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For more than half a century, the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Princeton, New Jersey, on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, the United States’ most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since he came “out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,” as Mr. Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors’ letter boxes and Mr. Dyson’s own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Mr. Dyson has discovered himself variously described as “a pompous twit,” “a cesspool of misinformation” and, perhaps inevitably, “a mad scientist.”
Among Mr. Dyson’s gifts is interpretive clarity, a penetrating ability to grasp the method and significance of what many kinds of scientists do. His thoughts about how science works appear in a series of lucid, elegant books for nonspecialists that have made him a trusted arbiter of ideas ranging far beyond physics. Mr. Dyson has written more than a dozen books, including “Origins of Life” (1999), which synthesizes recent discoveries by biologists and geologists into an evaluation of the double-origin hypothesis, the possibility that life began twice; “Disturbing the Universe” (1979) tries among other things to reconcile science and humanity. “Weapons and Hope” (1984) is his meditation on the meaning and danger of nuclear weapons that won a National Book Critics Circle Award.
Mr. Dyson is convinced that our current “age of computers” will soon give way to “the age of domesticated biotechnology.” Biotech, he writes in his book, “Infinite in All Directions” (1988), “offers us the chance to imitate nature’s speed and flexibility,” and he imagines the furniture and art that people will “grow” for themselves, the pet dinosaurs they will “grow” for their children (he has six children himself), along with an idiosyncratic menagerie of genetically engineered cousins of the carbon-eating tree: termites to consume derelict automobiles, a potato capable of flourishing on the dry red surfaces of Mars, a collision-avoiding car.
Mr. Dyson is well aware that “most consider me wrong about global warming,” but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus. Whatever else he is, Mr. Dyson is a good scientist; he asks the hard questions. He could also be a lonely prophet. Or, as he acknowledges, he could be dead wrong.
It was four years ago that Mr. Dyson began publicly stating his doubts about climate change. Speaking at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, Mr. Dyson announced that “all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.”
Among those he considers true believers, Mr. Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Mr. Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James E. Hansen, the head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Mr. Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as ice caps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.”
Mr. Dyson had proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow. Then he had added the caveat that if carbon dioxide levels soared too high, they could be soothed by the mass cultivation of specially bred “carbon-eating trees,” whereupon Eric Posner, a law professor at the University of Chicago, had looked through the thick grove of honorary degrees Mr. Dyson has been awarded — there are 21 from universities like Georgetown, Princeton and Oxford — and suggested that “perhaps trees can also be designed so that they can give directions to lost hikers.”
Mr. Dyson’s son, George, a technology historian, says his father’s views have cooled friendships. Some suspect that, at age 85, a great scientist of the 20th century is no longer just far out, he is far gone — out of his beautiful mind.
But in the considered opinion of the neurologist Oliver Sacks, Mr. Dyson’s friend and fellow English expatriate, that is far from the case. “His mind is still so open and flexible,” Dr. Sacks says.
Which makes Mr. Dyson something far more formidable than just the latest peevish right-wing climate-change denier. He is a scientist whose intelligence is revered by other scientists. A mathematics prodigy who came to the United States at 23 and right away contributed seminal work to physics by unifying quantum and electrodynamic theory, he not only did pathbreaking science of his own; he also witnessed the development of modern physics, thinking alongside most of the luminous figures of the age, including Einstein, Richard Feynman and Niels Bohr.
“The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models,” Mr. Dyson said. “They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models.” Climate models, he says, take into account atmospheric motion and water levels but have no feeling for the chemistry and biology of sky, soil and trees.
Mr. Dyson agrees with the prevailing view that there are rapidly rising carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere caused by human activity. To the planet, he suggests, the rising carbon may well be an ultimately benign occurrence in what Mr. Dyson says is still “a relatively cool period in the earth’s history.” The warming, he says, is not global but local, “making cold places warmer rather than making hot places hotter.”
Far from expecting any drastic harmful consequences from these increased temperatures, he says the carbon may well be salubrious — a sign that “the climate is actually improving rather than getting worse,” because carbon acts as an ideal fertilizer, promoting forest growth and crop yields. “Most of the evolution of life occurred on a planet substantially warmer than it is now,” he contends, “and substantially richer in carbon dioxide.”
Mr. Dyson calls ocean acidification, which many scientists say is destroying the saltwater food chain, a genuine but probably exaggerated problem. Sea levels, he says, are rising steadily, but why that is and what dangers it might portend “cannot be predicted until we know much more about its causes.”
For Dr. Hansen, the dark agent of the looming environmental apocalypse is carbon dioxide contained in coal smoke. Coal, he has written, “is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet.” Dr. Hansen has referred to railroad cars transporting coal as “death trains.”
Mr. Dyson, on the other hand, told me in conversations and e-mail messages that “Jim Hansen’s crusade against coal overstates the harm carbon dioxide can do.” Coal, Mr. Dyson says, contains “real pollutants” like soot, sulfur and nitrogen oxides, “really nasty stuff that makes people sick and looks ugly.” These are “rightly considered a moral evil,” he says, but they “can be reduced to low levels by scrubbers at an affordable cost.”
Mr. Dyson has always been strongly opposed to the idea that there is any such thing as an optimal ecosystem — “life is always changing” — and he abhors the notion that men and women are something apart from nature, that “we must apologize for being human.” Humans, he says, have a duty to restructure nature for their survival.
All this may explain why the same man could write “we live on a shrinking and vulnerable planet which our lack of foresight is rapidly turning into a slum” and yet gently chide the sort of Americans who march against coal in Washington. Mr. Dyson has great affection for coal, and for one big reason: It is so inexpensive that most of the world can afford it. To Mr. Dyson, “the move of the populations of China and India from poverty to middle-class prosperity should be the great historic achievement of the century. Without coal it cannot happen.”
That said, Mr. Dyson sees coal as the interim kindling of progress. In “roughly 50 years,” he predicts, solar energy will become cheap and abundant, and “there are many good reasons for preferring it to coal.”
Climate-change specialists often speak of global warming as a matter of moral conscience. Mr. Dyson says he thinks they sound presumptuous.
“It’s always possible Hansen could turn out to be right,” he says of the climate scientist. “If what he says were obviously wrong, he wouldn’t have achieved what he has. But Hansen has turned his science into ideology. He’s a very persuasive fellow and has the air of knowing everything. He has all the credentials. I have none. I don’t have a Ph.D. He’s published hundreds of papers on climate. I haven’t.
“By the public standard, he’s qualified to talk, and I’m not. But I do because I think I’m right. I think I have a broad view of the subject, which Hansen does not. I think it’s true my career doesn’t depend on it, whereas his does. I never claim to be an expert on climate. I think it’s more a matter of judgment than knowledge.”
Reached by telephone, Dr. Hansen sounds annoyed as he says, “There are bigger fish to fry than Freeman Dyson,” who “doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” In an e-mail message, he adds that his own concern about global warming is not based only on models, and that while he respects the “open-mindedness” of Mr. Dyson, “if he is going to wander into something with major consequences for humanity and other life on the planet, then he should first do his homework — which he obviously has not done on global warming.”
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Full article and photo: http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/27/healthscience/dyson.php?page=1
