Freeman Dyson: More Heretics Needed, Don't Sweat the CO2

Futurist, scientist, and all-around technosocial guru Freeman doesn't think climate change is a big deal -- at least, not in the way it's usually discussed.

There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global. I am not saying that the warming does not cause problems. Obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it better. I am saying that the problems are grossly exaggerated. They take away money and attention from other problems that are more urgent and more important, such as poverty and infectious disease and public education and public health, and the preservation of living creatures on land and in the oceans, not to mention easy problems such as the timely construction of adequate dikes around the city of New Orleans.

Being Freeman Dyson, he's got a techie fix: genetically engineer plants to put more biomass into their roots, practice no-till farming that allows carbon-rich topsoil to accumulate, and -- voila! -- we can keep enough CO2 out of the atmosphere to put our minds at ease.

But the importance of topsoil aside, Dyson's a lot less certain about other things: whether sea levels are likely to rise or a new ice age arrive. In fact, the only thing he seems certain about is this:

When I listen to the public debates about climate change, I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories. Many of the basic processes of planetary ecology are poorly understood. They must be better understood before we can reach an accurate diagnosis of the present condition of our planet. When we are trying to take care of a planet, just as when we are taking care of a human patient, diseases must be diagnosed before they can be cured. We need to observe and measure what is going on in the biosphere, rather than relying on computer models.

It's a vexing position. On the one hand, Dyson says our climate and ecosystem models are too primitive to work with, yet he suggests technology be used in radical, world-changing ways that we can hardly even begin to model.

This doesn't quite hold together. But maybe that's not the point:
Dyson's an idea man, someone who leaves the messy details to others.
But if what he's saying falls outside the mainstream, even to the point of illogic, there's still a place for it; such "heresy" is the necessary opposite of overconfidence.

So it happens that the experts who talk publicly about politically contentious questions tend to speak more clearly than they think. They make confident predictions about the future, and end up believing their own predictions. Their predictions become dogmas which they do not question. The public is led to believe that the fashionable scientific dogmas are true, and it may sometimes happen that they are wrong. That is why heretics who question the dogmas are needed.

I'm glad Freeman Dyson is around to say these things. And he's right about the importance of informed contrarianism. But -- as Dyson also recounts in his essay -- he also told a young Francis Crick to stick with physics, not biology. Even heretics can be wrong, too.

Heretical Thoughts About Science and Society [Edge]

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