einstein climbing with a friend when the topic of discourse during the climb turns to the nature of time–at that moment Einstein realizes that his friend does not understand general relativity at all. Difficult to understand why Dyson would exclaim that climate scientists are no Einsteins–that seems to be a prime example of fallacious reasoning.
some of my friends here succumb to the “Monte Hall” problem where given new and updated information, a Bayesian would indeed change their initial choice based on the new information. Staying the course makes sense for some, not so much for others.
climate is a long term record of weather–the current period of climate is statistically different from previous periods of climate. Land use and land cover changes effectuated by people have affected weather during the last few hundred years. Aerosols and greenhouse gases emitted by people have the capacity to affect weather.
I suppose if you are going to “moderate” or censor, or, rather, withhold a valid comment made–a comment that does not attack but rather informs–then I have nothing else to say as my argument has been unfairly hampered.
[Reply: your comments are not being censored. — mod.]
Very nice. Ad hom attacks on Hawking are fallacious and do not add to knowledge or understanding. Some readers here have chose to issue ad hom attacks on me–some of those appear to an attempt at deduction but the conclusions are not supported by the information. Indeed, some of the conclusions are wrong and if your basis of reasoning is exemplified by your ad hoc attack on and wrong conclusions about me, I can easily see where you subscribe to other fallacies
There’s also a simple behavioural test of whether geohydro-man is a warmist or a skeptic.
As has often been demonstrated on this and other websites, one of the most obvious (and tedious) traits of the warmist or anti-skeptic is that he or she puts up posting after posting on a thread – as if he were trying to smother any counterarguments with the sheer volume of his output. (Anyone remember some classic examples from aphysicist?)
So, based on that duck test, it’s pretty clear which side of the divide geohydro-man falls on.
[Reply: endless, repeat commenting is called thread-bombing, and it violates site Policy. — mod.]
geohydro2011,
Question: What would it take for you to admit that AGW is either falsified, or that it is such a minuscule effect that it can be completely disregarded for all practical purposes?
Or is your mind made up and closed tight? If it is not, give us specific numbers. At what point does AGW cease to matter?
geohydro2011:
I am writing to ask you to reconsider your posts which are wasting space on the thread. I am reaching the conclusion that this waste of space is their intended purpose.
At April 6, 2013 at 10:38 am I made a post which offered you advice on how to behave in a cogent manner on WUWT. Unfortunately for you, you have ignored that advice and posted a series of posts which are solely alarmist nonsense. For example, your post at April 6, 2013 at 11:05 am says in total
Your assertion that
“the current period of climate is statistically different from previous periods of climate”
Is a falsehood.
The only demonstrably true statements in your post are
“climate is a long term record of weather”
and
“Land use and land cover changes effectuated by people have affected weather during the last few hundred years”
although these weather changes are only local – not global – effects and the statement is a trivial factoid.
The other statement in your post is an assertion of improbable possibility;
“Aerosols and greenhouse gases emitted by people have the capacity to affect weather.”
And the assertion has no demonstrated importance.
Pigs have the capacity to evolve wings and fly.
Please stop your infantile and disruptive behaviour which is not appropriate here.
Richard
Hallo watty! nice blog u have here. u should come over and take a look at my Dyson page:
http://nextdoortostevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/04/06/here/
Thanks buddy, and keep up the x l ent work.
Oh, and could you bring Steven with you? I’m still trying to find out why I’m a racist.
geohydro2011,
You are avoiding my question: What would it take for you to admit that AGW is either falsified, or that it is such a minuscule effect that it can be completely disregarded for all practical purposes?
I periodically reassess my understanding of climate science. For example, I wonder about the effects of the “biotic pump” hypothesis. I suspect that for many others, they do not do this, rather they uphold Ptolemaic theory. I suspect there are structural differences in the minds of those that believe versus those that don’t. Still, there is a statistically significant difference in mean annual (and or seasonal) air temperature for the latest climate period for very many weather stations. The tocsin will be a change in sign and or increased variance in the signal.
I am not “thread bombing,” each comment is either a general reply to a previous post by some reader whom I would not identify publicly or it is new comment that stands alone.
On the issue of belief, my mind is not closed on this subject. Nay, it is some of the readers here that are so committed to an opinion that they will not or can not admit that there is evidence contrary to their belief. So rather than seek my approval of a refutation or affirmation, I suggest that you examine the evidence, apply the proper tests and affirm or refute. You can always come to a new understanding based on new data.
geohydro2011,
So, you are not willing to say what it would take for you to admit that AGW is either falsified, or that it is such a minuscule forcing that it can be completely disregarded for all practical purposes.
A mile of glacier ice could descend on Chicago as it did during the last great stadial, and you would still hold the position that AGW causes global warming. In your opinion, nothing could falsify AGW.
Your mind is made up. Global warming is caused primarily by human activity. No further evidence is necessary. Got it.
Scientific skeptics often encounter that type of religious belief here. No scientific evidence or measurements are necessary; belief is fully sufficient for the AGW religion. Or am I missing something?
Your comments reflect your belief system–not mine.
geohydro2011 says:
April 6, 2013 at 1:04 pm
“On the issue of belief, my mind is not closed on this subject. Nay, it is some of the readers here that are so committed to an opinion that they will not or can not admit that there is evidence contrary to their belief. So rather than seek my approval of a refutation or affirmation, I suggest that you examine the evidence, ”
The snow piles outside here in germany have nearly disappeared.
During the warm 90ies we had winters that had no snow at all.
I’ve examined a lot of that evidence this winter. Granted it didn’t come out of a computer program-. Notice I’m a programmer. I can make a computer perform any song and dance and when I find gullible people they might believe what I make the computer say. So I know what the government scientists are doing here.
geohydro2011,
Science is about falsification. What, specifically, would it take to falsify your belief in AGW?
geohydro2011,
you maintain that you answer on comments by other people. You haven’t answered any of mine.
You don’t have to. I just register it. I’d say you just give an endless series of baseless assertions of other people’s closed-mindedness.
See, if it were warming, I would take the CO2AGW theory serious. Because that would tell me that these scientists could be on to something.
If they had ever come up with a prediction (like Einstein) that were later acknowledged by real events, they would have a leg to stand on now. But they haven’t.
It looks like they’re lying scoundrels who won’t admit that their theory is wrong; that they never properly factored in negative feedbacks, and that all their models err on the warm side.
Given the largish influence Greenpeace and WWF have at the IPCC, this looks like a systematic problem. Therefore I maintain that it would be best to dissolve the existing climate science institutes, fire the lot of them, try to recover as much money as possible from them, and sell the supercomputers on EBay.
And stamp every page of every paper from them with a big red FALSIFIED.