Heretical thoughts about science and society (2005)
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Re: Heretical thoughts about science and society (2005)
#2Related:
Heretical Thoughts About Science and Society (2005) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34092635 - Dec 2022 (3 comments)
Heretical Thoughts About Science and Society, by Freeman Dyson - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43793 - Aug 2007 (9 comments)
Re: Heretical thoughts about science and society (2005)
#3Not a compelling article especially one from 2005. I think history has already proven Dyson wrong.
Sean Carroll has had numerous excellent podcasts on this subject. As I understand, in general, these climate models have actually underpredicted the rate of changes we have seen so far.
Re: Heretical thoughts about science and society (2005)
#4Smart analysis that aged like milk, given the subsequent 17 years of record heat trends. This is a good example of the dangers of being too in the weeds of complexity to not see the big simple picture, the sometimes blinding bias of contrarianism, and how methods of science alone are insufficient guides to solving all of society's problems.
One might come to a much clearer conclusion about carbon by looking at the incentives of societies to consume carbon, our struggles with collective decision making, and our very strong tendency to create tragedies of the commons.
If you follow the 'needs more research' approach and wait until all the data are in (as Freeman Dyson essentially proposes here), you may be way too late to address and overcome the problem. In other words, science is a method of finding certainty, but often we find ourselves in situations that demand acting from positions of uncertainty, where we have to rely more on judgment calls based our understanding of human behavior.
Great points about the need for heretical science tho! Sometimes heretics are right, just not in this case.
Re: Heretical thoughts about science and society (2005)
#5 To stop the carbon in the atmosphere from increasing, we only need to grow the biomass in the soil by a hundredth of an inch per year. Good topsoil contains about ten percent biomass, [Schlesinger, 1977], so a hundredth of an inch of biomass growth means about a tenth of an inch of topsoil.
Re: Heretical thoughts about science and society (2005)
#6In the opening paragraphs, he confused weather models and climate models. They’re not even remotely the same codes! One uses fluid dynamics, the other has inputs such as the precise absorption spectrum of isotopic variants of ionised molecules at low pressures!
We can’t predict where the bubbles will form in a boiling pot of water, but we can predict that it’ll boil at 100 degrees C.
Re: Heretical thoughts about science and society (2005)
#7Smart analysis that aged like milk, given the subsequent 17 years of record heat trends. This is a good example of the dangers of being too in the weeds of complexity to not see the big simple picture, the sometimes blinding bias of contrarianism, and how methods of science alone are insufficient guides to solving all of society's problems. One might come to a much clearer conclusion about carbon by looking at the in…
Another factor I think that plays in here is a bit of hubris about who has access to truth. Someone of Freeman Dyson's caliber is used to being the one who can see further into complexity to find truth. When someone has these talents, they tend to see all problems as problems they have special access to. If they see a lot of people without their abilities believing a thing with a lot of complexity, this creates the conditions to flip to being contrarians about that subject. I believe this kind of reactive contrarianism has happened in climate science quite a bit.
The bias here is that highly talented people sometimes cannot fathom that the ability to see some truths is broadly distributed. But in the case of human behavior, our ability to see truth is broadly distributed, much more so than the science someone like Freeman Dyson can do. And if that human behavior factor is the key variable, then the broad consensus can be correct.
Re: Heretical thoughts about science and society (2005)
#8Not a compelling article especially one from 2005. I think history has already proven Dyson wrong. Sean Carroll has had numerous excellent podcasts on this subject. As I understand, in general, these climate models have actually underpredicted the rate of changes we have seen so far.
There has been significant political and even social pressure on researchers to hedge their bets and predict the minimum value from their models.
Basically the final reports have been the “floor” — the guaranteed amount of warming expected with the most optimistic scenario and the most conservative modelling.
It turns out that the nonlinear feedbacks are nasty, perhaps worse than even the high estimates.
Re: Heretical thoughts about science and society (2005)
#9To stop the carbon in the atmosphere from increasing, we only need to grow the biomass in the soil by a hundredth of an inch per year. Good topsoil contains about ten percent biomass, [Schlesinger, 1977], so a hundredth of an inch of biomass growth means about a tenth of an inch of topsoil. Improving the atmosphere by improving the soil, a virtuous circle. We can measure global warming mitigation by tons of biomass c…
"we only" need to do that, huh?
> Good topsoil contains about ten percent biomass, [Schlesinger, 1977], so a hundredth of an inch of biomass growth means about a tenth of an inch of topsoil. Changes in farming practices such as no-till farming, avoiding the use of the plow, cause biomass to grow at least as fast as this. If we plant crops without plowing the soil, more of the biomass goes into roots which stay in the soil, and less returns to the atmosphere. If we use genetic engineering to put more biomass into roots, we can probably achieve much more rapid growth of topsoil. I conclude from this calculation that the problem of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a problem of land management, not a problem of meteorology.
What about all the land that isn't even farmed or managed?
How exactly are we supposed to accomplish this thing we "only" need to do?
Not very much later:
>To grow topsoil on a massive scale may or may not be practical, depending on the economics of farming and forestry.
Oh, so it might not be practical, without much math into whether or not it's an easy "only" or an "actually this would be far harder than other approaches" idea?
> All that we can say for sure is that this is a theoretical possibility and ought to be seriously explored.
Starting from the sweeping statements of "all we need to do" and then landing on "theoretically this is possible" is not convincing me that there's credibility here. Later we get into "maybe actually the carbon will help prevent an ice age, we don't know."
"We need further study" is not heretical; "we have time to wait" seems increasingly iffy a position; and "let me toss out some wild possible alternatives that I haven't studied myself" is more just unhelpful than heretical?
Re: Heretical thoughts about science and society (2005)
#10Smart analysis that aged like milk, given the subsequent 17 years of record heat trends. This is a good example of the dangers of being too in the weeds of complexity to not see the big simple picture, the sometimes blinding bias of contrarianism, and how methods of science alone are insufficient guides to solving all of society's problems. One might come to a much clearer conclusion about carbon by looking at the in…
I also find it interesting how he correctly recognized that the problem is not simple fluid dynamics but then made two major mistakes assuming that he correctly identified all of the complicating factors and concluding that he had a more accurate understanding than the thousands of people who’d been working in the field for decades. This is practically insulting when he just asserts that climate scientists are staying in comfortable offices without verifying their assumptions, as if there are a number of fields where people are doing fieldwork to collect things like ice core samples, measuring ocean conditions, surveying plant and animal communities, etc.
This is, of course, a notorious intellectual pitfall for both physicists and elder scientists but I think in this case it’s more a question of insufficiently vetting information. He wasn’t just wrong in some novel manner but in exactly the ways that the fossil fuel industry’s propagandists were saying in the 90s and early 2000s, down to the decoy concerns about public health and disaster relief (both of which are becoming much harder due to climate inaction). This essay seems like a good example for how susceptible smart people can be to the message that they’re savvy enough to see something most people missed.