Hacker News Reader

Comment by wbronitsky | Hacker News Reader

The criticisms in this thread of Dyson’s wrongthink on climate science show us a lot about the current moment and how hard it is to have an opinion outside of the mainstream.

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.

View on HN

It's not "one thing wrong" it's just a dude not even bothering to learn research before dismissing it all as wrong. And then being proven wrong because he was being anti-scientific. It just happens to be the most critical challenge to humanity of this century, and he stupidly used his social power to undermine the science. Call "wrong think" as if it wasn't actually a terrible disservice to humanity and just being political. But it was actually wrong, both scientifically, morally, ethically, and gives future contrarians more difficulty.

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.

The most critical challenge humans are facing this century is the quite reasonable scenario where we start to run out of fossil fuels. We're consuming them at a faster rate than we are discovering them and literally all our systems currently depend on fossil fuel consumption.

This theory is commonly called “Peak Oil” and has been repeatedly been debunked in practice since it was first proposed in the 1960s.

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.

> has been repeatedly been debunked in practice...

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.

There was a peak conventional oil in the US in the 1970's.

The US never felt the full effects of that peak [0]. The difference was made up by imports and the US didn't have to face a raw decline in oil availability. Global peak oil is going to change that, or spark more very nasty wars as the US bullies people into continuing to send them oil.

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...

The 1970's peak oil triggered the oil crises. The 2006 world conventional peak oil popped the subprime bubble.

> 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.

You are just restating peak oil theory here.

Or maybe critics like Dyson forced climate scientists to grow up and become a real science, instead of relying on hand-wavy fallacies. Often the best thing for science is vigorous opposition. Maybe a populist irrationally posing opposition to climate science innoculated climate science, making it able to stand up against the likes of Trump. If your critics are all people you can dismiss, you don't know if your theory will survive a political enemy until it happens.

Except that Dyson was not dismissed for who he was, he was dismissed because of what he was saying. He got original aurhority for who he was. That is exact opposite.

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.

First of all, thank you for the reference to Lysenkoism:

"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.

> as any deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable

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.

No different than green people opposing nuclear energy.

"Green" people opposing nuclear energy aren't missing their scientific authority with non-scientists about their scientific ability (because they have none). And they aren't misusing their scientific ability to negligently skip even learning about the science, because, again, they typically have none.

So in reality, nothing at all similar.

Dyson's arguments on climate are still quite valid. Climate has always been variable, never static, and CO2 is incredibly beneficial for plant growth. Climate models are inherently flawed. They do not model clouds or biological systems well at all. They are forecasts of nonlinear, dynamic systems for which uncertainty is an exponential function of time. Listen to his arguments: https://youtu.be/Pou3sGedeK4

First three minutes of his talk: the real world is messy and muddy and you can't use models to make predictions.

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?

> As for the rest of your argument, there are books and books and books that address all of it point by point.

Can you name a few?

Ok to be fair searching for a good reference specifically in book form isn't as efficient as turning up articles and websites.

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.

> 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.

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.

I’ll listen to him about physics but that doesn’t mean I have to give him any credit for what he thinks about climate. Incredibly smart people are still wrong about stuff all the time, being smart does not mean everything you have to say is worth listening to.

On the other hand, I'm right about everything.

You’re right enough, certainly :)

Well said, the halo effect is real.

> how hard it is to have an opinion outside of the mainstream.

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).

? Geniuses are wrong all the time.

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.

is the evolution of humanity an oscillation around 1-2 std dev ?

There are no Dyson spheres or nuclear powered spaceships, but there are a hell of a lot of climate deniers. If we’re weighing what part of his legacy, the part that had a negative effect on a very real crisis of human suffering is going to weigh heavier than some cool thought experiments that only showed up in scifi

I would argue that it is inaccurate to summarize Freeman Dyson’s work as “some cool thought experiments that only showed up in scifi”

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

I don't know a lot about Freeman Dyson so I read that article, but don't quite get it yet.

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."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com