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"When I listen to the public debates about climate change, I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories"

"We have no reason to think that climate change is harmful if you look at the world as a whole. Most places, in fact, are better off being warmer than being colder. And historically, the really bad times for the environment and for people have been the cold periods rather than the warm periods."

"...the computer models are very good at solving equations of fluid dynamics but very bad at describing the real world. The real world is full of things like clouds and vegetation and soil and dust which the models describe very poorly."

https://www.azquotes.com/author/4275-Freeman_Dyson/tag/clima...

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What is important is that Dyson has quotes, but I'm not aware of any published work by him on the problem (by "published", I don't mean peer-reviewed, arXiv etc would be fine too). This means that he probably never really put his hands on the problem as a working scientist.

I'd rather remember Dyson for his significant contributions to physics, rather than for something he did not contribute to.

the ridiculously hot summers in Australasia resulting in bushfires, famine and drought... seas taking over the cities are all demonstrable effects of climate change.

Did he live in UK? Yea the winter was milder I guess.

His point is, for every place that gets worse, someplace else will get better.

Small consolation if you live in one of the former places, of course. But he's not wrong. Earth as a whole is a bit colder than it would be in the best of all possible universes.

Other effects like ocean acidification are harder to hand-wave away. I hate cold weather, myself, but it's not just about terrestrial climate.

His point has been debunked time and time again. "Better" is a definition for the organisms that may inhabit a certain environment.

Under no reasonable time frame for human existence is his claim even close to valid.

His point has been debunked time and time again. ... by arguments that themselves are subject to debunking. You've used a thought-terminating phrase here.

The fact is, we've been coming out of an ice age for the past several millennia, and life has generally gotten better as a result. The rate at which that process happens is very important, though. If Dyson did overlook any important counterpoints, that seems like a big one.

Yeah, he's overlooking the entire field of climate science and all the associated environmental sciences that predict to an amazing level of detail the impact of climate change in each and every imaginable location in the planet.

We know exactly what the Arctic is going to look like and its impacts. We have known and are observing the melting of glaciers in the Alps, Andes and Himalayas to catastrophic effects in downstream environments.

Anything is subject to debunking if you're unwilling to look at the most sophisticated evidence available. Unfortunately, there is no model that will tell you that a 4 degree increase in average temperature won't end most of human society as we know it.

If you read the literature it's clear that model determinations of very high climate sensitivity (4°C, 5°C, 6°C and up) have increasingly been determined to be in error.

Moreover, “Contrary to popular accounts, very few scientists in the world – possibly none – have a sufficiently thorough, 'big picture' understanding of the climate system to be relied upon for a prediction of the magnitude of global warming. To the public, we all might seem like experts, but the vast majority of us work on only a small portion of the problem.” (Roy Spencer)

So? The predictions of the current heating have been spot on for models that are 20 years old.

I'm sorry but I'm not gonna take seriously people who want to criticize model sensitive as a reason to ignore climate change when the current glacial melt, the ongoing ocean acidification and all the phenomena that have already been unleashed by the existing levels of climate change continue unabated.

> seas taking over the cities are all demonstrable effects of climate change

The sea level raise has been approximately 3 inches from the 1993 level. That is much less than the change due to the tides.

Well, all that matters is the level at high tide, right? Everything near the seashore is constructed on that basis.

I agree. There are also spring and neap tides, so the important level is the high tide of a spring tide.

But if the wind is blowing from the sea/river to the land, it can increase the level, specially during a storm, in some places a few meters. And the waves during a storm can be also a few meters high. [Hi from Buenos Aires! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudestada ] So a few inches was never enough to ensure that your city will not be flooded.

and the city of Ur use to be right on the coast, but now it's way inland. The Ganges River use to lead right up to Red Fort and now it doesn't.

The location of certain geological features or bodies of water is a really poor indicator of environmental damage, because these things have changed constantly throughout time.

However the tons of plastic we dump into the oceans, the lakes of sludge outside of Chinese factory cities and the massive amounts of e-waste shipped every year to Africa where kids and adults extract metals and plastic in very unsafe conditions and smelters should be of great concern to everyone.

There is environmental disaster looming, and so much of it is much more radically evidence than CO2. We need to stop over-consumption. Consumerism and planned/negligent obsolescence is destroying this planet. Solving for the real problems will also reduce CO2, but focusing on CO2 is like trying to cure the sniffles when you're dying of the Flu.

Well said.

It’s important environmentalists consider the whole and do cost benefit analyses of intervention.

I see much less of a cost to quality of life in reducing planned obsolescence and increasing the reusability of things than I do in decreasing carbon emissions wholesale. The transportation benefits of gasoline are enormous, and it makes less sense to restrict something so practical and beneficial than it does to try to reduce something as wasteful and pointless as intentionally making a product difficult to repair and maintain long term.

I’m very sympathetic to Dyson’s criticism of the status quo, although I don’t know enough to have an opinion on whether carbon emissions may be beneficial on net. He advocated for practicality rather than dogmatic belief, and was interested in simple interventions like changing land management and tilling practices if carbon emissions are actually as detrimental as are being touted, rather than dramatic energy reduction or conversion to expensive and currently less viable energy sources.

Regardless of whether or not people believe CO2 is on net beneficial for the planet, I think he was right in calling out the difficulty in having an apolitical, non-interested and practically minded perspective on climate change and environmental impact that goes against dogma. The science should speak for itself, and any candid and open good faith discussion to determine whether alternative perspectives are valid should be welcomed. Dyson’s argument that carbon emissions are probably good on net might be wrong, but his position was in good faith and well constructed. Any such position should be transparently engaged with rather than dismissed as uneducated.

There are plant species that are dependent upon fire for reproduction. Such species begin to die if all fire is suppressed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrophyte

https://www.gardenguides.com/97493-eucalyptus-trees-australi...

https://www.bushheritage.org.au/species/grass-trees

https://www.nationalforests.org/our-forests/your-national-fo...

https://www.quora.com/What-seeds-need-fire-to-germinate-like...

https://thekidshouldseethis.com/post/why-the-giant-sequoia-n...

When the Iraqis set the Kuwait oil wells on fire as they left, it was predicted that they would burn for years and be a global environmental disaster. They were put out in six months. This was never celebrated. The news just moved on to something with more drama.

In the aftermath of the fires, the combination of ash and water used to put many of them out caused the desert to bloom like no one had seen in at least twenty years. This also was not widely promoted as some kind of good news.

When I was pursuing environmental studies, there was a cartoon in one of my textbooks depicting microbes giving off oxygen and some of the microbes protesting that they were destroying their environment and needed to stop. Microbes that off-gassed oxygen are how we got an oxygen atmosphere on earth.

One of my professors once said "We're like fleas on the butt of a dog trying to figure out which way the dog is going."

The truth is we don't really know as much as some people like to pretend we do and we do present stories in a biased fashion. The people who are convinced we are hurtling towards our doom generally don't want to have a rational discussion of the evidence. They are too busy trying to insist that our lives are in imminent danger and there's no time for rational discussion, we must do something to stop this.

> The truth is we don't really know as much as some people like to pretend we do and we do present stories in a biased fashion. The people who are convinced we are hurtling towards our doom generally don't want to have a rational discussion of the evidence. They are too busy trying to insist that our lives are in imminent danger and there's no time for rational discussion, we must do something to stop this.

This comment is essentially self-refuting, since it would mean that you don't know as much as you like to pretend you do, and you are presenting a story in a biased fashion. Considering that its evidence includes a second-hand account of what one of your professors saying we are fleas on the butt of a dog, I'm gonna put it squarely in the "stories" category.

When I want to know what is happening with the climate and fires, I'm gonna trust billions of CPU hours of simulations based on computational fluid dynamics, numerical methods, satellite observations, and the laws of thermodynamics, economic modeling, and the scientific peer review process just a little bit more than the model your professor presents. Yeah, Earth is complicated. Fleas? Not helping the discussion.

I didn't realize that about the original predictions for the Kuwaiti oil well fires, that's interesting.

They are still cleaning up the oil from the sands on the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia 30 years later though.

It was predicted that the fires would burn from two to five years before losing pressure and going out on their own, optimists estimating two years and pessimists estimating five while the majority estimated three years until this occurred.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires

You seem definitely better informed on the subject than I am (and on other subjects btw!) But I can't help but point out that the wiki quote talks about the time needed for the fires to go out by themselves, and the 6 months were for them to be extinguished.

Still something to be celebrating I suppose, but less of an inconsistency.

Presumably, I'm older than you. I was actually watching this on the news at the time it was happening.

At that time, it was not framed as "if nothing is done and we stand idly by and watch it burn." It was framed as "We simply don't have the manpower to resolve this and it's likely that many of these hundreds of oil well fires will end up simply burning themselves out while we try to get to them because the scale of this is just beyond what we have capacity to try to fix."

Then crack teams from around the world converged on Kuwait and developed new techniques on the spot that were more efficient and effective.

> When I was pursuing environmental studies, there was a cartoon in one of my textbooks depicting microbes giving off oxygen and some of the microbes protesting that they were destroying their environment and needed to stop. Microbes that off-gassed oxygen are how we got an oxygen atmosphere on earth.

Yes, that is called the Great Oxidation Event [1] and it was the Earth's first major extinction event.

The microbes were absolutely correct that their environment was being destroyed. The Earth then shifted to a new atmospheric makeup and new life blossomed but it was still a termination event for most life that existed prior to the event.

> The truth is we don't really know as much as some people like to pretend we do

Yes. Which means we shouldn't run a giant experiment with the atmosphere and the oceans. This is called the precautionary principle: if you're doing something that may result in systemic disaster then it's better to not do it. People who say that this giant global experiment won't do any harm (or go further and say it will be beneficial) are pretending knowledge that they don't actually have.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

Thank you for the link to The Great Oxidation Event and for the name of it. Have an upvote for that perfectly chromulent information.

> They were put out in six months. This was never celebrated.

Red Adair was already a celebrated oil well firefighter in the 1960s, when 'Hellfighters' was filmed. His fame continued to grow. I remember a number of pieces praising Red Adair Company and others involved in putting out the Kuwait oil well fires. Putting out an oil well fire with a jet engine made for eye-grabbing news.

Obituaries about him include praise like this, from CBS, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hellfighter-red-adair-dies-at-8... :

"Thanks in part to his expertise, an operation expected to last three to five years was completed in nine months, saving millions of barrels of oil and stopping an intercontinental air pollution disaster."

I therefore think you exaggerate when you write "never celebrated."

Do you have a citation for the desert bloom? I looked, but couldn't find any mention of it. Since much of the water for putting out the fires was sea water, pumped in reverse through oil pipes, I'm curious about salt water could be beneficial to a desert bloom. Was it downwind moisture?

It was far easier to find publications like "Remediation of Oil Contaminated Sludge and Soil in Kuwait":

"The destruction of oil fields in Kuwait during the Gulf War resulted in unprecedented large environmental damage. More than 500 oil lakes were formed covering more than 49 km2 area. The volume of contaminated oily sludge’s and soil, which needs to be treated in Kuwait, is estimated to be more than 20 million m3 ... Within Burgan, all lake beds, particularly the ones near the city of Ahmadi and in the working areas such as gathering centers in the oil field, are considered to be a threat to human health and harmful to all types of life, including native flora and fauna."

an "Ecology of Arabian deserts" (doi:10.1007/1-4020-3970-0_5 )

"Lakes of oil deliberately released in Kuwait by the Iraqi Armyin the 1991 Gulf War were up to 2.5 m deep and contaminated the environment, as well as the north-eastern shores of Saudi Arabia. The movement of armies and their vehicles during the first Gulf War in 1991 and the Iraq war in 2003–2005 has caused the fragile desert pavements laid down over thousands of years to be broken and destroyed over large areas of north-eastern Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and many areas of Iraq. This caused a dramatic increase in the number of violent sandstorms and dust storms, new dunes blocked roads in northern Kuwait (El-Baz, 1992), and pilots reported a doubling of dust storms following the Iraq–Iran war in the 1980s."

so I also would like to know how well benefits like the desert bloom balances the many better-known negative effects.

Do you have a citation for the desert bloom?

It was something I saw in a print magazine a long time ago. I can't cite it.

It's easy to pull out a single phrase, like "never celebrated," and nitpick it. In comparison to the handwringing in the news at the time about the imminent global catastrophe we were facing, the success of getting it out out and averting the level of global atmospheric catastrophe that was expected wasn't really celebrated.

We did the same with Y2K. The world expected a financial meltdown. People were stockpiling guns and give years of flour in their basements and then it became "Gosh, I can't program my VCR."

We take success for granted. We don't celebrate that we have 7 billion people with long life expectancy and high standard of living compared to 200 years ago. Instead, we complain about overpopulation and global warming and how we are hurtling towards our doom.

"How to lie with statistics" is a terrific book about how we can take the same data and say different things with it. We tend to frame it quite negatively.

In the end, none of us is getting out of here alive. We're all just dancing on this Earth for a short while.

There are people literally trying to find ways to solve death and wondering if we can be frozen and brought back and so forth. We're never satisfied and there's some evidence that it's partly because we choose to focus on the negative and with 7 billion people there no shortage of bad news, but not because things are necessarily actually worse in absolute terms.

"It's easy to pull out a single phrase, like "never celebrated," and nitpick it."

Sure. And it's easy to exaggerate. Why not say "underappreciated"?

"People were stockpiling guns and give years of flour in their basements"

Sure. And yet no one I knew did that. If one points to extremes and ignore the average case, isn't that an exaggeration?

"Instead, we complain about overpopulation"

Perhaps because Norman Borlaug was right in saying "But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only."

"it's partly because we choose to focus on the negative"

Perhaps you are the one to see a desert flower bloom in the midst of great environmental damage. Does that mean the damage is not there and there's nothing to do?

> Australasia resulting in bushfires

Ah yes, the same fires started by loony arsonists to promote climate change hysteria.

Famine in Australasia?? No idea where you got that. I live in NZ.

He lived in Princeton NJ. In the last several years, it has stopped snowing in the winter in central NJ. Direct consequence of global warming messing up the arctic air currents.

Those points may have been true when he said them. "The models are bad" becomes less true over time. Also, since the ice age was so bad for humans, it's forgivable that a non-expert would think that going further in the same direction could be helpful.

I think it’s unfair to call Dyson a non-expert. Climate science was not his speciality, and he was humble about his relation to it and quick to point out that there are people more familiar with the current state of the field than him, but he was involved in important early climate studies. From Wikipedia:

> Around 1979 Dyson worked with the Institute for Energy Analysis on climate studies. This group, under Alvin Weinberg's direction, pioneered multidisciplinary climate studies, including a strong biology group. Also during the 1970s, Dyson worked on climate studies conducted by the JASON defense advisory group.

There have been lots of advances in modelling complex systems, but it’s notoriously difficult to find models that work beyond a short timeframe. Dumb simple models often work better than cutting edge, complicated, much more realistic ones simply because there are less variables to get wrong. And every time you make an advance, the assumed accuracy of the model’s long term predictions needs to be reset: if model A predicted 1 year accurately, and you improved it so model A.1 predicted the next year accurately, you don’t have a model that accurately predicted 2 years; there is still only 1 unknown year that was predicted, and A.1 was just as accurate/inaccurate as model A at predicting that unknown year whether or not it took that past year into account.

We’ve seen how easy it is for sophisticated and complex models of chaotic systems like the stock market to fail despite people’s faith in them. His point seems as prudent now as back then; I think some systems are a lot more complicated than we’d like, and that we should have enough hubris to acknowledge that and be constantly testing our assumptions against empirical data.

He didn’t dismiss the value of models in helping understand chaotic systems, he was just wary about their long term predictions. And that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong, only that they should not be taken as Gospel for anything beyond a fairly short time frame.

Unfortunately, he acted like a non-expert when he hand-waved away quantitative arguments. Being wary of long-term predictions does not in any way justify using claims that are not even predictions, in any scientific sense, to argue for the opposite outcome.

I disagree about him hand-waving away quantitative arguments.

I’ve watched a number of relatively lengthy interviews and presentations he’s given that have been about or have touched on the topic of climate change, and he consistently references measurements of carbon’s effects and emphasizes the importance of real world measurements. His criticism is of abstract models of climate that attempt to make long term predictions.

If you’re most familiar with his positions through quotes and third hand reporting, I encourage you to listen to videos of him. I found him quite enjoyable to listen to. He was not the partisan he was sometimes painted as, although he was interviewed by people that were, but rather seemed genuinely curious and interested in truth and exploration.

Here are a few videos.

https://youtu.be/5hswLwqRIW8

https://youtu.be/8xFLjUt2leM

https://youtu.be/-mmI6DorL_Y?t=3m07s

His core claims appear to be that A) Increased CO2 has measurable, beneficial effects B) CO2 is one of many factors contributing to a complex system effecting climate that we don’t fully comprehend C) The positive or negative effects of climate change we’re observing depend on the region D) It is better to create a wide range of practical engineering solutions to deal with the effects of a changing climate than to think we can fully control it or know what effect our interventions or lack thereof will do in the future.

Some of those claims might be wrong, but I think it’s inaccurate to say they weren’t scientifically based.

The A, B, C and D are exactly the sort of places where he raises an issue and then starts handwaving over the quantitative questions that should be the next step, while at the same time dismissing and even belittling the work who have looked into these issues in more detail. For example, when he claims effects will balance out, it is just his opinion - he does not offer a quantitative scientific justification. He starts with something that is science-based, but he doesn't follow through.

There is also something of the motte-and-bailey fallacy when he claims that the modeling is not accurate enough to be trusted, while also telling us how things are going to work out.

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