Interview with Freeman Dyson, Reluctant Global Warming Skeptic

Full interview: http://e360.yale.edu/features/freeman_dyson_takes_on_the_cli...

This will do ... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?_r...

From the interview:e360: Do you mind being thrust in the limelight of talking about this when it is not your main interest. You’ve suddenly become the poster child for global warming skepticism.

Dyson: Yes, it is definitely a tactical mistake to use somebody like me for that job, because I am so easily shot down. I’d much rather the job would be done by somebody who is young and a real expert. But unfortunately, those people don’t come forward.

e360: Are there people who are knowledgeable about this topic who could do the job of pointing out what you see as the flaws?

Dyson: I am sure there are. But I don’t know who they are.

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I think there is a general sense some scientists get in which they judge a field from the outside based on their contacts with it, reading a paper or two, attending some meetings or engaging in conversation with others and so on. I am just a graduate student, but I sometimes tell myself it was a good idea to bail from a high profile and stressful CMS (LHC detector) group looking specifically for supersymmetry. I took a look at their results at that point, the general progress of the search for any sign of SUSY, the group environment, the stress level, and the advisors, and from that I betted against them and switched groups. Today, I am very happy in my current field and as HEP funds dry up, I am relieved I made the switch.

But, if I'm very honest with myself, what the hell did I know then? I just made a bet and won, it may have been informed but it was still uncertain then. Survivorship bias is a bitch after all, right?

I am not aware of Dyson's full body of work, but I am of course aware of the one thing most people know him for, the famous Dyson series from which springs modern particle physics. Dyson is on the mathy side of science, so it's not too surprising that he feels uncomfortable with fudge factors and the lot of them in the less fundamental sciences. You can't model everything exactly down to the bone due to computational constraints, you have to approximate and sometimes be happy when you get within an order of magnitude. Mathematicians I know and particle theorists I know are not comfortable with that. I at first wasn't when I switched to Laser Plasma and I still am not sometimes, but, it isn't completely arbitrary, the one saving grace that the more applied sciences have is we have experiment[0]. It's not that particle physicists don't have it, it's just that it requires the huge colliders which aren't that easy to make, while for Laser Plasma (my thing), you can shoot a target multiple times before someone can finish their simulations on a HPC system. For climate scientists, they have a wealth of history of temperatures to fit against and their predictions are surprisingly good. That to many of us is the gold standard, finding a model that fits the reality.

So fudge factors and fuzzy models are the norm in these parts, and how that would rub someone like Dyson the wrong way is understandable. Does that mean he's right? Dyson is extremely successful and one of my personal physics heros (right up there with Yang and Hermann Weyl) so perhaps he's come to trust that instinct where he might judge a field and bail (like it sounds like he did with modeling crowd, ironically, I'm in that crowd), but again, as an expert who doesn't know the deep facts, he is right when he says that he shouldn't be taken as a leading voice against it, especially when he doesn't want to be.

[0] (not counting the extremely messy systems like biologists or sociologists have. Weather is close, but climate I think is a little better)

[2009]