1000frolly PhD
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2018–2020
22:47 · 471K views · Apr 6, 2015
A 2015 interview in which physicist Freeman Dyson, then 91, argues that global warming concerns are exaggerated, that CO2 is beneficial and that climate models oversimplify complex systems. It is posted on a channel that opposes climate consensus.
HN commenters point to it as a prominent physicist's skeptical counter-view, usually when someone asks for dissenting opinions.
6 comments from Hacker News
He was an expert as much as anyone. From his wiki: "Around 1979 Dyson worked with the Institute for Energy Analysis on climate studies. This group, under Alvin Weinberg's direction, pioneered multidisciplinary climate studies, including a strong biology group. Also during the 1970s, Dyson worked on climate studies conducted by the JASON defense advisory group.[26]" He held the view that CO2 was mostly beneficial to the biosphere and that anthropogenic warming was much milder than has been estimated. You can watch his interview on the subject of you're curious. He explains his position quite coherently: this video
Freeman Dyson did speak out against climate alarmism. He provides some insightful counterpoints to the prevailing APW narrative, particularly about taking models on faith & the provisional nature of science. Given he was directly involved with some of the initial climate models, it's an interesting take on how models of complex nonlinear systems often oversimplify reality with assumptions. It seems like good general wisdom re: models in any domain exhibiting similar complexity & nonlinearity. this video
A fascinating talk, and a counter viewpoint from a top physicist: "Freeman Dyson on the Global Warming Hysteria" this video
To me science is never settled, and anyone who claims climate crisis is pretty much definite has an incentive that has other hidden angles than we are led to believe. This is not a denial position, but is largely characterised so. Nothing in science is black-and-white, there are infinite shades of gray in between. Having said that, Freeman Dyson also seems to share this opinion, and I think it carries some weight: this video . Another article also says the same: [LINK] The later link also highlights an important aspect from IPCC's report: "In climate research and modelling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. (Chapter 14, Section 14.2.2.2.)]" Whatever I know about modeling and Lorenz's theories, I do think long-term climate predication is impossible given our current models. Is that denial? Certainly not, and I am open to change my mind as models become more accurate and more data is avaiable. Till then I would not want my wallet to be lighter in the name of carbon taxes, please.
Number one they're not all in agreement. Number two, outright, science does not work on consensus. The only reason climate relies on consensus is because they cannot validate their models. They are stuck on the hypothesis step of the scientific method. It doesn't matter how many people you get to agree with your hypothesis. Without empirical experimentation, it proves nothing. You cannot beat chaos theory. The current crop of climate scientists are not being honest about the extremely exponentially high levels of uncertainty in their forecasts. You would do well to read from first principles on chaos theory and ask yourself whether I'm the crazy one for claiming that the future of our climate is unknowable. We understand weather far better than we understand climate. And we cannot predict it more than 10 days into the future. At any rate of you want to hear it from true experts here are a few: Richard Lindzen, PhD Atmospheric Sciences, MIT [LINK] Patrick Moore, UBC [LINK] Henrik Svensmark, Danish Space Institute [LINK] Freeman Dyson, Cornell this video NASA admitting they have no model for clouds: [LINK]