Freeman Dyson: The Question of Global Warming

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21494

by gruseom • 18 years ago

36 29 18 years ago

stcredzero5• 18 years ago

Freeman Dyson's brilliant, as usual. His analysis of what the wiggle in the Keeling graph means has profound implications for global warming policy.

1gor3• 18 years ago

I was thinking how you define brilliance. The problem with arguing such a complex topic is that in order to make a point you need to understand and take into your system the whole long chain of assumptions and conclusions that your opponent has made. Was your model right? Let me explain my model... Which is normally more than an average person is prepared for.

Hence, the power of the soundbite.

Freeman Dyson (and others quoted earlier on HN) however wins over the complexity not through unsubstantiated soundbite, but by arguing a simple logical point. CO2 is not a 'pollution' in itself. It's not an alien element on Earth. Plants put all of the carbon through their system 'every 12 years' on average. Plants are not alien. Forest fires and volcanic eruptions can produce carbon, and there is a ready system to 'digest' it. Plants.

That's something of a radical shift in the thinking. All that smoke from burning coal is not pollution???? Hm, taking the thesis to the extreme -- actually no. It's just taking one natural element from the soil and placing it in the atmosphere. Nature does exactly the same thing all the time (forest fires, eruptions etc.).

Obviously, even if we assume that increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is not a disaster, it may still be unpleasant because the change would affect the current status quo. Siberia will become fertile and Arkansas will turn into desert. This change should be prevented or at least managed. But not by the government austerity measures, but by gradual and natural means.

These simple ideas are powerful. They don't require complex arguing over whose weather model is better. Hopefully they will spread.

khafra• 18 years ago

The way I understand it, the disastrous part is that we've been releasing millions of years worth of carbon all at once, by burning the fossil fuels that had sequestered it underground until now.

Of course, this still presents the difficulty of deciding when and where to buy a hundred acres in Siberia to retire on.

Tichy7• 18 years ago

I don't get the "natural" part of the argument. If I carve a spear out of wood and put it through your heart, it will still kill you, even though it is all natural. Clearly it is what you do with it that matters...

I think earth has been terraformed by organisms several times, like there used to be not so much oxygen floating around? But I think the organisms that released the oxygen died after the terraforming. The same could happen to us... Not saying it will, just warning against some sort of Gaia theory that nature will fix everything to our benefit. Nature doesn't really care about us.

Prrometheus• 18 years ago

There are some good startup ideas in here. Carbon-eating trees would be fun to make.

jcl• 18 years ago

I think carbon-eating trees are only part of the solution. We already have carbon-eating trees; all that coal and oil didn't just come from dinosaurs. The problem is that the output of trees is so useful, we don't have to willpower to cut them down (or even just rake up all the leaves each fall), store them in a cave somewhere, and forget about them.

We really need the carbon in a form that doesn't decompose and is more useful than wood. Diamond would be great...

rickardg2• 18 years ago

We also already have genetically engineered carbon eating plants. Most of our agricultural crops have been genetically engineered (using selective breeding or molecular biology) to be much better at getting CO2 out of the atmosphere to produce carbohydrates than their wild counterparts. Unfortunately it seems that taking CO2 out of the atmosphere is like taking pee out of a swimming-pool: it's possible, but takes a lot of energy. Most crops compensate the increased energy cost for carbon uptake by reducing their defences against pests and droughts, which means they need to be subsidised with pesticides and irrigation (today produced mainly using fossil fuels).

It would be great if we could design trees that catch more CO2 than they need but, being an evolutionist, I'm not holding my breath. I imagine that even a small energetical efficiency increase would be a big evolutionary advantage and that plants are pretty close to their theoretical efficiency limit.

Of course IANAPNAPP (I Am Not A Physicist, Nor A Plant Physiologist), if you are please enlighten me.

whacked_new• 18 years ago

Have you see Paul Stamets's talk about mushrooms on TED? He proposes -- and as he demonstrates, justifiably so -- using fungi as an effective measure against global warming. It's so ridiculously awesome that if he starts a mushroom company I would want to work there.

Tichy7• 18 years ago

What if they ate away all the Carbon, leaving non for food plants to grow? It might not be as simple as the paper made it out to be...

TrevorJ2• 18 years ago

Um. Trees ARE carbon.

1gor3• 18 years ago

Oh, now it is clear why any other interpretation of the global warming is met with name calling and personal attacks (mostly trying to engineer some link between the opponent and the oil industry). It's because we are dealing with a religion. Beliefs are not to be questioned by definition. That's OK, but only up as long as the believers do not try to shut the scientists up. Which sadly is commonplace nowadays.

Thankfully, it seems a topic like this can at least be discussed on HN. I've seen some scientists' discenting views published in mainstream British press... The resulting outcry was not pretty.

gruseom2• 18 years ago

It's the same in Canada. I heard a phone-in show on CBC radio where a climatologist with unorthodox views was subjected to hysterical, nasty personal attacks like nothing I'd observed before. (Among which, you're right, he was accused of taking bribes from the oil industry.) Meanwhile his arguments were never addressed. Which, of course, doesn't mean his arguments were correct. It does say something about what Dyson calls secular religion, though.

Edit: I just remembered something funny that's related. I went with my son's class on a field trip to the planetarium once. Instead of the nice star show everyone was expecting, the kids were shown a film about global warming. That wasn't so bad, except that it was the worst kind of propaganda: millions of people are going to die in flooding and other natural disasters, millions more will die of malaria, all kinds of cute animals are going to die, etc, etc... unless you kids grow up to do something about it. How low do you have to stoop to propagandize grade-school children by scaring the crap out of them?! Anyway, the film ended with some advice about turning off dripping faucets (I swear)! The lights were turned on and we all looked at each other in stunned silence. Then one hilarious child said, quite loudly, "Do as we say, or hurricanes will destroy your house!" The entire audience cracked up. We laughed it out of our system and moved on happily to the next event. I swear that kid has a future in show business...

1gor3• 18 years ago

I think it's a kind of natural selection for kids. Surviving the peer pressure (and authority pressure). That should be OK education for some of them, not for the majority though.

Funny, I was exposed to similar bullshit growing up in the communist USSR. All propaganda forced on people was always justified by the most of humane reasons. Do you want to support the oppressed of the world? The starving? The exploited? Of course we were!

It was only later in life you start to notice some fat smirking person sitting in the shadows and enjoying the fruits of that mass enthusiasm... and mass scarifie. Some of the kids I new have noticed the falsehood early on, but decided to play along. Most were clueless and later shocked when the whole communist system collapsed around them. And a rare few had chosen to simply stand for the truth and face the consequences.

newt0311• 18 years ago

See http://www.uoguelph.ca/%7Ermckitri/research/ispm.html for a well reasoned dissent with global warming.

hugh• 18 years ago

Somewhere in between the raving Al Gores of the world and the equally raving "No, global warming is totally impossible!" folks is a sparsely-populated region of sensible opinion. It seems like Freeman Dyson is somewhere in this region, but very few others are -- at least, very few voices who can actually get heard in the media.

The basic problem is this: it's pretty clear that if we add extra CO2 to the atmosphere, the planet will get warmer. And it's also clear that if the planet gets warmer, then there will be bad effects. Thus we really should be able to come up with some sort of dollars-per-ton value (let's call it K) for exactly how much harm is caused by CO2 emissions and work from there, perhaps applying some sort of tax to properly take into account the externalities of CO2 emissions.

The problem is that sensible estimates for the value of K vary by many orders of magnitude, and values which are not sensible but are nonetheless widely implicitly accepted vary by an additional bunch of orders of magnitude on either end. First, we have the uncertainty of exactly how much CO2 causes exactly how much warming. Secondly, we have the uncertainty of how much warming causes how much harm -- again, several orders of magnitude in the sensible estimates.

And that's without getting into the additional problems of expressing total worldwide harm in dollars (if we make Siberia into great farmland but drown Tonga is that a net loss or a net gain?) which I'm not gonna even talk about.

Now, if we could all accept that there's a genuine question to be answered about how big K is, and that there are still enormous error bars involved in determining this quantity, then we might be able to get down to having the sensible and important discussion which we as a species really need to be having at this point in history.

Unfortunately, the majority of the voices we hear nowadays are coming from the extremes -- either the Al Gores and Ted Turners of the world who want us to believe that K is huge, or the folks who want us to believe that K is zero. (Actually I'm not sure that the K = 0 folks really exist in large numbers, but they're a convenient strawman for those who believe K is huge.)

I don't know what the solution is, but as usual it would help if the media would hire a few more people who actually had some clue about the way science works.

patrickg-zill• 18 years ago

Dyson admits: there is no accurate way to measure CO2 previous to 1958, when Keeling starts. Further, CO2 varies in important ways depending on location.

Diogenes• 18 years ago

Brilliant piece. Thank you for posting the link.

Likewise: Aliens cause global warming. http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-alienscauseglobalwar...

Tichy7• 18 years ago

It sounded good at first, but "Environmentalism as a Religion"?? Personally, I care about the environment because I LIKE nature, not because I feel it is some god-given mission to be steward of the earth.

Also, nature is a common good, so if I care about someone else destroying it, it might be less about wanting to spoil his fun, and more about me not wanting him to effectively steal something from me.

rickardg2• 18 years ago

I thought it ironical that Freeman Dyson has been very sceptical to computer models of the atmosphere:

"The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models [than to do empirical research]" -- http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html

but in this article seems to think that the economists have their models down cold, at least when they support his viewpoint.

gruseom2• 18 years ago

The same thought occurred to me, with reference to exactly the same earlier piece. Economic computer models surely suffer from most of the problems that the climate models do. I kept expecting him to repeat the same critique and was a little surprised when he didn't. I'm willing to cut him a little more slack than you are, though; it's true that he might just be changing his tune to suit a predefined viewpoint, but I can think of other interpretations as well. Hopefully he'll write more about it and we can see.

TrevorJ2• 18 years ago

Great read. The things is, all the planets are heating up.

http://www.livescience.com/environment/070312_solarsys_warmi...

It would be a wonderful and improbable coincidence if the net gain in heat from the sun gained by the earth where absolutely perfectly offset by the net loss in heat.

Freeman Dyson: The Question of Global Warming

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