Celebrated physicist Freeman Dyson say rising carbon dioxide is a net benefit

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Freeman Dyson is a colossus in the theoretical physics world, he towers over mental misfits like Michael Mann, James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt.

This is a theme that Steve and I have recurred to many times on this site. Today it is voiced by Freeman Dyson, one of the world’s most eminent scientists. Dyson, a theoretical physicist and professor emeritus of Mathematical Physics and Astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, is famous among other things for unifying the three versions of quantum electrodynamics. He has been a harsh critic of the slovenly science practiced by climate alarmists.

Dyson wrote a foreword to a report on the benefits of carbon dioxide by Indur Goklany which is quoted at length in the Science and Environmental Policy Project’s The Week That Was. Here are some excerpts:

To any unprejudiced person reading [Goklany’s] account, the facts should be obvious: that the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide as a sustainer of wildlife and crop plants are enormously beneficial, that the possibly harmful climatic effects of carbon dioxide have been greatly exaggerated, and that the benefits clearly outweigh the possible damage.

I consider myself an unprejudiced person and to me these facts are obvious. But the same facts are not obvious to the majority of scientists and politicians who consider carbon dioxide to be evil and dangerous. The people who are supposed to be experts and who claim to understand the science are precisely the people who are blind to the evidence. Those of my scientific colleagues who believe the prevailing dogma about carbon dioxide will not find Goklany’s evidence convincing. I hope that a few of them will make the effort to examine the evidence in detail and see how it contradicts the prevailing dogma, but I know that the majority will remain blind. That is to me the central mystery of climate science. It is not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to obvious facts? In this foreword I offer a tentative solution of the mystery.

There are many examples in the history of science of irrational beliefs promoted by famous thinkers and adopted by loyal disciples. Sometimes, as in the use of bleeding as a treatment for various diseases, irrational belief did harm to a large number of human victims. George Washington was one of the victims. Other irrational beliefs, such as the phlogiston theory of burning or the Aristotelian cosmology of circular celestial motions, only did harm by delaying the careful examination of nature. In all these cases, we see a community of people happily united in a false belief that brought leaders and followers together. Anyone who questioned the prevailing belief would upset the peace of the community.

Real advances in science require a different cultural tradition, with individuals who invent new tools to explore nature and are not afraid to question authority. Science driven by rebels and heretics searching for truth has made great progress in the last three centuries. But the new culture of scientific scepticism is a recent growth and has not yet penetrated deeply into our thinking. The old culture of group loyalty and dogmatic belief is still alive under the surface, guiding the thoughts of scientists as well as the opinions of ordinary citizens.

To understand human behavior, I look at human evolution. About a hundred thousand years ago, our species invented a new kind of evolution. In addition to biological evolution based on genetic changes, we began a cultural evolution based on social and intellectual changes. Biological evolution did not stop, but cultural evolution was much faster and quickly became dominant. Social customs and beliefs change and spread much more rapidly than genes.

Cultural evolution was enabled by spoken languages and tribal loyalties. Tribe competed with tribe and culture with culture. The cultures that prevailed were those that promoted tribal cohesion. Humans were always social animals, and culture made us even more social. We evolved to feel at home in a group that thinks alike. It was more important for a group of humans to be united than to be right. It was always dangerous and usually undesirable to question authority. When authority was seriously threatened, heretics were burned at the stake.

I am suggesting that the thinking of politicians and scientists about controversial issues today is still tribal. Science and politics are not essentially different from other aspects of human culture. Science and politics are products of cultural evolution. Thinking about scientific questions is still presented to the public as a competitive sport with winners and losers. For players of the sport with public reputations to defend, it is more important to belong to a winning team than to examine the evidence.

Cultural evolution was centered for a hundred thousand years on tales told by elders to children sitting around the cave fire. That cave-fire evolution gave us brains that are wonderfully sensitive to fable and fantasy, but insensitive to facts and figures. To enable a tribe to prevail in the harsh world of predators and prey, it was helpful to have brains with strong emotional bonding to shared songs and stories. It was not helpful to have brains questioning whether the stories were true. Our scientists and politicians of the modern age evolved recently from the cave-children. They still, as Charles Darwin remarked about human beings in general, bear the indelible stamp of their lowly origin.
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Indur Goklany has assembled a massive collection of evidence to demonstrate two facts. First, the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide are dominant over the climatic effects and are overwhelmingly beneficial. Second, the climatic effects observed in the real world are much less damaging than the effects predicted by the climate models, and have also been frequently beneficial. I am hoping that the scientists and politicians who have been blindly demonizing carbon dioxide for 37 years will one day open their eyes and look at the evidence.
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http://www.climatesciencenews.com/2...ms-carbon-dioxide-benefits-life-on-earth.htmlp
 
Dyson agrees that anthropogenic global warming exists, and has written that "[one] of the main causes of warming is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting from our burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal and natural gas
Dyson says his views on global warming have been strongly criticized. In reply, he notes that "[m]y objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it's rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have."[59]

In 2008, he endorsed the now common usage of "global warming" as synonymous with global anthropogenic climate change, referring to "measurements that transformed global warming from a vague theoretical speculation into a precise observational science
 
When he wrote the following.. he killed his credibility.

"There are many examples in the history of science of irrational beliefs promoted by famous thinkers and adopted by loyal disciples. Sometimes, as in the use of bleeding as a treatment for various diseases, irrational belief did harm to a large number of human victims. George Washington was one of the victims. Other irrational beliefs, such as the phlogiston theory of burning or the Aristotelian cosmology of circular celestial motions, only did harm by delaying the careful examination of nature. In all these cases, we see a community of people happily united in a false belief that brought leaders and followers together. Anyone who questioned the prevailing belief would upset the peace of the community."
 
He wrote this???

"Dyson says his views on global warming have been strongly criticized. In reply, he notes that "[m]y objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it's rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have."
 
kudzu said:
When he wrote the following.. he killed his credibility.

"There are many examples in the history of science of irrational beliefs promoted by famous thinkers and adopted by loyal disciples. Sometimes, as in the use of bleeding as a treatment for various diseases, irrational belief did harm to a large number of human victims. George Washington was one of the victims. Other irrational beliefs, such as the phlogiston theory of burning or the Aristotelian cosmology of circular celestial motions, only did harm by delaying the careful examination of nature. In all these cases, we see a community of people happily united in a false belief that brought leaders and followers together. Anyone who questioned the prevailing belief would upset the peace of the community."
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What makes you believe that?
 
kudzu said:
When he wrote the following.. he killed his credibility.

"There are many examples in the history of science of irrational beliefs promoted by famous thinkers and adopted by loyal disciples. Sometimes, as in the use of bleeding as a treatment for various diseases, irrational belief did harm to a large number of human victims. George Washington was one of the victims. Other irrational beliefs, such as the phlogiston theory of burning or the Aristotelian cosmology of circular celestial motions, only did harm by delaying the careful examination of nature. In all these cases, we see a community of people happily united in a false belief that brought leaders and followers together. Anyone who questioned the prevailing belief would upset the peace of the community."
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You're just being incredibly foolish, please stop!
 
Celebrated physicist Freeman Dyson say rising carbon dioxide is a net benefit
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You're sounding more desperate by the day, maggot. It's over. You lost. The whole world knows that we're facing a man-made climatic disaster. Your smokescreen was just...........more smoke.
 
Havana Moon said:
Bloody hell, there are so many, just think plate tectonics, Michelson-Morley experiment disproving the existence of the aether, stomach ulcers to name just a few.
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Exactly. That quote was as scholarly as it gets. I'm curious as to what moronic reason, the invasive plant species, has for saying he "lost credibility" for making that statement.
 
What you ought to be concentrating on now, maggot- that is you and your ' deniers ' ilk- is how to stay out of jail when the new wave of sufferers and environmentalists take power and come a-lookin' for ya to pay for what you've done and what you advocate.
 
moon said:
What you ought to be concentrating on now, maggot- that is you and your ' deniers ' ilk- is how to stay out of jail when the new wave of sufferers and environmentalists take power and come a-lookin' for ya to pay for what you've done and what you advocate.
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:smh:
 
This is from Quora written by an IPCC AR5 expert reviewer.

Dave Burton, IPCC AR5 WGI expert reviewer

What Prof. Dyson actually wrote (h/t Steven Swerling) was more nuanced and tactful than the questioner’s summary of it, but it is true that GCMs (climate models) are untrustworthy, and the people who trust them are foolish to do so.

A “model” (noun) is a computer program which simulates or “models” (verb) real processes for the purpose of predicting their progression. The utility and skillfulness of models is dependent on:

1. how well the processes which they model are understood;

2. how faithfully those processes are simulated in the computer code; and

3. whether the results can be repeatedly tested so that the models can be refined.

Specialized models, which try to model reasonably well-understood processes like PGR and radiation transport, are useful, because the processes they model are manageably simple and well-understood.

Weather forecasting models are also useful, even though the processes they model are very complex and poorly understood, because the models' short-term predictions can be repeatedly tested, allowing the models to be validated and refined.

But more ambitious models, like GCMs, which attempt to simulate the combined effects of many poorly-understood processes, over time periods much too long to allow repeated testing and refinement, are of very dubious utility.

(Worst of all are so-called “semi-empirical models,” which aren't actually models at all. “Semi-empirical modeling” is an oxymoron: “modeling” that doesn't actually model anything. It is similar to modeling, but without reference to any physical basis. It is really just curve-matching. It can be made to produce just about any desired result. GCMs are subject to criticisms that they don't accurately model the real world, because of inconsistency with observations of things like clouds and the predicted “tropical mid-tropospheric hot spot.” Semi-empirical modelers neatly avoid such criticism, by not even trying to model the real world. It's the worst sort of junk science, yet to their discredit, the IPCC treats semi-empirical modeling as if it were credible.)

What limited experience we have, with comparing GCM predictions against reality, does not inspire confidence in the GCMs. Few modern climate models have existed for long enough to properly test their predictions, but some have, including the most influential of all: NASA GISS's GCM Model II (a predecessor of the current Model E2). On the basis of that model, Hansen et al 1988 (published just before the IPCC was created) predicted that if GHG emissions rose 1.5%/year temperatures would rise 0.5°C/decade.

It was wildly wrong. CO2 emissions rose nearly 2%/year, yet we only got about 1/4 as much warming as they predicted (or at most 1/3, depending on whose numbers you use). For more details see: Hansen et al 1988, retrospective

So Prof. Dyson is correct: the GCMs have not demonstrated skillfulness at predicting future climate, and might never do so, so basing public policy on their highly dubious predictions is foolish.
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