Wanted: A Young Heretical Climate Scientist
Must be young enough not to be accused of senility. Moral depravity is not a disqualification.
Wanted: Heretical climate scientist. Must be young enough not to be accused of senility. Moral depravity is not a disqualification. Reply to Prof. Freeman Dyson c/o Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton.
The position has remained open far too long. Time is short. Prof. Dyson began actively recruiting as early as August 2007, with the statement:
We are lucky that we can be heretics today without any danger of being burned at the stake. But unfortunately, I am an old heretic. Old heretics do not cut much ice. When you hear an old heretic talking, you can always say, ‘Too bad he has lost his marbles’, and pass on. What the world needs is young heretics. I am hoping that one or two of the people who read this piece may fill that role.
As far as I know, no one has taken the job. Prof. Dyson, at 95, continues to do it himself.
He was referring, of course, to his persistent attacks on today’s “science” of global warming and climate change. And, more to the point, his dismissal of the international campaign to persuade governments to assume emergency powers to mandate economic transformations needed to head off “catastrophic climate change.”
He duly acknowledged his lack of academic credentials in climate science. He said a younger man in one of the relevant fields ought to step up. He was insistent, however, that until and unless a young paladin with the soul of a heretic shows up, he feels it his “duty” to fight the good fight. Back then, he was 83 years old. Now, he is 95.
Prof. Dyson personifies our era’s concept of a great scientist.
It isn’t, of course, that Prof. Dyson lacks scientific credentials. In fact, he personifies our era’s concept of a great scientist. He has spent recent decades at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, and now is emeritus, but behind him stretches a fabled career at Cambridge’s Trinity College, Oak Ridge National Laboratories, Cornell, and other positions at the pinnacle of contemporary physics, mathematics, and astronomy. Half a dozen or so scientific concepts permanently bear his name.
He has published three books since 2014, most recently, Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters (New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 2018). When he goes on a book tour, detractors panic, knowing that he always brings up the climate (the science, not the weather). An article in the Huffington Post (May 14, 2005) noting that he was on tour for his book Dreams of Earth and Sky (New York: New York Review Books, 2015), lamented an interview he gave to National Public Radio. The article began sweetly enough: “By all accounts, he’s a modest and funny man, a loving husband and father, and a continued source of inspiration to his colleagues at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies.”
But soon it was: “Really, professor? That’s the best you can come up with?” A classic bait and switch. And: “I implore Professor Dyson to take a good hard look at the scientific evidence and think again—especially because his deserved scientific eminence may lead the public to overindulge at his smorgasbord of misconceptions.”
That was mild compared with what happens to a less securely revered scientist when Greenpeace’s Climate Investigation Center organizes the media to take him down.
Still, that was mild compared with what happens to a less securely revered scientist when Greenpeace’s Climate Investigation Center organizes the media to take him down. (Willie Soon, former astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a prominent example.)
With the modern equivalent of burning at the stake facing scientists who go public with dissent from climate catastrophe science, Prof. Dyson, now beyond the reach of professional destruction (but not from attacks on his reputation or “marbles”) cannot and will not keep his “heretical” views to himself. In the aftermath of a New York Times Magazine cover story, March 2009, that ushered him out of the closet and into the limelight on climate change, there was “a major flap.” With that characterization, science writer Michael Lemonick introduced his interview with Prof. Dyson in Yale Environment 360 (June 4, 2009).
Lemonick explained that with publication of the Times piece “large numbers of climate modelers and others who actually work on climate change—as Dyson does not—rolled their collective eyes at assertions they consider appallingly ill-informed.”
Lemonick: “First of all, was that article substantially accurate about your views?”
Dyson: “… reasonably accurate on details … I was able to correct the worst mistakes. … I don’t claim to be an expert. I never did. I simply find that a lot of these claims that experts are making are absurd. … My objections to the global warming propaganda are … against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have. I think that’s what upsets me.”
Actually, he had quite a few more objections, both in the interview and an article in On Edge, “Heretical Thoughts about Science and Society” (August 7, 2007), from which is quoted the statement above about recruiting a young heretic.
Between the pieces in On Edge and Yale Environment 360, he expressed the burden of his case against the dire predictions and visions of apocalypse that issue daily from a vast coalition of scientists, environmentalists, political “greens,” and the media. The core of his position, stated in “Heretical Thoughts about Science and Society,” should be quoted at length. It goes to the heart of the climate-change case. Before I turn to that, however, let me provide a brief context for grasping its pivotal importance.
Some 100 computer simulations, called “General Climate Models,” with typically about 500,000 lines of programming, are the foundation, citadel, and keep of climate catastrophe’s claim to rigor in method and near certainty in predictions—as well as its basis for inviting those with observations and arguments based on the current climate or climate history to stop spreading dangerous myths.
The latest landmark statement of the grave urgency of economic transformation now—now—is National Climate Assessment Report #4, Vol. 11, released by the U.S. Government in November 2018. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman hastily explained to readers how to view climate catastrophe “deniers.” (Those who raise doubts about the long-term weather predictions of climate science just as other individuals are ignorant or malignant enough to question the plain historical fact of the Nazi Holocaust.) What category are the deniers of the Report, asked Krugman? “Depraved” because some are paid by the petroleum industry to oppose salvation of the human race and others are their mouthpieces.
I have not checked the lifetime sources of support received by Prof. Dyson. It is possible that the Institute of Advanced Studies gets grants from Exxon—or that its investment portfolio includes the stocks of fracking companies. It is important that the scientist who takes over from Dyson realize that no government, nor the United Nations, provides any grant support for research contrary to the climate catastrophe hypothesis. And that for the petroleum industry to support any research that might question the need to eliminate fossil fuels will be deemed prima facie evidence of moral depravity.
That NCA Report’s 1,100 pages focus on predictions of the impact of global warming/climate change between now and the year 2100 on the economy, transportation, energy, agriculture, tribal populations, weather, recreation and tourism, and life in specific states and types of communities. In all those areas, it looks like we are in for increasing bad weather for the next 82 years. And that prediction rests on running the computer models and little else.
Vol. II, devoted to the “impacts,” explains that the scientific evidence for the premised climate changes already has been presented in National Climate Assessment Report #4, Vol. 1, released to the public in 2017. In summary, however, we are told that references to past climate conditions and changes—such as the much warmer or much colder several-million-year epochs of the present climate Holocene and talk about the climate today—are quite irrelevant to the discussion. The point is the computer models show that increased global warming is caused by human activities and project 82 years of increasing trouble if human activities are not drastically changed now.
Putting it in a nutshell, the chapter on methods say: “NCA4 authors have grounded their assessment in an analysis of the widely-used scenarios termed “Representative Concentration Pathways,” or RCPs, that form the foundation for the majority of recent coordinated global climate model experiments.”
And so, we arrive at the centrality of Prof. Dyson’s critique of the models:
My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts. … I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. 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 put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models. (On Edge)
In that essay, and elsewhere, he also addresses claims about arctic and Antarctic temperature trends, melting Greenland glaciers, the five great carbon “reservoirs” on earth and in the atmosphere, the lack of evidence for more or stronger storms, and, always, what the models leave out, muddle, or by nature can’t predict.
A few more headlines (emphasis added) of topics he has addressed:
I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories. Many of the basic processes of planetary ecology are poorly understood. They must be better understood before we can reach an accurate diagnosis of the present condition of our planet. (On Edge)
The warming effect of carbon dioxide is strongest where air is cold and dry, mainly in the arctic rather than in the tropics, mainly in mountainous regions rather than in lowlands, mainly in winter rather than in summer, and mainly at night rather than in daytime. The warming is real, but it is mostly making cold places warmer rather than making hot places hotter. To represent this local warming by a global average is misleading. (On Edge)
A large part of the observed rise in sea level must have other causes. One possible cause is a slow readjustment of the shape of the earth to the disappearance of the northern ice-sheets at the end of the ice age twelve thousand years ago. Another possible cause is the large-scale melting of glaciers, which also began long before human influences on climate became significant. Once again, we have an environmental danger whose magnitude cannot be predicted until we know more about its causes. (On Edge)
In each hundred-thousand year period, there is an ice-age that lasts about ninety thousand years and a warm interglacial period that lasts about ten thousand years. We are at present in a warm period that began twelve thousand years ago, so the onset of the next ice-age is overdue. If human activities were not disturbing the climate, a new ice-age might already have begun. (On Edge)
And the basic problem is that in the case of climate, very small structures, like clouds, dominate. And you cannot model them in any realistic way. They are far too small and too diverse. So, they say, ‘We represent cloudiness by a parameter,’ but I call it a fudge factor. (Yale Environment 360)
Prof. Dyson has a special reputation for dazzling scientific imagination.
But Prof. Dyson has a special reputation for dazzling scientific imagination. He is frequently lauded as without peer in that realm. Thus, he also dwells on alternate possibilities for coping with threats of global warming.
While reiterating that the threats appear to be wildly exaggerated, he wonders, for example, if land management might be a key to the entire atmospheric carbon dioxide problem. The soil, it is known, absorbs gigantic amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (it is one of Earth’s five massive carbon “reservoirs”) because CO2 is an indispensable nutrient of all green plants. Calculating the absorption rate of the Earth’s total open ground and arguing that land management can increase that rate—to the vast benefit of crops—he speculates that the entire annual input of CO2 into the atmosphere could be neutralized.
He concludes after elaboration of this idea: “We should take such possibilities into account when we listen to predictions about climate change and fossil fuels. If biotechnology takes over the planet in the next fifty years, as computer technology has taken it over in the last fifty years, the rules of the climate game will be radically changed.”
The suggestion that humans through technology can correct their own imbalances, even on a global scale, is … well … heretical to environmentalists.
It is the kind of speculation, which he tells us is only that, that enrages the global warmers. The suggestion that humans through technology can correct their own imbalances, even on a global scale, is … well … heretical to environmentalists. As an ideology, environmentalism views humans and their activities as the fundamental threat to the Earth and believe the sole recourse is to limit, reduce, and eventually reverse such activities.
And that, really, is why Prof. Dyson is determined to fight until he dies or a younger heretic answers the call. He explains the “way these people behave” on one level is the result of an obsession with using computers to create new worlds and watch how they collapse over the next century. On another level, he sees their motive as panicking governments and voters into centrally planned economic change to reverse, especially, the industrial revolutions underway in China, India, and other rapidly developing countries.
And right there is the idea that transitions the scientist into the philosopher meditating on the metaphysics of man and his relationship to existence. From On Edge:
It is not surprising that honest and well-informed experts can disagree about facts. But beyond the disagreement about facts, there is another deeper disagreement about values … between naturalists and humanists.
Naturalists believe that nature knows best. For them the highest value is to respect the natural order of things. Any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil. Excessive burning of fossil fuels is evil. … Nature knows best, and anything we do to improve upon Nature will only bring trouble.
At the other end of the metaphysical spectrum, Dyson states: (and he readily admits that its endpoints are ideological extremes between which individual views lie): “The humanist ethic begins with the belief that humans are an essential part of nature. Through human minds the biosphere has acquired the capacity to steer its own evolution, and now we are in charge. Humans have the right and the duty to reconstruct nature so that humans and biosphere can both survive and prosper … the greatest evils are poverty, underdevelopment, unemployment, disease and hunger, all the conditions that deprive people of opportunities and limit their freedoms. The humanist ethic accepts an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a small price to pay, if world-wide industrial development can alleviate the miseries of the poorer half of humanity.”
Lemonick: “Do you mind being thrust in the limelight of talking about this when it is not your main interest? You’ve suddenly become the poster child for global warming skepticism.”
Dyson: “… it is definitely a tactical mistake to use somebody like me for that job, because I am so easily shot down. I’d much rather the job would be done by somebody who is young and a real expert. But unfortunately, those people don’t come forward.”
What are you waiting for?
About the Author: Walter Donway
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