{"id":17096,"date":"2014-05-06T20:37:22","date_gmt":"2014-05-07T00:37:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=17096"},"modified":"2014-05-06T20:53:01","modified_gmt":"2014-05-07T00:53:01","slug":"freeman-dyson-and-global-climate-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2014\/05\/06\/freeman-dyson-and-global-climate-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Freeman Dyson and Global Climate Change"},"content":{"rendered":"

The climate change deniers have been saying that I need to see what Freeman Dyson has to say about global climate change.\u00a0 I found two links in the article Freeman Dyson\u2013 ally in the Climate War<\/a> on JunkScience.com All the Junk That’s Fit to Debunk<\/em>. I was confused by this authors comments, but he did provide links to two good article.<\/p>\n

The Case for Blunders by Freeman Dyson | The New York Review of Books<\/a><\/p>\n

In Livio\u2019s list of brilliant blunderers, Darwin and Einstein were good losers, Kelvin and Pauling were not so good, and Hoyle was the worst. The greatest scientists are the best losers. That is one of the reasons why we love the game. As Einstein said, God is sophisticated but not malicious. Nature never loses, and she plays fair.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

after you read the next article, decide whether or not you think Freeman Dyson is a good loser, a sore loser, or if he is even a loser at all.<\/p>\n

In The\u00a0<\/em> New York\u00a0 Times Magazine<\/em> The Civil Heretic by Nicholas Dawidoff<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cwho make confident predictions about the future and end up believing their predictions,\u201d and he cites examples of things people anticipated to the point of terrified certainty that never actually occurred, ranging from hellfire, to Hitler\u2019s atomic bomb, to the Y2K millennium bug.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I always have to laugh at the people who cite the Y2K millenium bug as something that turned out not to be worth worrying about because the disaster never struck.\u00a0 Of course it never struck.\u00a0 People took note of the warning and spent billions of dollars fixing computer programs to remove the bug before Y2K hit.\u00a0 Should we ignore the Global Climate Change warning this time\u00a0 to see if it might turn out to be nothing?\u00a0 Thank goodness people with computer programs did not take this attitude about Y2K.<\/p>\n

Of course, there is much more in the two articles just above.\u00a0 You can’t judge Freeman Dyson on just the quote that I have excerpted.<\/p>\n

Read the article and judge for yourself as to how much weight you want to give Freeman Dyson’s opinion on Global Climate Change.\u00a0 He may play a useful role in the debate and in the long run he could even turn out to be right, but I am still not on his side of the argument.\u00a0 The proponents of Global Climate Change could prove to be wrong in the long run or could prove to be wrong on the magnitudes of what they are predicting, but I think the odds weigh on the side of taking out insurance on the likelihood that they are more right than wrong.<\/p>\n

If you read about the puzzle posed to Freeman Dyson, you could spend some time thinking about it. Then you could look at the article Puzzle Answers From a 4th-Grader and Freeman Dyson By John Tierney<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The climate change deniers have been saying that I need to see what Freeman Dyson has to say about global climate change.\u00a0 I found two links in the article Freeman Dyson\u2013 ally in the Climate War on JunkScience.com All the Junk That’s Fit to Debunk. I was confused by this authors comments, but he did […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-stevegsposts","czr-hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17096"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17102,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17096\/revisions\/17102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}