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Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Two views on climate change at Edge.org: Dyson vs. Anderson
Over at Edge.org, John Brockman has recently published two essays representing two very different views on climate change.
Snip from the first, by Freeman Dyson, physics professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton (also known as the dad of Esther and George):
Link to Dyson's essay, HERETICAL THOUGHTS ABOUT SCIENCE AND SOCIETY.My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.
And snip from the second, by research biologist and former editor-in-chief of New Scientist Alun Anderson:
Link to Anderson's THE CHANGING ARCTIC: A RESPONSE TO FREEMAN DYSON'S "HERETICAL THOUGHTS." (image: Mr. Anderson in the arctic, shot by John McConnico)Knowing that Arctic climate models are imperfect, it would be reassuring for me, if not for the scientists, to be able to write that scientists keep making grim predictions that just that don't come true. If that were so, we could follow Dyson's line that the models aren't so good and "the fuss is exaggerated". Scarily, the truth is the other way around. The ice is melting faster than the grimmest of the scientist's predictions, and the predictions keep getting grimmer. Now we are talking about an Arctic free of ice in summer by 2040. That's a lot of melting given that, in the long, dark winter the ice covers an area greater than that of the entire United States.
posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:07:09 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments
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