All models are wrong. Some are useful approximations for understanding and others for forecasting. In Econ for example, DSGE models are useful for asking counterfactuals but not great for forecasting. Lots of models are particularly susceptible to assumptions that can be tuned in an Upton Sinclair like way. Climate modeling appears to be one of these areas where the black box can be filled with all sorts of debatable assumptions, yet questioning what’s in the black box carries great reputational risk.
> e360: Are there people who are knowledgeable about this topic who could do the job of pointing out what you see as the flaws?<p>> Dyson: I am sure there are. But I don’t know who they are.<p>> I have a lot of friends who think the same way I do. But I am sorry to say that most of them are old, and most of them are not experts. My views are very widely shared.<p>One plausible explanation is that as people become knowledgeable, they no longer share his view.
Here's an interview of Freeman Dyson in 2015 re: APW & faith in models of complex nonlinear systems.<p>Also goes into solar activity (electric, magnetic, & ion ejections) as a driver of climate change. Note that CMIP6 includes particle forcing to its model. CMIP5 & earlier versions did not include particle forcing.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/BiKfWdXXfIs" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/BiKfWdXXfIs</a>
This is a pretty decent article with a misleading headline. Dyson himself doesn’t claim to be the representative of any counter-movement, he simply raises some (admittedly interesting) questions. I don’t know enough about climate science to verify his claims, but pointing out that more people die from the cold than heatwaves (and thus warming will result in less deaths) was something that I hadn’t considered. That’s assuming his data is correct, of course.
Dyson (re Oak Ridge experiments): <i>So if you change the carbon dioxide drastically by a factor of two, the whole behavior of the plant is different. Anyway, that’s so typical of the things they ignore.</i><p>'Different'. 'Ignore'. Not Dyson's best day. Oak Ridge was hardly a climate lab. Many studies have followed. This two year-old SA article, <i>Ask the Experts: Does Rising CO2 Benefit Plants?</i> [0]starts with this summary: "Climate change’s negative effects on plants will likely outweigh any gains from elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide levels"<p>[0] <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-does-rising-co2-benefit-plants1/" rel="nofollow">https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-d...</a>
It was strange to see on reddit that his death was celebrated as another climate change denier gone. I mean it never ouccured me people don't respect him or anything. Maybe I'm just too naive.
>Dyson believes we can just do some genetic engineering to create a new species of super-tree that can suck up the excess.<p>You can just stop reading right there. Not only do we not have the ability to do that, even if we had such a tree, we would destroy the biosphere by cutting down all the world's trees to replace them with our magical carbon capture trees.
Climate change is a red herring, air pollution is a clear and present danger. India and China have ignored this in the past and now they are making some efforts to correct course because people are dying from it.
> I have been to Greenland a year ago and saw it for myself. And that’s where the warming is most extreme. And it’s spectacular, no doubt about it. And glaciers are shrinking and so on.<p>> But, there are all sorts of things that are not said, which decreases my feeling of alarm. First of all, the people in Greenland love it. They tell you it’s made their lives a lot easier. They hope it continues. I am not saying none of these consequences are happening. I am just questioning whether they are harmful.<p>His arguments on the topic are bizarrely anecdotal and unscientific. He suggests that the happiness of locals over the past few years of warming is sufficient reason to doubt that it could get worse for Greenland in the future? Making dramatic changes to human environments is not good, people react poorly and things like resource wars can start / have started.<p>Super weird to see such anecdotal experiences extrapolated to "locals love it, so what's the problem?" while dismissing decades of intensive scientific research (not even including modals) that suggest a global chaotic event is happening presently.<p>Also, this:<p>> There’s been a very strong warming, in fact, ever since the Little Ice Age, which was most intense in the 17th century. That certainly was not due to human activity.<p>What does this mean? I went to wikipedia <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age</a> and it lists multiple possible / probable causes of the little ice age that are directly human-related. He dismisses yet another field of scientific research as "certainly not due to human activity" without any evidence to back that up. He makes stuff up, dismisses decades of real science, and claims that major problems aren't real simply because local people don't understand large-scale chaotic events are are 'happy' with warming local climates for now. Bizarre.