What I think people commenting here are missing is Freeman Dyson's flexibility of mind, curiosity, and in general desire to do something good for humanity.
One can argue over where that last comes from, including whether his involvement with WWII and subsequent bomb-related defense work relates to it as atonement.
His design of the intrinsically safe TRIGA nuclear reactor used for training in universities across the globe is an example of his efforts towards finding good possibilities in nuclear energy as were other things like Project Orion (more questionable, given the biological effects of nuclear fallout). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIGA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
He was also humble, like in his concluding sentence there: "The moral of this story is clear. Even a smart twenty-two-year-old is not a reliable guide to the future of science. And the twenty-two-year-old has become even less reliable now that he is eighty-two." And he always seemed willing to learn and adjust his views given new evidence and new ideas. So I really could not say what his opinions might be now about climate change and CO2 given that article is from 2007 and I am not sure he published much more on that before dying in 2020 at the age of 96.
I emailed him a bit in 2010 related to that 2007 Edge article and his stance on global climate change. One point I mentioned, given some previous experience related to organic farming, was that top soil erosion in the USA due to poor farming practices (e.g. the great plains going from perhaps six feed of top soil to six inches over 200 years) could be a substantial contributor to global warming. Studies conflict, but some suggest one third of CO2 increase is due to that. So it is reasonable he suggest putting that back. I guess I am more a problem finder there and he to his credit is more of a problem solver (with him in that article suggesting rebuilding the topsoil).
A deeper issue missed here is his comment: "I am not saying that the warming does not cause problems. Obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it better. I am saying that the problems are grossly exaggerated. They take away money and attention from other problems that are more urgent and more important, such as poverty and infectious disease and public education and public health, and the preservation of living creatures on land and in the oceans, not to mention easy problems such as the timely construction of adequate dikes around the city of New Orleans."
Freeman Dyson cared about making the world a better place, and that is an example of it. And I agree with his stance there. Priorities matter. Even in a worst case, there are people dying right now from lack of investment in sanitation, education, housing, a UBI (controversially) and so on.
Why should global warming take precedence over all those things? Maybe it should, but where is the informed political discussion on that (perhaps done via Dialogue Mapping with IBIS)? "A Tool for Wicked Problems: Dialogue Mapping™ FAQs " https://www.cognexus.org/id41.htm
Humankind is essentially now a "geological force" according to another author, Cloud. We can choose what to do with that capacity. The tragedy is when we think of humanity as only destructive with that power and ignore the constructive capacity of eight billion minds working on local and global solutions using amazing materials and tools.
The media is full of doom and gloom about Climate Change and has been for years. So many people are running around despairing now over climate change, leading into depression, not having children, and even suicide. If you want examples see https://www.reddit.com/r/CollapseSupport/
But, another response is to ask what we can do with the capacity at hand? Think of all the productive capacity we have. There are vast mostly empty lands across the globe currently too cold to be hospitable (think Canada and Siberia). There are all sorts of engineering ideas available for close life support systems like Biosphere II and NASA efforts for Space Habitats. There are all sorts of indoor agriculture projects. We can even build artificial islands and also "Seasteads". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasteading
Given all that capacity and more, even in a worst case of gloom and doom from increased CO2, there is plenty of technical capacity to make the world work for everyone. The issue in that sense purely political. Vast amounts of money pour into things like AI and Social Media and Weapons and so on -- but not so much to those other things. So priorities are really important.
For me personally, I have been predicting since around 2000 that solar power would eventually become very cheap -- way cheaper than fossil fuels. And that is coming to pass. When I saw Hillary Clinton's plan for "green" energy I was like, that is what is going to happen anyway no matter who is president given the economics of solar -- although it is true politics can slow it or speed it up somewhat. Fossil fuel use is slowly coming to an end as a result of decades of continued innovation by those who believed in the potential of solar energy and other renewables and also batteries -- even if liquid synthetic fuels generated by solar power may still be useful given energy density and how batteries or portable fusion works out. I even have half-joked that at some point, given solar energy and someday fusion ending most fossil fuel use, that humanity may intentionally start putting more carbon in the air at great expense to do things like promote plant growth. "CO2 is making Earth greener—for now" https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/co2-is-making-...
From a different direction, and not something Freeman Dyson said, but implicit in his questions in of models, are things like S-curve limits on the effects of rising CO2. While I don't know how true this is, consider this:
"New Scientific Evidence That CO2 Emissions Can’t Warm Atmosphere Because it is “Saturated” Published in Peer-Reviewed Journal" https://dailysceptic.org/2024/04/24/new-scientific-evidence-... "Current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are around 418 parts per million (ppm) but the scientists state that past 400 ppm, “the CO2 concentration can no longer cause any increase in temperature”. ... The saturation hypothesis is complex, but in simple terms it can be described by the example of loft insulation in a house. After a certain point, doubling the lagging will have little effect since most of the heat trying to escape through the roof has already been trapped. Carbon dioxide traps heat only within narrow bands of the infrared spectrum, and levels of the gas have been up to 20 times higher in the past without any sign of runaway global warming. At current levels, the Polish scientists suggest that there is “currently a multiple exceedance of the saturation mass for carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere”. The latest work is featured on Elsevier’s Science Direct peer-reviewed online platform. Many other scientists are attracted to the saturation hypothesis because it provides more plausible explanations to fit past changes in the climate. ..."
So in the end, Freeman Dyson may be right to be concerned about academic models of any sort and how we use them to make political decisions. The academic models about CO2 and its future effects on global warming may be potentially off significantly, leading to a dysfunctional societal response.
Consider how wrong the popular politically-accepted academic models were about Covid's epidemiology and all the tragic consequences: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7447267/ "Brilliant scientists expected 100,000,000 cases accruing within 4 weeks in the USA (Hains, 2020). Predictions for hospital and ICU bed requirements were also entirely misinforming. Public leaders trusted models (sometimes even black boxes without disclosed methodology) inferring massively overwhelmed health care capacity (Table 1) (IHME COVID-19 health service utilization forecasting team & Murray, 2020). However, very few hospitals were eventually stressed and only for a couple of weeks. Most hospitals maintained largely empty wards, expecting tsunamis that never came. The general population was locked and placed in horror-alert to save health systems from collapsing. Tragically, many health systems faced major adverse consequences, not by COVID-19 cases overload, but for very different reasons. Patients with heart attacks avoided hospitals for care (De Filippo, D’Ascenzo, Angelini, et al., 2020), important treatments (e.g. for cancer) were unjustifiably delayed (Sud et al., 2020) and mental health suffered (Moser, Glaus, Frangou, et al., 2020). With damaged operations, many hospitals started losing personnel, reducing their capacity to face future crises (e.g. a second wave). With massive new unemployment, more people may lose health insurance. The prospects of starvation and of lack of control of other infectious diseases (such as tuberculosis, malaria, and childhood communicable diseases where vaccination is hindered by COVID-19 measures) are dire (Ioannidis, 2020, Melnick and Ioannidis, 2020)."
It is the risk of a similar kind of dysfunctional political response to rising CO2 levels that Freeman Dyson was worried about, where there could be all sorts of disastrous consequences to well-intentioned and misguided actions. And I still think he was right to be concerned about it.