Physicist Freeman Dyson does not necessarily believe in global warming.

The Nytimes has a long article [link] about this aged skeptic, who is not paid off by Exxon/industry finances, research grants, and other such tomfoolery. After reading the article, I wonder if he’s not thoroughly invested in his criticism, but rather is more interested in being a humanist iconoclast. Nevertheless, he makes some excellent points on how we need to take our financially secure ‘bourgeois’ identity into account within this debate and choose to look at the complicated impact ecological activism and political / economic action in response to climate change will have on the developing world.

I’m often a cheerleader of the honest skeptics, so this is an interesting read for me personally. Often I question my activism within a field that I am academically alienated from, and find it strange to embrace a ‘faith’ in ‘expert consensus’ and scientific methods that are foreign to me. Nevertheless, I feel much more comfortable working within the substantial majority camp of ‘experts’ on this one. Which, in turn, makes me feel anxious and uncomfortable on a different level.

Perhaps I’m romanced by the urgent necessity of action and the consequence of inaction. Its difficult to conceptualize and act on an issue that has no ‘real-world’ impact upon the contemporary, the current status-quo, where diverse and complicated societal problems and human suffering exist right now in abundance. We certainly live in a strange moment of detached urgency.

Dyson has led quite an interesting life transitioning from nuclear bomb admiration to critic, and studying within a wide variety of fields. However, I think the following conversation Dyson had with his wife after they watched “An Inconvenient Truth” together shines light upon his complicated and somewhat contradictory motivations and intuitions.

“How far do you allow the oceans to rise before you say, This is no good?” she asked Dyson.

“When I see clear evidence of harm,” he said.

“Then it’s too late,” she replied. “Shouldn’t we not add to what nature’s doing?”

“The costs of what Gore tells us to do would be extremely large,” Dyson said. “By restricting CO2 you make life more expensive and hurt the poor. I’m concerned about the Chinese.”

“They’re the biggest polluters,” Imme replied.

“They’re also changing their standard of living the most, going from poor to middle class. To me that’s very precious.”

“All my friends say how smart and farsighted Al Gore is,” she said.

“He certainly is a good preacher,” Dyson replied. “Forty years ago it was fashionable to worry about the coming ice age. Better to attack the real problems like the extinction of species and overfishing. There are so many practical measures we could take.”

“I’m still perfectly happy if you buy me a Prius!” Imme said.

“It’s toys for the rich,” her husband smiled, and then they were arguing about windmills.

Below the fold I’ve included his argument against the scientific consensus on climate change:

Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.”

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Climate models, he says, take into account atmospheric motion and water levels but have no feeling for the chemistry and biology of sky, soil and trees. “The biologists have essentially been pushed aside,” he continues. “Al Gore’s just an opportunist. The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers.” Dyson agrees with the prevailing view that there are rapidly rising carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere caused by human activity. To the planet, he suggests, the rising carbon may well be a MacGuffin, a striking yet ultimately benign occurrence in what Dyson says is still “a relatively cool period in the earth’s history.” The warming, he says, is not global but local, “making cold places warmer rather than making hot places hotter.” Far from expecting any drastic harmful consequences from these increased temperatures, he says the carbon may well be salubrious — a sign that “the climate is actually improving rather than getting worse,” because carbon acts as an ideal fertilizer promoting forest growth and crop yields. “Most of the evolution of life occurred on a planet substantially warmer than it is now,” he contends, “and substantially richer in carbon dioxide.” Dyson calls ocean acidification, which many scientists say is destroying the saltwater food chain, a genuine but probably exaggerated problem. Sea levels, he says, are rising steadily, but why this is and what dangers it might portend “cannot be predicted until we know much more about its causes.”

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Climate-change specialists often speak of global warming as a matter of moral conscience. Dyson says he thinks they sound presumptuous. As he warned that day four years ago at Boston University, the history of science is filled with those “who make confident predictions about the future and end up believing their predictions,” and he cites examples of things people anticipated to the point of terrified certainty that never actually occurred, ranging from hellfire, to Hitler’s atomic bomb, to the Y2K millennium bug. “It’s always possible Hansen could turn out to be right,” he says of the climate scientist. “If what he says were obviously wrong, he wouldn’t have achieved what he has. But Hansen has turned his science into ideology. He’s a very persuasive fellow and has the air of knowing everything. He has all the credentials. I have none. I don’t have a Ph.D. He’s published hundreds of papers on climate. I haven’t. By the public standard he’s qualified to talk and I’m not. But I do because I think I’m right. I think I have a broad view of the subject, which Hansen does not. I think it’s true my career doesn’t depend on it, whereas his does. I never claim to be an expert on climate. I think it’s more a matter of judgment than knowledge.”