Owl'd You're Up!
Verified User
Point taken.
Yeah, but our righty friends don't know that. They are hearing about "climate skeptic" Dyson, and conclude AGW and climate science are debunked. When, much closer to reality, the man is somewhat behind the times. Three decades behind in 2009, to be more exact:
Dyson: I think the difference between me and most of the experts is that I think I have a much wider view of the whole subject. I was involved in climate studies seriously about 30 years ago. That’s how I got interested. There was an outfit called the Institute for Energy Analysis at Oak Ridge. I visited Oak Ridge many times, and worked with those people, and I thought they were excellent. And the beauty of it was that it was multi-disciplinary. There were experts not just on hydrodynamics of the atmosphere, which of course is important, but also experts on vegetation, on soil, on trees, and so it was sort of half biological and half physics. And I felt that was a very good balance.
And there you got a very strong feeling for how uncertain the whole business is, that the five reservoirs of carbon all are in close contact — the atmosphere, the upper level of the ocean, the land vegetation, the topsoil, and the fossil fuels. They are all about equal in size. They all interact with each other strongly. So you can’t understand any of them unless you understand all of them. Essentially that was the conclusion. It’s a problem of very complicated ecology, and to isolate the atmosphere and the ocean just as a hydrodynamics problem makes no sense.
Thirty years ago, there was a sort of a political split between the Oak Ridge community, which included biology, and people who were doing these fluid dynamics models, which don’t include biology. They got the lion’s share of money and attention. And since then, this group of pure modeling experts has become dominant.
I got out of the field then. I didn’t like the way it was going. It left me with a bad taste.
And there you got a very strong feeling for how uncertain the whole business is, that the five reservoirs of carbon all are in close contact — the atmosphere, the upper level of the ocean, the land vegetation, the topsoil, and the fossil fuels. They are all about equal in size. They all interact with each other strongly. So you can’t understand any of them unless you understand all of them. Essentially that was the conclusion. It’s a problem of very complicated ecology, and to isolate the atmosphere and the ocean just as a hydrodynamics problem makes no sense.
Thirty years ago, there was a sort of a political split between the Oak Ridge community, which included biology, and people who were doing these fluid dynamics models, which don’t include biology. They got the lion’s share of money and attention. And since then, this group of pure modeling experts has become dominant.
I got out of the field then. I didn’t like the way it was going. It left me with a bad taste.
Now, of course, the thesis, any factor of significant size and impact needs to be included for the models to work properly, is not without merit, but I doubt that Dyson's criticism is as valid now as it has been three decades ago, since models have since undergone several generations of refining and adapting to scientific findings. Moreover, the biological side of the equation is at best inconclusive, since improved conditions in some parts are counteracted by plain devastation elsewhere, and thus biology might end up not an equal but a fairly minor, or even negative part.
Still, there's a heck of a lot of damage done, not necessarily by Dyson, but by those handing out the talking points muddling the heads of the scientifically illiterate.
