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CREDENTIALS_FREEMAN_DYSON_NODS

                                             November 6, 2015


I've been a fan of the aforementioned Freeman Dyson for
some time, but a few years back he made some moves that
look to me a bit dubious, and I wouldn't be surprised if
they strike a lot of you out there as even worse. After
publishing a book on the need for "Scientific Heretics"              http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/02/22/1279634/-Thomas-Gold-vs-Rachel-Maddow
(where one of his prime examples was Thomas Gold, by the way).

Dyson came out of the closet as a "global warming
denialist", though of the "third type": His take is
essentially that yeah, anthropogenic global warming is
happening, but rushing to fix it now would be really          THE_HERETIC
expensive, and we're probably better off waiting for
some technical breakthroughs in coming decades, and
going after it then.

Dyson's ideas about possible breakthroughs struck me as
pretty interesting (though I'm afraid your average
environmentalist just thought they were whacked, and
started doing the usual rants, like "Who's paying this guy?
He must've been bought!").

I think you'd have to call this a case where Dyson was led
astray by some inflated cost-estimates of going after
GHG-emissions. As pointed out in the Hansen study
mentioned above, the emissions of coal power are
phenomenally nasty, even before you take the greenhouse
effect into account. If you take climate change
seriously, then coal power is public enemy number one, if
we went after coal power and by some miracle discovered we
were all mistaken about climate change... well then all
we'd get out of it is saving millions of lives.

It's possibly a problem endemic with physicists--
they have a very high opinion of themselves, for
good reason-- but consequently they have a way of
thinking they can pick-up anything quickly and take
on the pros in their own field...




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