Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Freeman Dyson, one of the world’s most prominent physicists, has given an interview to The Register, in which he discusses climate change, and his disappointment that President Obama, whom he strongly admires, chose the wrong side of the Climate issue.
Freeman Dyson on Politics;
An Obama supporter who describes himself as “100 per cent Democrat,” Dyson says he is disappointed that the President “chose the wrong side.” Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere does more good than harm, he argues, but is not an insurmountable crisis. Climate change, he tells us, “is not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to obvious facts?”
Freeman Dyson on Climate models;
Are climate models getting better? You wrote how they have the most awful fudges, and they only really impress people who don’t know about them.
I would say the opposite. What has happened in the past 10 years is that the discrepancies between what’s observed and what’s predicted have become much stronger. It’s clear now the models are wrong, but it wasn’t so clear 10 years ago. I can’t say if they’ll always be wrong, but the observations are improving and so the models are becoming more verifiable.
It seems almost medieval to suppose that nature is punishing us, rather than the Enlightenment view, that we can tame nature, and still be good stewards of it.
That’s all true.
Read more: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/11/freeman_dyson_interview/
Dyson is also deeply concerned that the world appears to be experiencing a hunger for apocalypse, comparable to the buildup to World War 1.
The years before 1914 were a tremendously promising time. Russia was getting richer, [but then] the whole thing fell apart. It’s comparable today – we’ve done a much better job with feeding the world and if you look at the number of desperately poor people, it has been decreasing quite steadily.
The Dyson’s interview covers a range of interesting related issues – well worth a read. It is also interesting that Dyson openly identifies so strongly with Democratic Party politics. Dyson’s politics, like the politics of other prominent skeptics, contradicts the rather lazy stereotype alarmists sometimes promote, that your politics determine your views on climate change.
As the recent climate mutiny in California demonstrated, Dyson is not the only climate skeptic in the Democratic Party. Other Democrats have gone as far as they are willing to go, and are starting to put climate sanity before political unity.
Global warming is a sham and Go Bernie 2016! ‘Nuff said!!
That’s just weird !!!! A socialist that doesn’t believe in the GloBULL warming scam !!
Reblogged this on gottadobetterthanthis and commented:
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I think it is reasonable to assert that Freeman Dyson is the greatest genius alive on earth today. He is worth listening to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson
I love this closing:
[Interviewer] Finally, what are your views on fusion? Do you see any real progress being made?
[Dyson] I think they made a terrible mistake 50 years ago when they stopped doing science and went to big engineering projects. These big engineering projects are not going to solve the problem, and they’ve become just a welfare programme for the engineers. You have these big projects, both national and international, that are really a dead end as far as I can see. Even if they’re successful, they won’t provide energy that’s useful and cheap.
But it’s not clear when you do science, whether you’ll discover anything or not. But that’s the only answer.
[Interviewer] So with fusion, we should go back to the drawing board?
[Dyson] Yes, and it’s not going to solve any problems for the near future.
But I don’t think there is a problem in the near future anyway [laughs].
Well, I am left leaning politically. I am an admirer of Obama and recently Jeremy Corbyn. But I have become skeptical as a result of having been challenged on the facts by someone whose views on such things I respected. I then investigated very deeply and the found that the evidence does not support the conclusion that man is irrevocably and dangerously altering the climate on a global level.
The question of whether we are changing the climate is in the first instance a scientific one. What to do about it is a political question. But it’s dangerous and not valid to let yourself be fooled over the first question in order to fulfil the requirements for a consensus for a political solution. The danger is that our agonising over essentially what is a non problem distracts us from the very real and immediate problems we face, particularly in respect with our impact on the environment.
As a progressive liberal (what I think is understood by that anyway) I can understand why the alarm can grow on this issue. People who know nothing at all about climate change are predisposed to be somewhat skeptical. They are force fed so much alarmist rubbish by the media that alarm of AGW smells the same. Then there are the educated progressive types such as myself, who read scientific articles, in depth articles in broadsheets on certain issues and are generally superficially more informed. From this point of view, the plausible mainstream scientific concern plus a primary motivating sense of social and general responsibility, the sense that we need to work collectively to manage our existence on this planet responsibly, can lead to genuine if misinformed concern over our impact on the climate.
It’s only when you investigate the issue more deeply that you realise that the scientific case is so poor and efforts and energies directed in rectifying a non problem is efforts and energies not directed into manifest problems. Thus my liberal progressive “socially responsible” nerve kicks in and my alarm is over the damage to the integrity of science, the distraction and waste of money and ingenuity on “fixing” a non problem that will not be relevant or adequate for our longer term future.
“Well, I am left leaning politically. I am an admirer of Obama and recently Jeremy Corbyn. But I have become skeptical as a result of having been challenged on the facts by someone whose views on such things I respected. I then investigated very deeply and the found that the evidence does not support the conclusion that man is irrevocably and dangerously altering the climate on a global level.”
I hope you will take that newfound, albeit late, wisdom and do something useful with it within the democrat party. Help the poor not by redistributing wealth but by lowering the cost of living, not raising it with false climate scares.
When it comes time for the Nuremberg Climate Trials in about 20 years, will you testify against all your friends and leaders who, being in denial themselves falsely called others “denialists”, “flat earthers”, refusing to debate, convincing major newspapers to squelch the debate and not publish their opinions, some of whom called publicly to prosecute and imprison leading scientists who disagreed with them, attempting to create an atmosphere of fear amongst scientists who dared go against the political and scientific elite, where government agencies tasked with objective scientific responsibilities themselves became biased and political?
No need to answer, just making a point.
Welcome to the real world. (…sort of..we need to work on that Progressive thing next, another day, another blog).
🙂
++ 10
It is no mystery. If it is impossible to get a grant unless you are pro global warming / climate change so of course those trained in the field will either support it or be unemployed and look elsewhere for work. I only became interested in this issue as a result of a group of them who went into engineering rather than lose their integrity showing me the fiddles and them getting me put on a list for papers that were not intended to go outside the faithful.
There is another interesting article on the site about the effects of the Cherbobyl disaster. Greenpeace (as usual) were predicting the usual death/destruction/tragedy/mass extinction of local wildlife yet exactly the opposite seems to have happened.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/06/chernobyl_wildlife_ting/
Be careful with this. All the recovery of wildlife was from removing the human population in its entirety. Don’t give these people ideas.
Climate and CO2- E mail Exchange with Freeman Dyson
E-mail 4/7/15
Dr Norman Page
Houston
Professor Dyson
Saw your Vancouver Sun interview.
I agree that CO2 is beneficial. This will be even more so in future because it is more likely than not that the earth has already entered a long term cooling trend following the recent temperature peak in the quasi-millennial solar driven periodicity .
The climate models on which the entire Catastrophic Global Warming delusion rests are built without regard to the natural 60 and more importantly 1000 year periodicities so obvious in the temperature record. The modelers approach is simply a scientific disaster and lacks even average commonsense .It is exactly like taking the temperature trend from say Feb – July and projecting it ahead linearly for 20 years or so. They back tune their models for less than 100 years when the relevant time scale is millennial. This is scientific malfeasance on a grand scale. The temperature projections of the IPCC – UK Met office models and all the impact studies which derive from them have no solid foundation in empirical science being derived from inherently useless and specifically structurally flawed models. They provide no basis for the discussion of future climate trends and represent an enormous waste of time and money. As a foundation for Governmental climate and energy policy their forecasts are already seen to be grossly in error and are therefore worse than useless. A new forecasting paradigm needs to be adopted. For forecasts of the timing and extent of the coming cooling based on the natural solar activity cycles – most importantly the millennial cycle – and using the neutron count and 10Be record as the most useful proxy for solar activity check my blog-post at http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2014/07/climate-forecasting-methods-and-cooling.html
The most important factor in climate forecasting is where earth is in regard to the quasi- millennial natural solar activity cycle which has a period in the 960 – 1020 year range. For evidence of this cycle see Figs 5-9. From Fig 9 it is obvious that the earth is just approaching ,just at or just past a peak in the millennial cycle. I suggest that more likely than not the general trends from 1000- 2000 seen in Fig 9 will likely generally repeat from 2000-3000 with the depths of the next LIA at about 2650. The best proxy for solar activity is the neutron monitor count and 10 Be data. My view ,based on the Oulu neutron count – Fig 14 is that the solar activity millennial maximum peaked in Cycle 22 in about 1991. There is a varying lag between the change in the in solar activity and the change in the different temperature metrics. There is a 12 year delay between the neutron peak and the probable millennial cyclic temperature peak seen in the RSS data in 2003. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1980.1/plot/rss/from:1980.1/to:2003.6/trend/plot/rss/from:2003.6/trend
There has been a cooling temperature trend since then (Usually interpreted as a “pause”) There is likely to be a steepening of the cooling trend in 2017- 2018 corresponding to the very important Ap index break below all recent base values in 2005-6. Fig 13.
The Polar excursions of the last few winters in North America are harbingers of even more extreme winters to come more frequently in the near future.
I would be very happy to discuss this with you by E-mail or phone .It is important that you use your position and visibility to influence United States government policy and also change the perceptions of the MSM and U.S public in this matter. If my forecast cooling actually occurs the policy of CO2 emission reduction will add to the increasing stress on global food production caused by a cooling and generally more arid climate.
Best Regards
Norman Page
E-Mail 4/9/15
Dear Norman Page,
Thank you for your message and for the blog. That all makes sense.
I wish I knew how to get important people to listen to you. But there is
not much that I can do. I have zero credibility as an expert on climate.
I am just a theoretical physicist, 91 years old and obviously out of touch
with the real world. I do what I can, writing reviews and giving talks,
but important people are not listening to me. They will listen when the
glaciers start growing in Kentucky, but I will not be around then. With
all good wishes, yours ever, Freeman Dyson.
Email 4/9/15
Professor Dyson Would you have any objection to my posting our email exchange on my blog?
> Best Regards Norman Page
E-Mail 4/9/15
Yes, you are welcome to post this exchange any way you like. Thank you
for asking. Yours, Freeman Dyson
Great post and thread of comments. The sense I get is that the planet is cooling, particularly since 2005 March. I think that the vested interests in CAGW are panicking and have circled the wagons to push forward their control paradigm agenda. Distracting the voter and world citizen with ever more shrill climate scare stories to quickly drive policies they want is what we are seeing now. Inertia. Money. And ultimately our world civilization is being set up for a catastrophic failure by not allocating resources to real problems and events man-made or natural.
I very much like Freeman Dyson and his views (let’s leave aside his allegiance to any particular political party).
Regarding the false global warming crisis:
If elected (in Canada), young Trudeau says he will meet with Obama to discuss climate change.
Now that will be a meeting of intellectual giants…
Best, Allan 🙂
Well, young Trudeau got elected tonight.
Today, Canada got a whole lot stupider.
This was a national IQ Test, and Canada failed.
Get ready for the meeting of minds between Trudeau and Obama – with that much brilliance in one room, the lights will dim all the way to Florida.