Lately, however, since Dyson raised some concerns about the computational models predicting an increased likelihood of severe global warming, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors' letter boxes and Dyson's own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as "a pompous twit," "a blowhard," and, perhaps inevitably, "a mad scientist."
Dyson's son, George, a technology historian, says his father's views have cooled friendships.
Dyson is a scientist whose intelligence is revered by other scientists since he came to the US at 23 and right away contributed seminal work to physics by unifying quantum and electrodynamic theory.
Among Dyson's gifts is interpretive clarity, a penetrating ability to grasp the method and significance of what many kinds of scientists do. His thoughts about how science works appear in a series of lucid, elegant books for nonspecialists that have made him a trusted arbiter of ideas ranging far beyond physics.
Formed in a heretical and broad-thinking tradition of British public intellectuals, Dyson left behind a brooding England still stricken by two bloody world wars to become an optimistic American immigrant with tremendous faith in the creative imagination's ability to invent technologies that would overcome any predicament. And according to the physicist and former Caltech president Marvin Goldberger, Dyson is himself the living embodiment of that kind of ingenuity. "You point Freeman at a problem and he'll solve it," Goldberger says. "He's extraordinarily powerful." Dyson seems to see the world as an interdisciplinary set of problems out there for him to evaluate.
Climate change is the big scientific issue of our time, so naturally he finds it irresistible. But to Dyson this is really only one more charged conundrum attracting his interest just as nuclear weapons and rural poverty have. That is to say, he is a great problem-solver who is not convinced that climate change is a great problem.
Seems silly to choose CO2 as the global warming villain. That is akin to blaming butterfly flutter for hurricanes.
I am a physicist. I was an NSF Fellow, or else a Prof. of Physics and Radiology at UW and at WFU since about 1962. That is to say, I am literate, know a little physical science, and have lived for quite a while. I am one of the last FBAIs (full blood American Irish) and when I was a child I remember very “OLD” people at funerals and wakes speaking English, but a sort of peculiar grammar and dialect, with a number of exclamatory words (e.g., Begorra) I did not know. But the following, in my fascination at funeral wakes/feasts among the oldest specimen (on Mom’s side they all were Lumbermen, from New England, Forested Pennsylvania, and ultimately Callfornia)…. I remember distinctly as it had implications for my favorite winter sports in North Pennsylvania. A number of they would say “When we were young lumberjacks, or timbering owners, we used to - begorra - count on at least - AT LEAST - 90 days of deep snow down in the hilltop forests, so that the mules could skid logs out to the rivers - either to the Allegheny or to the Susquehana. But now probably less than 60-70 days, being down in the woods, the snow, ‘tis!.
Twenty years later, walking out of a wet woods in the middle of December, from deer hunting with my Dad (not a lumberman) he said. “Middle of December and no snow down here in the forests. When I was a young man the lumber people (which would be 50 years or so after the true oldsters timbering days)—- well doing the first cut of the Susquehanoc forest they counted absolutely on cold weather to have at LEAST 50 days of snow down for the horse teams to haul out logs. Why I do not even remember 50 continuous days snow on the ground in the woods…. Maybe we get —- 30 - but maybe not that.”
So the man-made CO2 et cetera climate warming, such does not apply very well to my Fathers youth in the woods (1910-1918 and after WWI) when it was horses, or to my Great-Grandfathers youth on my Mom’s side, which would be the 1850-70s, when it was mules. NOBODY shrieking on the TV or in the CAP and TRADE frenzy ever mentions solar radiance variations — why is that?
the old badger