Top physicist on climate change....

[Nathon Detroit]

So says one of the world’s greatest theoretical physicists, Dr Freeman Dyson, the British-born, naturalised American citizen who worked at Princeton University as a contemporary of Einstein and has advised the US government on a wide range of scientific and technical issues.

In an interview with Andrew Orlowski of The Register, Dyson expressed his despair at the current scientific obsession with climate change which he says is “not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to the obvious facts.”

This mystery, says Dyson, can only partly be explained in terms of follow the money. Also to blame, he believes, is a kind of collective yearning for apocalyptic doom.

It is true that there’s a large community of people who make their money by scaring the public, so money is certainly involved to some extent, but I don’t think that’s the full explanation.

It’s like a hundred years ago, before World War I, there was this insane craving for doom, which in a way, helped cause World War I. People like the poet Rupert Brooke were glorifying war as an escape from the dullness of modern life. [There was] the feeling we’d gone soft and degenerate, and war would be good for us all. That was in the air leading up to World War I, and in some ways it’s in the air today.

Dyson, himself a longstanding Democrat voter, is especially disappointed by his chosen party’s unscientific stance on the climate change issue.

It’s very sad that in this country, political opinion parted [people’s views on climate change]. I’m 100 per cent Democrat myself, and I like Obama. But he took the wrong side on this issue, and the Republicans took the right side.

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[chrysostom]

I like climate change

I even started a thread on it

 

[Foxfire]

Dyson’s son, George, a technology historian, says his father’s views have cooled friendships, while many others have concluded that time has cost Dyson something else. There is the suspicion that, at age 85, a great scientist of the 20th century is no longer just far out, he is far gone — out of his beautiful mind.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

 

[Quetzal]

So says one of the world’s greatest theoretical physicists, Dr Freeman Dyson, the British-born, naturalised American citizen who worked at Princeton University as a contemporary of Einstein and has advised the US government on a wide range of scientific and technical issues.

In an interview with Andrew Orlowski of The Register, Dyson expressed his despair at the current scientific obsession with climate change which he says is “not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to the obvious facts.”

This mystery, says Dyson, can only partly be explained in terms of follow the money. Also to blame, he believes, is a kind of collective yearning for apocalyptic doom.



Dyson, himself a longstanding Democrat voter, is especially disappointed by his chosen party’s unscientific stance on the climate change issue.



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Breitbart is a horrid source for anything that isn't speculative garbage. Further, I don't care how acclaimed you are, if you cannot present a sensible, accountable set of data to counter what we already have, you should not be included in the discussion.

 

[nikolai_42]

So says one of the world’s greatest theoretical physicists, Dr Freeman Dyson, the British-born, naturalised American citizen who worked at Princeton University as a contemporary of Einstein and has advised the US government on a wide range of scientific and technical issues.

In an interview with Andrew Orlowski of The Register, Dyson expressed his despair at the current scientific obsession with climate change which he says is “not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to the obvious facts.”

This mystery, says Dyson, can only partly be explained in terms of follow the money. Also to blame, he believes, is a kind of collective yearning for apocalyptic doom.



Dyson, himself a longstanding Democrat voter, is especially disappointed by his chosen party’s unscientific stance on the climate change issue.



READ MORE

He's not the first...Anyone remember this :

Hal Lewis resigns from APS

 

[ok doser]

Dr Freeman Dyson (says) I’m 100 per cent Democrat myself, and I like Obama.

so he's admitting that he's struggling with mental retardation?

 

[Nathon Detroit]

Breitbart is a horrid source for anything that isn't speculative garbage. Further, I don't care how acclaimed you are, if you cannot present a sensible, accountable set of data to counter what we already have, you should not be included in the discussion.

Breitbart didn't write the article or conduct the interview. They were merely referencing the original article from the Register.

Do you think that Breitbart was in someway misrepresenting Mr Dyson's views?? :idunno:

 

[chrysostom]

you don't need breitbart or dyson to know climate change is not a real issue

 

[Foxfire]

you don't need breitbart or dyson to know climate change is not a real issue

You don't need breitbart or dyson a weatherman to know climate change is not a real issue which way the wind blows.

Planning a vacation in South Carolina in the near future?

 

[Quetzal]

Breitbart didn't write the article or conduct the interview. They were merely referencing the original article from the Register.

Do you think that Breitbart was in someway misrepresenting Mr Dyson's views?? :idunno:

I am actually going to take it one step further and say Mr Dyson has not presented an argument worth discussion. The interview is a joke, let's look at a few examples...

The rise of the oceans is a real problem and while they're not rising as fast as people say, they're still rising. That could be stopped if you could arrange that it snows a bit more in Antarctica. That's something that could be quite feasible, but it's not been looked at very much.

This is an incredibly exciting idea... why didn't the interviewer expand the question, why didn't Dyson expand? There is no support here.

What has happened in the past 10 years is that the discrepancies between what's observed and what's predicted have become much stronger. It's clear now the models are wrong, but it wasn't so clear 10 years ago. I can't say if they'll always be wrong, but the observations are improving and so the models are becoming more verifiable.

Again, he is making a very bold claim with no evidence to support himself. As a scientist, I feel that he is responsible to provide hints to where he is getting his information from. He does this nowhere in the article at all.

At the same time, coal is very unpleasant stuff, and there are problems with coal quite apart from climate. I remember in England when we burned coal, everything was filthy. It was really bad, and that's the way it is now in China, but you can clean that up as we did in England. It takes a certain amount of political willpower, and that takes time. Pollution is quite separate to the climate problem: one can be solved, and the other cannot, and the public doesn't understand that.

All data and theories presented so far say the exact opposite.

Again, the more I read his answers to some obviously skewed questions the stronger my belief is that this guy really has nothing to offer. None of his answers have any scientific support, he does not even hint at a source for his theories, and while I believe he is a very smart guy, he is trying to cash in, himself, on a hot topic. Trying to make his voice heard, as it were.

 

[Stripe]

Notice that when presented with evidence, evolutionists question the source.

 

[Selaphiel]

Notice that when presented with evidence, evolutionists question the source.

Where is the evidence in this interview? He doesn't present any data that supports his claims at all.

No doubt that Freeman Dyson is quite intelligent. However, finding one intelligent person that supports something does not make it right. Intelligent people can be wrong about quite a few things, have their own intellectual pet peeves and so on.

Presenting this interview as some kind of evidence is simply a case of confirmation bias. It is indeed correct that Dyson is a top physicist and he surely is smart, but he has no data to support his claims. Also, the vast majority of relevant experts says he is wrong on this. These experts are quite intelligent as well. Focusing on Dyson and then saying that the >97% of the climate scientists are wrong is confirmation bias.

 

[Stripe]

Where is the evidence in this interview? He doesn't present any data that supports his claims at all.

Far from it.

His claims were a description of how society gets wrapped up in an idea and ignores science. He gave reasons for his beliefs.

Meanwhile, evolutionists want to talk about something else. His intelligence, the source, imaginary data... anything but the evidence.

 

[genuineoriginal]

Breitbart is a horrid source for anything that isn't speculative garbage. Further, I don't care how acclaimed you are, if you cannot present a sensible, accountable set of data to counter what we already have, you should not be included in the discussion.

Maybe the climate scientists should stay out of the discussion until they can return with a sensible, accountable set of data?

 

[Foxfire]

His claims were a description of how society gets wrapped up in an idea and ignores science.

:rotfl:

 

[annabenedetti]

Notice that when presented with evidence, evolutionists question the source.

Notice that Freeman Dyson is an evolutionist. :chuckle:

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.

http://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2015/10/benefits1.pdf​

 

[tetelestai]

Notice that Freeman Dyson is an evolutionist. :chuckle:

Kinda like the pope's top climate advisor being an atheist :chuckle:

The Pope’s Top Climate Change Advisor Does Not Believe In God

 

[Quetzal]

Maybe the climate scientists should stay out of the discussion until they can return with a sensible, accountable set of data?

:chuckle: You are adorable when you have no idea what you are talking about.

 

[Stripe]

The evolutionists still got nothing. :idunno:

 

[Foxfire]

The evolutionists still got nothing. :idunno:

Is that a blanket condemnation of Freeman Dyson?

I believe that life can go on forever. It takes a million years to evolve a new species, ten million for a new genus, one hundred million for a class, a billion for a phylum—and that's usually as far as your imagination goes. In a billion years, it seems, intelligent life might be as different from humans as humans are from insects. But what would happen in another ten billion years? It's utterly impossible to conceive of ourselves changing as drastically as that, over and over again. All you can say is, on that kind of time scale the material form that life would take is completely open. To change from a human being to a cloud may seem a big order, but it's the kind of change you'd expect over billions of years.
— Freeman Dyson