The Civil Heretic - Freeman Dyson

"Where all think alike, no one thinks very much," - Walter Lippmann

This article about Freeman Dyson in the New York Times has made me question my thoughts on climate change. Dyson, a notable physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, is a a so-called "heretic" for his views on global warming - in particular that the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is not really a crisis. He believes that the models built by current climate change scientists have ignored the effect of biology to compensate for excess CO2, and that there is no ideal ecosystem.

Incidentally, this echoes the sentiment of my favorite high school teacher, who taught biology. I used to think he was sage on all topics except for global warming being a big lie. The world is bigger than us, he said. "How dare humans think that they're significant enough to change the earth."

Dyson, though, does recognize specific dangers to the environment, for example ocean acidification as a threat to marine life. His rationale for detracting from global warming is to shift attention to what he sees as more immediate problems, and his science is driven by consideration for the betterment of the human condition. Take his view on coal (granted, with the use of scrubbers to reduce the release of "real pollutants" like soot): "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." But he thinks in about 50 years, "solar energy will become cheap and abundant, and 'there are many good reasons for preferring it to coal'" (qtd. from the article).

Dyson is an individual who stands apart from the crowd, even purposefully avoids it, while also admitting that he could be "dead wrong." He reminds me of Henry David Thoreau's description of "The American Scholar" in his speech of the same title, particularly this passage:

*the American scholar

These being his* functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and he only knows the world. The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time, happy enough, if he can satisfy himself alone, that this day he has seen something truly. Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.

This attitude is embodied in Dyson's own words, when he speaks of James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute and a leader in climate change research:

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.

Here, Dyson strikes a thought expressed succinctly by Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." It's clear from the tone of the article which side of the Dyson/Hansen divide the author is empathetic towards; who is right or wrong remains to be seen. In any case, here we do not have good against evil, but rather, which good? Fortunately, Dyson and Hansen share the common goal of improving the future of humanity. Dyson's important role here has been to question what most people believe, to make them consider possibilities deemed ludicrous and dangerous by conventional wisdom.