The Atlantic Monthly has a profile of Freeman Dyson, a scientist and contrarian who, I would hazard to guess, is known and has been read by a few regulars around these parts. It is okay up to a point – there are some nice biographical details to spice things up – but then it comes up with the following:
“That humanity has been kind to the planet is not a possible interpretation, not even for a moment—certainly not for anyone who has been paying the slightest attention at any point in the 4,700 years of human history since Gilgamesh logged the cedar forest of the Fertile Crescent.”
So I presume that instances such as the spectacular achievements of land reclamation by the Dutch over the centuries – turning tidal waters into productive farmland, for example, don’t count?
On it goes:
“That we repair our damage to the planet is a laughable assertion. It is true that the air is better now in London, and in Los Angeles too. Collars do blacken more slowly in both those places. Some rivers in the developed world are somewhat cleaner, as well: the Cuyahoga has not burned in many years. But it is also true that the Atlantic is afloat with tar balls, and that detached sections of fishnet and broken filaments of longline drift, ghost-fishing, in all our seas. Many of the large cities of Africa, South America, and Asia are megalopolises of desperate poverty ringed by garbage. Vast tracts of tropical rain forest, the planet’s most important carbon sink, disappear annually, burned or logged or mined. Illegal logging is also ravaging the slow-growing boreal forests of Siberia. The ozone hole over Antarctica continues to open every southern spring, exposing all life beneath to unfiltered ultraviolet rays. African wildlife is in precipitous decline.”
These are assertions not backed up by actual numbers or clear sources in the article. They are just trotted out as “facts”. In Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist, he points out, if my reading of that book is correct, that much of the data on resource depletion and species loss, etc, is wildly exaggerated, and Lomborg was able to point this out by using publicly disclosed data from the very sources so very often cited by the doomsters. The Atlantic’s article does, at least, concede that in the richer nations of the West, such as the UK, rivers have been cleaned up to some degree (as in the Thames), and air pollution of some kinds is far less – the smogs that were familiar in Victorian London are things of the past. What this article is talking about in fact is more about poverty; but as living standards rise and profit-making businesses look to wring out efficiency gains, so the use of fossil fuels to deliver a given level of output goes down. This has been a fairly widely observed fact. In the US, for example, thanks to improved efficiency as firms look to cut costs, less oil/coal is needed to produce a given amount of stuff now than was the case 100 years ago. Here are some figures from the US Energy Agency.
I suspect the reason why Dyson has got up the nose of the author of this piece is his essential optimism and enjoyment of the idea of human progress, his belief that science and technology can fix all the real or perceived problems, including Man-made global warming. He has likened the Green movement to socialism, and of course that really gets the temperatures rising. The truth, after all, often stings.
I found the tone of the article somewhat patronising, to be honest. Here is this fearesomely bright guy and he’s a Denier! The shame of it.
On a related theme, I have just received my copy of Tim Worstall’s Chasing Rainbows. I’ll try and post a review soon.
Looks to me as if there has been a formatting error in this post. The paragraph starting “Desertification…” is a continuation of the quote “African wildlife is in precipitous decline. “.
BTW, has anyone heard of this Kenneth Brower character? This seems to be only the second article he’s got listed at the Atlantic.
Matt Ridley points out that 200 billion tons of carbon per year are removed from the atmosphere by plant life, and 200 billion tons/year is added by rotting, digestion and respiration, in a neat natural balance, to which humans are adding another 10 billion tons/year. To state that we can’t increase the rate of natural carbon absorption by 5% through 21st technology is being ever so slightly over pessimistic.
And Tim, if you’re listening, can you convince Amazon to Kindle-ize your book, or pimp the Kindle vote on your blog, please.
Kindle will come: not sure when yet though.
Like Dyson, I’ve seen through the incorrect science in the CO2-AGW hypothesis, except I’ve gone further.
There’s a major error in the maths used to calculate the effect of pollution on cloud albedo: instead of causing cooling, it causes heating. That’s a game changer because CO2 has lost its monopoly and could be very low indeed. The error was made in 1974 by NASA adapting work by Sagan on Venusian clouds.
If correct, this hypothesis explains such effects as according to ocean heat capacity, global warming stopped in 2003.
In 2004, after no experimental evidence of the cooling had been proved, NASA put out a fake scientific explanation of it, apparently to keep it in AR4.
The bottom line is that the IPCC’s predictions of CO2-AGW must be reduced by at least a factor of 3.
Dr. Dyson is on our NSS Board of Governors and is an awesome intellect with a sharp British wit to boot. I would not want to be the poor SOB who tries to take him on, especially where anything in the realm of Physics is involved.
I had the chance to talk to him for a few minutes after he spoke at our conference in May. His kids are pretty sharp too: George has an excellent book out on the Orion project and everyone knows Esther!
As the Americans say, turn about is fair play.
Jerry Pournelle’s take on Brower’s hatchet job:
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2010/Q4/view648.html#Dyson
Read the article. Detested the article. This bugs me–Brower repeatedly praises Dyson’s intellect as ‘cosmic’, certainly much greater than Brower’s own, yet he never once thinks to consider that maybe the person who by your own admission is much smarter than you might be right, just maybe, and so devotes the whole article to speculation as to why someone so smart could be so wrong. As Eliezer Yudkowsky would put it, notice that you are confused, and question the assumptions that confuse you.
Any author of the epic phrase “since Gilgamesh logged the cedar forest” is a pretty rabid Greenie. There is however a difference between general care over pollution and the environment – which most of us feel to some extent – and the AGW issue.
The interesting thing about this article is the change in tactics against the sceptics. Dyson poses them a particular problem because he is so highly respected that the warmists cannot get away with their usual tricks of alleging senility or accusing Dyson of talking about a field in which he is not a specialist. Direct attack is out.
Instead, and more subtly, his intellect has been praised to the skies. His failure to subscribe to the AGW credo is glossed over. The slur is that despite his talent his faith in mankind has blinded him to practical realities of which, tacitly, AGW is deemed to be one. He is a great man but sadly other worldly.
Interesting to see if and how he responds to this.
Alexander wrote:
The bottom line is that the IPCC’s predictions of CO2-AGW must be reduced by at least a factor of 3.
I did a similar calculation, and came to a similar answer. The error pre-dates Sagan, though.
Interesting times ahead.
Reply to Dishman: Nov 21.
Yes, it goes back to Van de Hulst who, apparently when he observed more backscattering from sols [milk presumably], invented lumped parameterisation and the idea of constant Mie asymmetry factor as a reason for directed backscattering from internal scattering.
Sagan latched onto it, Hansen also quotes a lot of Van de Hulst. Twomey apparently toyed with it but didn’t fall for it, simply warning his ideas couldn’t work for thick clouds.
Alexander,
That wasn’t the one I had in mind, but it was still an interesting read. Another piece of the puzzle, if you will.
In my spare time, I’m working on a piece tying together ‘confirmation bias’ and ‘constructal theory’. and the way ‘knowledge’ becomes stylized to the point of actually losing contact with reality.
Add in a disagreement, risk, and a few Black Swans, and it appears to me that the numbers work out as a mathematical/utilitarian case for libertarianism. That wasn’t where I intended to go with it, but I certainly don’t object to the result.
There is indeed environmental damage – but it caused (in the case of water or forest) by a lack of PRIVATE PROPERTY.
Where no one owns a river or a forest – then people abuse it. And it works for air pollution also – with the 19th century legal judgements that people could not sue for the tort of their air being polluted because of the “public interest” (the Wensleydale judgement so hated by Oakeshott).
Of course the MSM loved Freeman Dyson when he was backing the establishment position on the nuclear test ban treaty (even though it meant the end of his own Orion Project – at least till the Chinese build such ships), but now he has opposed them on something he is a nonperson.
Such is the way of the MSM – and the education system (neither the schools or the universities will ever give Dyson’s view of this matter, other than to use as proof of his senility), and of the establishment generally.
As for Dyson – he is part of the old California, the place where anything seemed possible (Robert Heinlein short stories capture the time and place – basically up to the late 1960’s although the peak was most likely in the late 1940’s).
The computer industry still lives on the human capital of the traditions of the ol;d Calornia – they have not noticed that the very politics that a lot of them (such as the top managers at Google) support, have doomed California.
When the (much despised) Orange County conservatives had a lot of influence in California politics government spending and taxes were low – and bold experimentors in all fields bar politics benefitted from the experimentors in how to use the state being kept in check (such as the great defeat the left suffered back in 1934 – with U. Sinclair being smashed at the election).
However, bit by bit the “rock ribbed” “reactionary” forces in Californian politics were defeated – and people who were bold and optomistic about government got their policies put into practice (in spite of the resistance of Ronald Reagan, Pete Wilson and others) .
Now all “public services” (i.e. welfare state schemes) are “rights” – even for people who are not even in the United States legally.
The State is doomed – and, please remember, California is just an extreme example of the ideology that has taken control (of the courts, of the schools, of the universities, of the media – including the entertainment media) generally.
If States like Texas do not wish to go down the same road as California (a road leading to economic and social collapse) they may have to do some “experiments” of their own – but experiments in a very different direction from what the MSM would approve of.
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