Freeman Dyson’s letters offer another glimpse of genius
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
https://www.edge.org/conversation/freeman_dyson-freeman-dyso...
Teller, E., Hyde, T., & Wood, L. (2002). Active climate stabilization: Practical physics-based approaches to prevention of climate change (No. UCRL-JC-148012). Lawrence Livermore National Lab.(LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States).
That’s a consequence we can readily foresee. What other unforeseen consequences will there be?
I think we might need something like this to reduce warming while we suck carbon out of the atmosphere. But to envisage it as a permanent solution is extremely risky.
(We don’t have scaleable carbon sucking tech yet, but later we might have it but not enough time to use it, if warming continues and activates feedback loops)
Sure, he appears to be quite incorrect now, but dismissing a mind of the caliber of Dyson’s because he got this one thing wrong is pedantic. And yes, he did appear to get this one extremely wrong, but that should not overshadow his amazing ideas and all of the things he got right. Ideas like Dyson Spheres, nuclear explosion based space travel, and many other Dyson ideas were just as outside of the standard deviations of thought as climate change denial at the time he came up with them.
It appears extremely popular right now to disregard an entire human’s work over an apparently incorrect opinion. Freeman Dyson is a great example of why this is probably a bad idea.
So he was a very outspoken mathematician and physicist, and people like his sci-fi ideas?
Regardless, blaming all critique on a "current moment" is utterly nonsensical.
Edit: op said "current moment," I incorrectly recalled it as "cultural moment."
This worship of personalities is very bad for science. We should prioritize data and ways to understand the data. Paying attention to misplaced authority is how we get lysenkoism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil#Predictions
While certainly the quantity of fossil fuels is finite. It is unlikely we will ever “run out of fossil fuels” because the price will simply increase as supplies begin to run low. Then two things will happen: we will consume less and expand the scope of production to more expensive source.
This has already happened repeatedly over the history of the fossil fuel industry.
You say debunked, then link to a table with a near total consensus that we'll have hit peak oil by 2060. The exception being the EIA putting out 2067 as a stretch goal. That is not a table of crackpots, that is groups like the World Bank, IEA, Shell, etc.
Debunked usually means 'disproven', not 'consensus position'.
> Then two things will happen: we will consume less and expand the scope of production to more expensive source.
Either of those outcomes are a bigger threat than climate change.
> This has already happened repeatedly over the history of the fossil fuel industry.
We haven't ever hit peak oil before.
In this century it is quite likely that we'll see peak oil globally. It is a bigger threat than climate change. Anyone who was going to suffer from climate change is also one of the people vulnerable to the affects of oil availability reductions.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-consumption-by-countr...
You are just restating peak oil theory here.
He also was not making it stronger against limes of Trump, he was pawing a way for likes of Trump. Who is also someone dissmissed because of what he says and does. And also someone whose original disproportional benefit of doubt and trust (when he was young) was because of familly he was from.
"as any deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable".
But I fail to see the connection with Dyson here.
Having an open discussion about taboo subjects is at the core of progress.
Conflating science with morality is adding another barrier to having those kinds of discussions.
I am aware of Brandolini's Law:
“The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”
But if the criticism is done in good faith, with the tools of science, I think it's worth the debunking exercise.
Data is just data. It can be collected with a lot of bias in place and can be interpreted with the same biases. We are only humans after all.
When you say thinks like:
1. "it's just a dude not even bothering to learn research before dismissing it all as wrong" 2. "he stupidly used his social power to undermine the science"
I feel you are some priest that dismisses the sinner, by pointing out the vices of carelessness and stupidness, in the name of the sanctimony of science.
This is precisely what Dyson was engaging in. There was no scientific backing for his critiques, he didn't even bother to learn about what he was critiquing. He just went on a political crusade and pretended that because he had scientific accomplishments in a different field, he was applying the same scientific rigor in climate science. In fact, he was not.
As far as being a "priest," excuse me for caring about basic scientific honesty. This sort of hero worship of Dyson, to the point of excusing extremely bad science and abuse of authority by calling criticism religious, is exactly the sort of stuff that happened in the Soviet Union! Lysenko and Dyson promote the right politics, so they are considered above reproach.
So in reality, nothing at all similar.
Minute five: if we convert all of the excess CO2 in the air into soil, we'll need to add 1/10th of an inch of topsoil per year. "Therefore I conclude that the CO2 problem is one primarily of land management."
After berating climate scientists for using mathematical models for using fluid dynamics (driven by huge supercomputers), he turns around and does a back-of-the-envelope calculation like this. It was so disappointing to listen to a brilliant person utterly fail at self-reflection.
As for the rest of your argument, there are books and books and books that address all of it point by point.
As for nonlinear systems, your trillion-cell body is beyond my comprehension to understand or predict a day or two in advance. However, I predict you will be dead in 90 years. I also predict it will be cold in winter and warm in summer. Do you understand that models are layered and not all inputs are the same?
Can you name a few?
For the "models are inherently reliable" schtick (holy heck, where would be if every field of science had motivated trolls jumping out of the woodwork to decry "models"--ffs the dynamics of a single atom--let alone molecule--are still based on models that need to be calibrated and make predictions)...please have a gander at how climate models are constructed and cross-validated. A good reference is https://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models.htm. It'd be great if we could instead take a look at how much computational power and painstaking care has gone into tuning and analyzing models. One important technique is that a model must be able to reconstruct the past based on limited data. That's one useful check that they aren't just generating complete garbage, but actually model some important underlying system dynamics. I do not work on climate models but I do work on performance of computer systems and after having a look at the math and modeling that goes into climate I can confidently say that we understand climate better than we understand the performance of computer systems which we designed and built ourselves.
As for the "CO2 is incredibly beneficial to plants"...people also test this and it turns out not as much as claimed, there are other limiting factors, like Nitrogen, and oh by the way, that all assumes that they are not significantly negatively affected by climate change as well. A good reference, from actual experts, here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-d.... The truth is that nobody is seriously jazzed about more CO2 somehow increasing crop production. Which really shows how outdated and simplistic Dyson's thinking was.
This conclusion does not necessarily follow. You can use a very sophisticated computer model based on statistical mechanics that takes into account all particles in the system and their interactions and I can tell you it's wrong using a simple thermodynamic equation. Sometimes a problem is tractable because you get rid of details.
You can very easily have an opinion outside of the mainstream, but when that opinion turns out to be wrong then don't expect people to treat you as a smart person anymore or even as a "genius" (to quote the BBC).
In fact, anyone taking a speculative line of inquiry, with any vigour, will by definition, 'be wrong' probably quite a lot.
Especially if they have to pursue the subject alone, it with a million 'opponents' who are such due as much to ideology than anything else.
Every 'genius' you care to mention will have been 'very wrong' about many things, but because they were 'wrong' about issues that weren't politicized, we don't care.
Dyson is the opposite of a hack, and probably not ideological about whatever it is he wants to talk about ...
... these are exactly the kinds of geniuses we shouldn't mind 'being wrong'.
We need more Dysons, not fewer.
I’ll build a D-Sphere or at least the foundation for the next generation.
The sphere is merely a Gedankenexperiment, taking some factors to their logical extrema. Nothing wrong with that.
Well, if you call putting 10 million tons of diffractive moondust into orbit at L1 “magical”, then he’ll probably turn out to be right.
Sounds magical to me!
A million tons a year to orbit (10,000 launches) equates to 600 billion cubic feet of methane, or about 2% of total US annual production.
But the actual plan would involve manufacturing the “mirrors” from moondust and propelling them to L1 using railguns powered by lunar solar panels. So you don’t need nearly so much methane.
On top of that, you have Poynting–Robertson drag stopping you from putting dust into stable solar orbit in the first place.
And you can start out at whatever scale you feel comfortable with. E.g. If 1 million tons of material had an overall effect of 0.1% reduction in TSI.
The sun’s output isn’t perfectly constant over time naturally. On average we get about 1361W/m2 (TSI). But sunspots can show short-term variance up to 0.3%, overall TSI has been varying about 0.04% per decade based on modern measurements, and TSI is believed to have increased about 40% overall over the last few billions of years.
Estimates are that reducing TSI by 1% would reduce global average temperatures somewhere between 0.6°C to 1.6°C.
I think the most interesting impact of being able to set the world’s temperature would be countries arguing over the thermostat at a global scale. It’s bad enough when my wife and I can’t agree in our own house!
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2659/four-decades-and-counting...