Freeman Dyson takes on the climate establishment (2009)
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
Proceed by testing and accepting or disproving hypothesis. Nothing more, nothing less.
There is more money at stake with climate change than most areas of science, which means it becomes a political issue. There would seem to be a very strong incentive to show existing models are not accurate, or to come up with scientifically plausible models with very different outcomes. However no arguments against climate change do this, presumably because it's not very easy to do so.
Dyson here points out some areas that he thinks are not possible to model accurately or are not currently modelled accurately, such as the benefits and threats of various changes to the climate, the impact of climate change on sea level change, cloud modelling uncertainties, and the chaotic effects of different carbon reservoirs on each other.
His points on the exact impact of climate change and what the ideal climate is are important, but they are also studied and discussed. The supposed political reasons for supporting or being against climate change theories do not change the facts. If there are real problems with the models these can be flagged up - sensitivity testing can be done for all of these issues.
One major problem here is that the communication of the climate mainstream is very poor. The IPCC produces massive reports that are designed to be printed as PDF, and are targeted at policy experts. They're not really readable, the web versions don't really use hyperlinks and have minimal pictures and poor structure.
They're slowly getting better, but still a long way from ideal. Example for reference:
Yes. But even beyond that, power is at stake. Climate change isn't about science, it's about geopolitics/globalism. It's about instilling fear to create a global political system. At least that's my take. If the climate change alarmism was valid, we'd simply end global trade today because global trade is the driver of pollution. But you never hear that from the elites. They demand more globalism, but with a global tax. Maybe a global system is the next step of human societal evolution, but instead of being open and honest and having a global discussion, these people are being sneaky and using fear to sneak a global system on humanity.
> There would seem to be a very strong incentive to show existing models are not accurate or to come up with scientifically plausible models with very different outcomes.
Not if enough of those with money and power are aligned on one side. Then there is very strong incentive to show one side.
> The supposed political reasons for supporting or being against climate change theories do not change the facts.
Sure. And the facts are that climate science is a very young science and have been reliably wrong that we shouldn't take it as gospel. Especially when so much of climate science is politically driven.
I love climate change alarmism. When their predictions are wrong, they claim that the climate is so complex that it's hard to model and predict accurately. At the same time, they claim their predictions are facts and we must believe everything they say. Even when these alarmists all say and have different predictions. How about this, how out of dozens/hundreds of climate alarmist models, which is the right one?
I personally believe that climate change is natural and the forces of nature ( mostly the sun ) drive climate on earth. Also, I don't think there is anything we can do about climate change, just like we can't do anything about earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. And I reject the false notion that climate change is bad. Climate change can be bad for some, but good for others.
If climate alarmists want to be taken seriously, then let them protest globalist bankers and global trade instead of advocating for a global carbon tax and enriching the wealthy bankers and industrialists. But of course they won't because these climate alarmists are funded by the globalist bankers and industrialists.
It must have been in the early 00s when there was the first report that created a big media echo, since it was presented at the UN. It was full of obvious flaws and the results were not reproducible because the data wasn't published and the team behind it only reluctantly gave out the data and the calculations that were done based on that.
That's quite a contrast to the Theoretical Physicist Dyson. In both experimental and theoretical Physics everything is calculated with great care and cross-checked by other people.
Probably the governments/universities would do well if they created funds to enhance the theoretical backing of the black boxes. On the other hand nobody minds using black boxes, after all every equation based on experiments is one. (Historically many equations in Physics and Chemistry were created based on experiments and later on theoretical backing was deduced) But a bit more transparency would be good...
The word salad looked good, though.
Existing climate models are really good. They are used with little modification to correctly model climate of Mars, Venus, tidal locked exoplanet and previous historical eras on Earth. You just set the parameters and they pretty much produce the climate that exists on those planets or time periods. Yet constant shade thrown at them.
Never heard that claim. Could you back it up?
Side note. I did a calculation of PV=nRT on Venus which has a 96.5% (965000PPM) CO2 atmospheric concentration. Assuming RT is close to equal on Venus & Earth, P~T.
Venus has a surface temp/pressure of 7.96 K/bar vs 287.15 K/bar on Earth. If Venus had a runaway greenhouse effect, the K/bar on Venus should be significantly higher than on Earth. Would love more feedback & critique on this calculation, particularly a relevant PVT diagram for CO2.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mn4yuh2TUKWeMtMpZkDN...
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Heres a PVT phase diagram for CO2 but hopefully theres better ones wrt Venus. Note that theres a bend in the liquid/gas border. 1 to 10 bar has a lower increase of K/bar than for the 10 to 90 bar region.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-phase-diagram-for-CO2_...
why are they wrong all the time then ?
If you can't predict certain known inputs, and theres unknown unknowns, how can your model have predictive accuracy? If you believe that the model is accurate, what makes the model falsifiable? One of the indicators of a pseudoscience is nonfalsifiability.
It's possible some of these inputs may be of the form "the Gulf Stream continues to operate within historically observed parameters", i.e. we make no attempt to claim accuracy for the model outside of its studied conditions. That's fine: there are a large number of accurate models which are known to have breakdown conditions.
It is literally impossible for any model to be robust to unknown unknowns. All we can do is endeavour to drag them into the light and become known unknowns, then attempt to quantify them as known knowns. Sadly, our ability to experiment repeatedly in the same conditions with the environment is deeply limited, in a way much akin to astronomy.
That doesn't help if you are not gathering the correct proxy data to represent the actual physical system. For example, CMIP6 includes particle forcing while CMIP5 & before did not. The global & solar electric circuits are not considered. Are xrays, which have a large variance with solar cycles, included in CMIP6? I don't think the Birkeland Current is considered.
What also doesn't help is adjusting historical measurements such as temperature. It's like changing the rules mid-game, which indicates that past observations are mutable to fit the models. Also note the incomplete data, as modern satellite observations span a tiny window compared to Earth's lifespan. The solar system travels through different parts of the Galaxy, crossing the Galactic Current Sheet at times, passing through ionized dust, among other phenomena.
> Sadly, our ability to experiment repeatedly in the same conditions with the environment is deeply limited, in a way much akin to astronomy.
We can experiment with ions, plasma, & high voltages applied to plasma. Note the Birkeland Current between Sun & the Earth, ions being ejected from the Sun, XRay emission varying wildly with solar activity, cosmic rays, etc. There's also a Birkeland current sheet in the solar system & a galactic current sheet.
One of the major issues is that the standard model does not consider plasma & electricity, in light of recent observations of the prevalence of Plasma in space, effectively blinding large parts of the astronomical theory to it's impact. This led to a legacy of ad hoc, non-observable (thus non-falsifiable) inventions such as "dark matter", "dark energy", "black holes", "neutron stars", "the big bang", "space/time", "magnetic line snapping", "parallel universes", "11 dimension space" & whatever other mathematical patches are used to fit the observations. Note inconsistencies with the assertion that redshift equals distance with observations such as examples of a Quasar with a high redshift being connected to a Galaxy with a low redshift.
Point is climate science is built on a tower of assumptions built on assumptions where some of the foundational pieces are called into question. Ad hoc tweaking of observational data & ad hoc tweaking of models to fit the transformed observed measurements makes it easy to doubt the accuracy, predictive ability, & knowledge of applicable boundary conditions of the model. It sounds like a tough job to get it right.
Do we have global data for historical eras?
> Dyson: I am sure there are. But I don’t know who they are.
> I have a lot of friends who think the same way I do. But I am sorry to say that most of them are old, and most of them are not experts. My views are very widely shared.
One plausible explanation is that as people become knowledgeable, they no longer share his view.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/freeman-dyson-physic...
Judging by the consequences for those public figures who made a mistake of doubting these believes, it's a whole totalitarian sect.
Sure, scientists make mistakes. Their models need adjustment. They ignore variables because they don't have the computational power to model every electron in the universe. Yeah, imprecise models make imprecise predictions. No one has accuracy of 100%. Sometimes it's 90%, sometimes it's 50%. Sometimes it's 99.9%. It's rarely, rarely ever 0%. People just don't publish scientific results that are 100% wrong with no checking whatsoever.
But that's not the level of conversation we are having. We usually aren't talking about adjusting and tinkering or adding sub-models for systems that aren't fully understood yet. We aren't asking what we missed, we aren't examining the assumptions from the outset, trying to get to something that works. We aren't talking details of climate models or pointing to something in the inner guts of their computer simulations that we can fix up, remove, replace, etc. All of that is really complicated and hard! And we aren't doing that specifically because you frame that stuff as "Sacred Knowledge" which you reflexively and categorically reject--it's a shortcut thinking that doesn't require you to understand math, code, or read a goddamn paper. It's a shortcut that allows you to keep reasoning in a vacuum and go about your daily life because you actually hate the idea of being an (xyz) scientist.
As such, we end up in a situation where you are forced to argue a position that results from all-or-nothing thinking, and have to start accusing them of being a religion, a totalitarian sect, usually because one of them got pissed off at some really outrageously stupid disinformation spread deliberately by politicians. But you are forced there because you either can't or don't want to cede any rhetorical ground of being fully and utterly more right than "they" are, because you have no idea what will happen if you cede any ground at all. So instead the othering intensifies. Reject everything they say! We must throw them out! It's a religion! Look, one of them got pissed off one day! They were wrong that one time! I don't trust a word they say!
And you only frame things this way because that's how you think--in terms of religion and power. Moreover, it's how you think they think.
No. I absolutely and unequivocally reject the framing of your comment. It's lazy and it's a lie.
There is no "Sacred Knowledge." Go dig. Scientists welcome it. But don't be a denialist moron. There are too many of those. Denialist morons reject even the basics of what scientists do. Sometimes they couch it in more-scientific-than-thou-art framing like yours, sometimes they don't. But they come out in anger and denial. You know what? That pisses off anybody. To have your work shat on, you better believe that pisses people off. We end up circling back over and over and over again to the same basics and it's just exhausting, because people aren't motivated by a desire for the truth, they are motivated by their tribal instincts which underpin your framing, whether you recognize it or not.
You do nothing to help your argument by resorting to this type of language.
terse catharsis.
Doesn't sound healthy, or wise.
Now the yin problem has revealed itself as an existential threat to the growth-centric way of life built upon the work of the great minds of the 20th century. Unsurprisingly they and their disciples are reluctant to accept this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_ef...
That was your SPECULATION.
Dyson is exhibiting a pathology common among physicists, a sort of Dunning-Kruger effect along the lines of “physics is hard, therefore everything else is easy for me”. We see it often when they dabble in social sciences, or biology, or economics. The complete opposite of intellectual humility and the scientific method.
Also goes into solar activity (electric, magnetic, & ion ejections) as a driver of climate change. Note that CMIP6 includes particle forcing to its model. CMIP5 & earlier versions did not include particle forcing.
Those statements are so vague in measurement as to mean nothing.
I've read the IPCC report and the relevant section says nothing of generalized society ending collapses as people would seem to want you to believe.
There's a few that you can read about:
1. A collapse in permafrost may occur (low confidence); 2. collapse of Maize in some regions, may exist under 3°C or more of global warming (low confidence)
etc...
Ok, those aren't great or desired things, and we need to mitigate that, but the world isn't ending. This isn't even close to a world war, a nuclear bomb going off, a massive solar event that takes out the grid etc...
I'd love to see way less apocalyptic language used and more talk about tradeoffs and realistic possible future costs of how we produce and consume vs finding sustainable growth.
As far as food shortages, that just requires a significant reduction in arable land. The US will probably be fine, but countries which rely on farming/production near the coasts will suffer.
'Different'. 'Ignore'. Not Dyson's best day. Oak Ridge was hardly a climate lab. Many studies have followed. This two year-old SA article, Ask the Experts: Does Rising CO2 Benefit Plants? [0]starts with this summary: "Climate change’s negative effects on plants will likely outweigh any gains from elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide levels"
[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-d...
Realistically, the bigger problem is that massive changes to society are required to mitigate the risks of climate change. However as Dyson says, some people will likely benefit from climate change, or at least will be in a position where their personal costs of doing something about it are much more than what they stand to gain.
This is the political problem: overall richer people are the greatest contributors to climate change, and they stand to lose the least from the bad effects of climate change.
Trump and Scott Morrison come closer to admitting this than most, and politically it seems to have worked in their favour.
If anybody were to even attempt to apply for grants to do that work, they would be expelled from the university community, and their professional reputation immediately destroyed.
There is no incentive to even look to see if you can find a flaw in the orthodoxy.
It’s not like they need to fight for academic grant money when they can go tap Big Oil any time they like. Also plenty of governments who’d like to hear everything’s fine, nothing to see, business as usual.
Heck, even climate scientists, being purely pragmatic, would like to be wrong. After all, they live on this rock too, so it’s not like they want this for their kids.
Nobody wants climate change. Nobody likes climate change. But the best science says that’s what’s happening, so deal. Or ignore it; your choice. But don’t lie about it; because, honestly, you’re absolutely rubbish at it and fooling no-one but yourself.
This is not to say they're wrong. But I strongly doubt that many of them would be looking for signs that climate change is not that bad after all.
In the case of Exxon, it appears that they believed the opposite to be true:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...
I guess that proving the absence of something is harder, and less rewarding in terms of recognition, than proving its presence. Many climate studies are interspersed with "may", "could", "likely"- but to prove an absence you need a higher degree of certainty. Also, there is of course a publication bias- research that doesn't produce significant results is less likely to be published. "We modeled the impact of global warming on this crop, and it didn't seem to change" is not as sexy as "the model for this staple crop failed spectacularly and at current temperature projections hundreds of million will die of hunger in 30 years".
This is also true when the threat is actually real and the people concerned about it are acting in good faith, which is the case here.
You are absolutely delusional if you think anybody advocating for climate action has any meaningful power whatsoever. All the power and all the big money is solidly behind denying, delaying and avoiding any action on climate.
But, it is the entire media system, the university-political complex, and all of the largest and most powerful political parties across the West.
It's pretty much just this one dead guy, a few internet memers, and a few Republicans versus the entire entrenched political structure of the western world.
On one of those sides, you can have a career in academia. On the other, you're lucky if you don't end up dead in a ditch.
So you’re saying that these organisations are conspiring to hide the truth?
Does it not make sense to you?
I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
You can just stop reading right there. Not only do we not have the ability to do that, even if we had such a tree, we would destroy the biosphere by cutting down all the world's trees to replace them with our magical carbon capture trees.
The latter one I'm not sure about, it's complicated.
The downvoting of this comment seems a little strange to me.
Edit: Thanks for explaining, I get it now, I shouldn't have mentioned it anyway, I was just interested in the scientific substance of parent comment and wondered why others seemed not to be (I get it now, it wasn't the scientific aspect of the comment which was against HN guidelines).
There are many comments ending with /s to signify sarcasm or even /sarcasm or such. It’s easier to point out a transgression when the user has agreed in his mind or his words that he was in fact being sarcastic.
Snark is general obnoxiousness that adds no intellectual value.
"What the secular faith of Dysonism offers is, first, a hypertrophied version of the technological fix, and second, the fantasy that, should the fix fail, we have someplace else to go."
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/12/the-dan...
Yet here we are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpKlvxnspXs
Anyway that's the optimistic view.
Your words not mine.
Problem is you guys thinks real technology moves as fast as you guys reinvent web frameworks.
It doesn't. Developing real technology and rolling it out takes decades.
What you're arguing for is normalization of deviance.
https://conservativehardliner.com/sites/default/files/styles...
> But, there are all sorts of things that are not said, which decreases my feeling of alarm. First of all, the people in Greenland love it. They tell you it’s made their lives a lot easier. They hope it continues. I am not saying none of these consequences are happening. I am just questioning whether they are harmful.
His arguments on the topic are bizarrely anecdotal and unscientific. He suggests that the happiness of locals over the past few years of warming is sufficient reason to doubt that it could get worse for Greenland in the future? Making dramatic changes to human environments is not good, people react poorly and things like resource wars can start / have started.
Super weird to see such anecdotal experiences extrapolated to "locals love it, so what's the problem?" while dismissing decades of intensive scientific research (not even including modals) that suggest a global chaotic event is happening presently.
Also, this:
> There’s been a very strong warming, in fact, ever since the Little Ice Age, which was most intense in the 17th century. That certainly was not due to human activity.
What does this mean? I went to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age and it lists multiple possible / probable causes of the little ice age that are directly human-related. He dismisses yet another field of scientific research as "certainly not due to human activity" without any evidence to back that up. He makes stuff up, dismisses decades of real science, and claims that major problems aren't real simply because local people don't understand large-scale chaotic events are are 'happy' with warming local climates for now. Bizarre.
“orbital cycles; decreased solar activity; increased volcanic activity; altered ocean current flows; fluctuations in the human population in different parts of the world causing reforestation, or deforestation; and the inherent variability of global climate change”
Only one of those is human related. Bizarre.
And they show that during the past few thousand years, when human co2 output was negligible, the temperature changed over decades by 5C.