All models are wrong. Some are useful approximations for understanding and others for forecasting. In Econ for example, DSGE models are useful for asking counterfactuals but not great for forecasting. Lots of models are particularly susceptible to assumptions that can be tuned in an Upton Sinclair like way. Climate modeling appears to be one of these areas where the black box can be filled with all sorts of debatable assumptions, yet questioning what’s in the black box carries great reputational risk.
What is the evidence that people who question the black box have great reputational risk? Dyson raises this point, but I don't really see that this would be different from any other area.
There is more money at stake with climate change than most areas of science, which means it becomes a political issue. There would seem to be a very strong incentive to show existing models are not accurate, or to come up with scientifically plausible models with very different outcomes. However no arguments against climate change do this, presumably because it's not very easy to do so.
Dyson here points out some areas that he thinks are not possible to model accurately or are not currently modelled accurately, such as the benefits and threats of various changes to the climate, the impact of climate change on sea level change, cloud modelling uncertainties, and the chaotic effects of different carbon reservoirs on each other.
His points on the exact impact of climate change and what the ideal climate is are important, but they are also studied and discussed. The supposed political reasons for supporting or being against climate change theories do not change the facts. If there are real problems with the models these can be flagged up - sensitivity testing can be done for all of these issues.
One major problem here is that the communication of the climate mainstream is very poor. The IPCC produces massive reports that are designed to be printed as PDF, and are targeted at policy experts. They're not really readable, the web versions don't really use hyperlinks and have minimal pictures and poor structure.
They're slowly getting better, but still a long way from ideal. Example for reference:
> One major problem here is that the communication of the climate mainstream is very poor. ... They're not really readable
It must have been in the early 00s when there was the first report that created a big media echo, since it was presented at the UN. It was full of obvious flaws and the results were not reproducible because the data wasn't published and the team behind it only reluctantly gave out the data and the calculations that were done based on that.
That's quite a contrast to the Theoretical Physicist Dyson. In both experimental and theoretical Physics everything is calculated with great care and cross-checked by other people.
Probably the governments/universities would do well if they created funds to enhance the theoretical backing of the black boxes. On the other hand nobody minds using black boxes, after all every equation based on experiments is one. (Historically many equations in Physics and Chemistry were created based on experiments and later on theoretical backing was deduced) But a bit more transparency would be good...
> There is more money at stake with climate change than most areas of science, which means it becomes a political issue.
Yes. But even beyond that, power is at stake. Climate change isn't about science, it's about geopolitics/globalism. It's about instilling fear to create a global political system. At least that's my take. If the climate change alarmism was valid, we'd simply end global trade today because global trade is the driver of pollution. But you never hear that from the elites. They demand more globalism, but with a global tax. Maybe a global system is the next step of human societal evolution, but instead of being open and honest and having a global discussion, these people are being sneaky and using fear to sneak a global system on humanity.
> There would seem to be a very strong incentive to show existing models are not accurate or to come up with scientifically plausible models with very different outcomes.
Not if enough of those with money and power are aligned on one side. Then there is very strong incentive to show one side.
> The supposed political reasons for supporting or being against climate change theories do not change the facts.
Sure. And the facts are that climate science is a very young science and have been reliably wrong that we shouldn't take it as gospel. Especially when so much of climate science is politically driven.
I love climate change alarmism. When their predictions are wrong, they claim that the climate is so complex that it's hard to model and predict accurately. At the same time, they claim their predictions are facts and we must believe everything they say. Even when these alarmists all say and have different predictions. How about this, how out of dozens/hundreds of climate alarmist models, which is the right one?
I personally believe that climate change is natural and the forces of nature ( mostly the sun ) drive climate on earth. Also, I don't think there is anything we can do about climate change, just like we can't do anything about earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. And I reject the false notion that climate change is bad. Climate change can be bad for some, but good for others.
If climate alarmists want to be taken seriously, then let them protest globalist bankers and global trade instead of advocating for a global carbon tax and enriching the wealthy bankers and industrialists. But of course they won't because these climate alarmists are funded by the globalist bankers and industrialists.
>No, that is a take that you have been fed by those who have gigantic vested interests in stopping any attempts to challenge THEIR power and profits.
Like who? The evil oil companies who are one of the major drivers of the greenwashed consumerism that is being touted as the solution to "climate change"? They don't care about oil, they care about money. They invest in whatever they think will make them money, including silly nonsense like wind and solar.
>You are being used as a useful idiot to spread uncertainty about absolute facts about absolutely real and highly pressing threats to our entire planet.
That's a very arrogant take on it. No part of climate hysteria is absolute facts, and climate hysteria is very clearly distracting people from REAL highly pressing threats to our ecosystems. We're letting huge portions of the oceans DIE while we pretend it is because of CO2 emissions, rather than doing something about the disposable consumer culture driving the massive amount of pollution coming from Chinese rivers and causing the problem. We just want to go on causing the problem, but pretend that charging our worthless electronic garbage from a solar panel instead of a natural gas plant makes it ok.
>Stop repeating them. Stop repeating them NOW. Stop helping those who put their own profits before the needs of all of humanity. Stop helping bring about destruction. Just stop
Consider taking your own advice. You are promoting an environmentally destructive system driven by corporate greed because it is a current social virtue to do so. Are you going to come back and apologize to all the people you needlessly lashed out at in 30 years when the shambling corpse of the climate boogeyman can no longer be made to look scary? When you realize that promoting the continuation of an unsustainable global economic system CAUSED a real global catastrophe, rather than preventing one? Or will you gradually allow yourself to pretend you never really believed in global warming and always knew it was fake as that becomes the predominant opinion?
Climate modeling is one of those areas where debatable assumptions are relatively small.
Existing climate models are really good. They are used with little modification to correctly model climate of Mars, Venus, tidal locked exoplanet and previous historical eras on Earth. You just set the parameters and they pretty much produce the climate that exists on those planets or time periods. Yet constant shade thrown at them.
> They are used with little modification to correctly model climate of Mars, Venus, tidal locked exoplanet and previous historical eras on Earth. You just set the parameters and they pretty much produce the climate that exists o
However they are not able to accurately forecast solar activity & climate into the future, making them need to frequently readjust their models to fit the data of the past & present. i.e. Curve Fitting.
Their entire job is to forecast climate into the future, and they do that well. Solar activity is an input, and is obviously not predicted. Your comment is gibberish.
> Solar activity is an input, and is obviously not predicted. Your comment is gibberish.
If you can't predict certain known inputs, and theres unknown unknowns, how can your model have predictive accuracy? If you believe that the model is accurate, what makes the model falsifiable? One of the indicators of a pseudoscience is nonfalsifiability.
A model that can't predict inputs can provide a mapping from any given inputs to a predicted value. We can then, after the fact, demonstrate whether the actual value is equal to the predicted value (i.e. within expected error bars). Repeated failure to predict at the expected probability of your error bars would falsify the model.
(i.e. commit to what your model is, then run it with now known inputs after the fact)
It's possible some of these inputs may be of the form "the Gulf Stream continues to operate within historically observed parameters", i.e. we make no attempt to claim accuracy for the model outside of its studied conditions. That's fine: there are a large number of accurate models which are known to have breakdown conditions.
It is literally impossible for any model to be robust to unknown unknowns. All we can do is endeavour to drag them into the light and become known unknowns, then attempt to quantify them as known knowns. Sadly, our ability to experiment repeatedly in the same conditions with the environment is deeply limited, in a way much akin to astronomy.
> Repeated failure to predict at the expected probability of your error bars would falsify the model. (i.e. commit to what your model is, then run it with now known inputs after the fact)
That doesn't help if you are not gathering the correct proxy data to represent the actual physical system. For example, CMIP6 includes particle forcing while CMIP5 & before did not. The global & solar electric circuits are not considered. Are xrays, which have a large variance with solar cycles, included in CMIP6? I don't think the Birkeland Current is considered.
What also doesn't help is adjusting historical measurements such as temperature. It's like changing the rules mid-game, which indicates that past observations are mutable to fit the models. Also note the incomplete data, as modern satellite observations span a tiny window compared to Earth's lifespan. The solar system travels through different parts of the Galaxy, crossing the Galactic Current Sheet at times, passing through ionized dust, among other phenomena.
> Sadly, our ability to experiment repeatedly in the same conditions with the environment is deeply limited, in a way much akin to astronomy.
We can experiment with ions, plasma, & high voltages applied to plasma. Note the Birkeland Current between Sun & the Earth, ions being ejected from the Sun, XRay emission varying wildly with solar activity, cosmic rays, etc. There's also a Birkeland current sheet in the solar system & a galactic current sheet.
One of the major issues is that the standard model does not consider plasma & electricity, in light of recent observations of the prevalence of Plasma in space, effectively blinding large parts of the astronomical theory to it's impact. This led to a legacy of ad hoc, non-observable (thus non-falsifiable) inventions such as "dark matter", "dark energy", "black holes", "neutron stars", "the big bang", "space/time", "magnetic line snapping", "parallel universes", "11 dimension space" & whatever other mathematical patches are used to fit the observations. Note inconsistencies with the assertion that redshift equals distance with observations such as examples of a Quasar with a high redshift being connected to a Galaxy with a low redshift.
Point is climate science is built on a tower of assumptions built on assumptions where some of the foundational pieces are called into question. Ad hoc tweaking of observational data & ad hoc tweaking of models to fit the transformed observed measurements makes it easy to doubt the accuracy, predictive ability, & knowledge of applicable boundary conditions of the model. It sounds like a tough job to get it right.
> They are used with little modification to correctly model climate of Mars, Venus, tidal locked exoplanet and previous historical eras on Earth.
Never heard that claim. Could you back it up?
Side note. I did a calculation of PV=nRT on Venus which has a 96.5% (965000PPM) CO2 atmospheric concentration. Assuming RT is close to equal on Venus & Earth, P~T.
Venus has a surface temp/pressure of 7.96 K/bar vs 287.15 K/bar on Earth. If Venus had a runaway greenhouse effect, the K/bar on Venus should be significantly higher than on Earth. Would love more feedback & critique on this calculation, particularly a relevant PVT diagram for CO2.
Heres a PVT phase diagram for CO2 but hopefully theres better ones wrt Venus. Note that theres a bend in the liquid/gas border. 1 to 10 bar has a lower increase of K/bar than for the 10 to 90 bar region.
> e360: Are there people who are knowledgeable about this topic who could do the job of pointing out what you see as the flaws?
> Dyson: I am sure there are. But I don’t know who they are.
> I have a lot of friends who think the same way I do. But I am sorry to say that most of them are old, and most of them are not experts. My views are very widely shared.
One plausible explanation is that as people become knowledgeable, they no longer share his view.
It's not helpful when scientists share their views outside their specialty and get things wrong. As much as I appreciate and respect Freeman Dyson, I wish he would have kept his views to himself on this particular issue, as he was remarkably ill-informed and stubbornly so. But that said, there's a difference between sharing your view and going on a crusade, which he didn't really seem to do. Now, if he had gone on a crusade, that'd be a different matter.
If you have a group of people with Sacred Knowledge™ who are the only capable of judging on things and you have to literally believe them (and dare you not!) as their proofs lie in the realm of sketchy models in which they ignore billions of variable, it's not science, it's at least scientism. But there is more. They have a whole set of signs of a pseudo-religion. Their own Original Sin, apocalypse, Messiah.
Judging by the consequences for those public figures who made a mistake of doubting these believes, it's a whole totalitarian sect.
Except these people (Scientists(tm)) have to show their work and anyone can follow along and participate, provided they aren't so afraid of their own ignorance and terrified of feeling stupid that they strike out with disbelief and denial.
Sure, scientists make mistakes. Their models need adjustment. They ignore variables because they don't have the computational power to model every electron in the universe. Yeah, imprecise models make imprecise predictions. No one has accuracy of 100%. Sometimes it's 90%, sometimes it's 50%. Sometimes it's 99.9%. It's rarely, rarely ever 0%. People just don't publish scientific results that are 100% wrong with no checking whatsoever.
But that's not the level of conversation we are having. We usually aren't talking about adjusting and tinkering or adding sub-models for systems that aren't fully understood yet. We aren't asking what we missed, we aren't examining the assumptions from the outset, trying to get to something that works. We aren't talking details of climate models or pointing to something in the inner guts of their computer simulations that we can fix up, remove, replace, etc. All of that is really complicated and hard! And we aren't doing that specifically because you frame that stuff as "Sacred Knowledge" which you reflexively and categorically reject--it's a shortcut thinking that doesn't require you to understand math, code, or read a goddamn paper. It's a shortcut that allows you to keep reasoning in a vacuum and go about your daily life because you actually hate the idea of being an (xyz) scientist.
As such, we end up in a situation where you are forced to argue a position that results from all-or-nothing thinking, and have to start accusing them of being a religion, a totalitarian sect, usually because one of them got pissed off at some really outrageously stupid disinformation spread deliberately by politicians. But you are forced there because you either can't or don't want to cede any rhetorical ground of being fully and utterly more right than "they" are, because you have no idea what will happen if you cede any ground at all. So instead the othering intensifies. Reject everything they say! We must throw them out! It's a religion! Look, one of them got pissed off one day! They were wrong that one time! I don't trust a word they say!
And you only frame things this way because that's how you think--in terms of religion and power. Moreover, it's how you think they think.
No. I absolutely and unequivocally reject the framing of your comment. It's lazy and it's a lie.
There is no "Sacred Knowledge." Go dig. Scientists welcome it. But don't be a denialist moron. There are too many of those. Denialist morons reject even the basics of what scientists do. Sometimes they couch it in more-scientific-than-thou-art framing like yours, sometimes they don't. But they come out in anger and denial. You know what? That pisses off anybody. To have your work shat on, you better believe that pisses people off. We end up circling back over and over and over again to the same basics and it's just exhausting, because people aren't motivated by a desire for the truth, they are motivated by their tribal instincts which underpin your framing, whether you recognize it or not.
Ars Technica has an article about Mr. Dyson and in the comments, the author attempts to explain why Dyson might have had the view on climate science that he had. I found the suggested reasons plausible.
Another plausible explanation is that Dyson’s generation of scientists mostly ignored climate. It was a “yin” problem when these men were looking to make their mark on a “yang” problem — new physics, thinking machines, conquest of some new domain.
Now the yin problem has revealed itself as an existential threat to the growth-centric way of life built upon the work of the great minds of the 20th century. Unsurprisingly they and their disciples are reluctant to accept this.
In the mid 1980's I attended a library sale. I bought a collection of Science News magazines that covered the whole year of 1959. For those of you who don't know that was the International Geophysical Year. I don't feel like digging it out right now, but there was a short piece about a scientist who was studying the effects of carbon dioxide on the climate. I did not find a follow up article, but it does demonstrate that this has been going on a long time. Just because your old doesn't mean you haven't considered it.
Thank you for the link. I suspected it went back further than 1959, but could not come up with a publication for it. I should have searched wikipedia. I had a great interest in the Ice Age in my youth. Most of the books I read on the subject were older than 1959. The idea that the Ice Ages were caused by the green house effect was quite prominent in most of them. They did not extrapolate it to industrial, Agriculture, and individual pollution. Though I do recall a theory I read that the Agricultural Revolution is what ended the last Ice Age.
I was taught about the problem in elementary school in The Netherlands at around the year of 1990. We had it as "theme week". Which means we had to, for example. make a collage about it. At another time (around same year) we had such about alternative energy as well ("alternatives to the status quo ie. coal").
Yes, it's been going on for a long time. And the Dysons and Feynmans of the science world didn't care, because this topic wasn't sufficiently big and axiomatic for them. That was my point.
I remember being a big advocate for nuclear power from the mid-1980s when I was in high school, precisely because it was the only way to fight the greenhouse effect as it was known back then.
Dyson is exhibiting a pathology common among physicists, a sort of Dunning-Kruger effect along the lines of “physics is hard, therefore everything else is easy for me”. We see it often when they dabble in social sciences, or biology, or economics. The complete opposite of intellectual humility and the scientific method.
There are endless ways to phrase "old people who don't know much about something still insist their opinions should be given equal weight as experts" but "ok boomer" is probably the most succinct.
Here's an interview of Freeman Dyson in 2015 re: APW & faith in models of complex nonlinear systems.
Also goes into solar activity (electric, magnetic, & ion ejections) as a driver of climate change. Note that CMIP6 includes particle forcing to its model. CMIP5 & earlier versions did not include particle forcing.
This is a pretty decent article with a misleading headline. Dyson himself doesn’t claim to be the representative of any counter-movement, he simply raises some (admittedly interesting) questions. I don’t know enough about climate science to verify his claims, but pointing out that more people die from the cold than heatwaves (and thus warming will result in less deaths) was something that I hadn’t considered. That’s assuming his data is correct, of course.
We can solve all that be having the central banks print more money. That's what we've been doing since the RTOI of oil and gas fell off a cliff in the early 2000's. Working so far.
Nobody worried about climate change thinks that additional deaths from heatwaves are going to be a significant issue compared to ecological collapse, food shortages due to crop collapse, and of course rising sea levels causing mass migration.
"ecological collapse, food shortages due to crop collapse, and of course rising sea levels causing mass migration"
Those statements are so vague in measurement as to mean nothing.
I've read the IPCC report and the relevant section says nothing of generalized society ending collapses as people would seem to want you to believe.
There's a few that you can read about:
1. A collapse in permafrost may occur (low confidence);
2. collapse of Maize in some regions, may exist under 3°C or more of global warming (low confidence)
etc...
Ok, those aren't great or desired things, and we need to mitigate that, but the world isn't ending. This isn't even close to a world war, a nuclear bomb going off, a massive solar event that takes out the grid etc...
I'd love to see way less apocalyptic language used and more talk about tradeoffs and realistic possible future costs of how we produce and consume vs finding sustainable growth.
I wasn't trying to be apocalyptic. Ecological collapse just means that many many organisms will (continue) to go extinct due to rapid changes in their environment. That's both from direct causes (warming, ocean acidification) and from indirect causes.
As far as food shortages, that just requires a significant reduction in arable land. The US will probably be fine, but countries which rely on farming/production near the coasts will suffer.
That's very location specific. Heat waves kill more people in Australia than any other natural disaster and they're worsening and becoming more frequent.
Dyson (re Oak Ridge experiments): So if you change the carbon dioxide drastically by a factor of two, the whole behavior of the plant is different. Anyway, that’s so typical of the things they ignore.
'Different'. 'Ignore'. Not Dyson's best day. Oak Ridge was hardly a climate lab. Many studies have followed. This two year-old SA article, Ask the Experts: Does Rising CO2 Benefit Plants? [0]starts with this summary: "Climate change’s negative effects on plants will likely outweigh any gains from elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide levels"
It was strange to see on reddit that his death was celebrated as another climate change denier gone. I mean it never ouccured me people don't respect him or anything. Maybe I'm just too naive.
When your political power comes from the ability to regulate every aspect of life due to a supposed existential threat that comes from all economic activity, an educated, informed, and well-spoken critic of the supposed existential threat is dangerous.
This works both ways. There is a very strong incentive to create plausible scientific models that show climate change is not a problem if that is in fact the case. Even Dyson says he doesn't know any informed people who disagree with the mainstream climate change theories. This interview shows that he accepts the key premise that there is likely to be significant warming.
Realistically, the bigger problem is that massive changes to society are required to mitigate the risks of climate change. However as Dyson says, some people will likely benefit from climate change, or at least will be in a position where their personal costs of doing something about it are much more than what they stand to gain.
This is the political problem: overall richer people are the greatest contributors to climate change, and they stand to lose the least from the bad effects of climate change.
Trump and Scott Morrison come closer to admitting this than most, and politically it seems to have worked in their favour.
If anybody were to produce such a model, they would be utterly destroyed.
If anybody were to even attempt to apply for grants to do that work, they would be expelled from the university community, and their professional reputation immediately destroyed.
There is no incentive to even look to see if you can find a flaw in the orthodoxy.
Nobody wants climate change, it's true. But do you really believe that the scientists who have become public advocates for climate change mitigation, that have contributed building the international climate research organism that was awarded a Nobel prize, and whose research ends up regularly on the front page of international newspapers and shapes the decisions of world politicians in economic matters- do you really think these people are putting all their daily effort in proving themselves wrong? They're human beings like everyone else, they become invested in their own ideas. And the stronger the message, the harder it is to be completely dispassionate about it.
This is not to say they're wrong. But I strongly doubt that many of them would be looking for signs that climate change is not that bad after all.
> There is a very strong incentive to create plausible scientific models that show climate change is not a problem if that is in fact the case.
I guess that proving the absence of something is harder, and less rewarding in terms of recognition, than proving its presence. Many climate studies are interspersed with "may", "could", "likely"- but to prove an absence you need a higher degree of certainty. Also, there is of course a publication bias- research that doesn't produce significant results is less likely to be published. "We modeled the impact of global warming on this crop, and it didn't seem to change" is not as sexy as "the model for this staple crop failed spectacularly and at current temperature projections hundreds of million will die of hunger in 30 years".
We are in this mess exactly because the people who know the most about climate change have FUCK ALL political power compared to the absolutely massive industry that will do anything in their power to deny it.
You are absolutely delusional if you think anybody advocating for climate action has any meaningful power whatsoever. All the power and all the big money is solidly behind denying, delaying and avoiding any action on climate.
When your unfounded, conspiratorial thinking comes from AM talk radio, due to a supposed existential threat to freedom, an educated, informed, and well-spoken overwhelming consensus of independent scientists trumps a physicists off-the-cuff remarks.
I don't think of random nobodies talking climate change on reddit as being very politically powerful. Do you think you might be elevating them to some privileged position they do not possess in this description?
It isn't political nobodies, though. I mean, it's them too.
But, it is the entire media system, the university-political complex, and all of the largest and most powerful political parties across the West.
It's pretty much just this one dead guy, a few internet memers, and a few Republicans versus the entire entrenched political structure of the western world.
On one of those sides, you can have a career in academia. On the other, you're lucky if you don't end up dead in a ditch.
Disliking people for an immutable characteristic that they had no power over(racism) and disliking people for actions they chose to take, are not even remotely equivalent
>Dyson believes we can just do some genetic engineering to create a new species of super-tree that can suck up the excess.
You can just stop reading right there. Not only do we not have the ability to do that, even if we had such a tree, we would destroy the biosphere by cutting down all the world's trees to replace them with our magical carbon capture trees.
To me the funny thing is that he spoke about climate scientists in their ivory towers, yet dreams up genetic engineering plans that have no basis in current reality. It's even unclear he understands realities of DNA-based terrestrial life as we know it, if you look at his writings on seeding the solar system with life. In my day we called such people "bullshit artists."
I think one of the best things the alarmists do is say we only have ten years left. When those predictions are proven wrong again and again eventually people will notice the pattern.
People don't pay attention long enough. We have 20 solid years of non-stop doomsday predictions, all of which were wrong. Nobody pays any attention to this, they just go right on believing all the new baseless doomsday predictions. Meanwhile actual looming disasters are ignored.
None of us individually do, but I'm pretty sure there will still be 7+ billion people on this planet in year 2120. Irrespective of 2 degree rise in temperature or lack thereof.
I'm not an expert, but I think the sea level rise is going to be quite crappy in another 30 years or so. Sounds plausible that it could lead to people being displaced and pricey waterfront properties and adjacent losing a lot of value.
A hundred years might enough to bring the population back up after civilization collapses. Collapse will put a damper on CO2 release, and the pulse of reforestation of formerly occupied areas would absorb a lot of the CO2 overburden.
Your point about genetic engineering capability is true (source: spent two years working in an advanced plant science lab).
The latter one I'm not sure about, it's complicated.
The downvoting of this comment seems a little strange to me.
Edit: Thanks for explaining, I get it now, I shouldn't have mentioned it anyway, I was just interested in the scientific substance of parent comment and wondered why others seemed not to be (I get it now, it wasn't the scientific aspect of the comment which was against HN guidelines).
I imagine it was downvoted because of "You can just stop reading right there", which is an internet trope (-> repetitive -> bad for HN) and also needlessly aggressive. The comment would be just fine without that bit—well, plus the snarky "magical". Snark is deprecated on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Can you add sarcasm next to snark in the guidelines? I’ve never seen sarcasm improve a conversation and it inflames passions unnecessarily. Thanks for considering this, whatever you decide.
Sarcasm is writing the opposite of what you mean. It doesn't work in short form text (similar to Poe's Law) but people do it anyway because it works in their internal monologue that has vocal intonation. Even when it works, it's an obnoxious outburst and intellectually devoid of value.
Snark is general obnoxiousness that adds no intellectual value.
It’s not to signify a difference, but to expand coverage. I wouldn’t want to argue with someone saying “I was sarcastic, but not snarky”.
There are many comments ending with /s to signify sarcasm or even /sarcasm or such. It’s easier to point out a transgression when the user has agreed in his mind or his words that he was in fact being sarcastic.
Ah I see. If it comes up, you can point to this subthread, or you can always ping us at hn@ycombinator.com. Thanks for quoting the rules and helping to preserve this place!
It's hero worship. Dyson was an innovator and very much an outside the box thinker. He was also fond of what rationalists call "magical thinking".
"What the secular faith of Dysonism offers is, first, a hypertrophied version of the technological fix, and second, the fantasy that, should the fix fail, we have someplace else to go."
Climate change is a red herring, air pollution is a clear and present danger. India and China have ignored this in the past and now they are making some efforts to correct course because people are dying from it.
Air pollution is a big problem. The biggest problem IMO is water and soil pollution. We're putting far worse chemicals into our food and water (and in household products we absorb) than what we're putting into the air (in the developed world, anyway).
True, it's a fact. But what's not a fact, that CO2 is the reason for that. We humans can do nothing about it. How do you else explain some ice age with 10x the CO2 amount in the far past. But don't misunderstand that I am against a cleaner future. Efficiency should be always improved, in every field. But I am against unnecessary change just because of CO2. For example it's better for the environment to use your old car as long as possible instead building new electric cars. This is less efficient overall than repairing and maintaining the tech of today. The whole climate change topic is far more political than actually fact based.
> I have been to Greenland a year ago and saw it for myself. And that’s where the warming is most extreme. And it’s spectacular, no doubt about it. And glaciers are shrinking and so on.
> But, there are all sorts of things that are not said, which decreases my feeling of alarm. First of all, the people in Greenland love it. They tell you it’s made their lives a lot easier. They hope it continues. I am not saying none of these consequences are happening. I am just questioning whether they are harmful.
His arguments on the topic are bizarrely anecdotal and unscientific. He suggests that the happiness of locals over the past few years of warming is sufficient reason to doubt that it could get worse for Greenland in the future? Making dramatic changes to human environments is not good, people react poorly and things like resource wars can start / have started.
Super weird to see such anecdotal experiences extrapolated to "locals love it, so what's the problem?" while dismissing decades of intensive scientific research (not even including modals) that suggest a global chaotic event is happening presently.
Also, this:
> There’s been a very strong warming, in fact, ever since the Little Ice Age, which was most intense in the 17th century. That certainly was not due to human activity.
What does this mean? I went to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age and it lists multiple possible / probable causes of the little ice age that are directly human-related. He dismisses yet another field of scientific research as "certainly not due to human activity" without any evidence to back that up. He makes stuff up, dismisses decades of real science, and claims that major problems aren't real simply because local people don't understand large-scale chaotic events are are 'happy' with warming local climates for now. Bizarre.
I also went to that Wikipedia page. The “multiple possible / probable causes” listed are:
“orbital cycles; decreased solar activity; increased volcanic activity; altered ocean current flows; fluctuations in the human population in different parts of the world causing reforestation, or deforestation; and the inherent variability of global climate change”
