Freeman Dyson: Contrarian National Treasure

“According to the global-warming people, I say what I say because I’m paid by the oil industry. Of course I’m not, but that’s part of their rhetoric. If you doubt it, you’re a bad person, a tool of the oil or coal industry.” Global warming, he added, “has become a party line.”_NYT

Freeman Dyson is a physicist at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. Widely dmired for his brilliance and his modesty, the 85 year old Dyson has lately ruffled feathers among the conformist glitterati by expressing doubts about the dangers of "global warming." And so naturally, the echo chambers of climate catastrophe orthodoxy have rushed to paint the grand old scientist as a closet sell-out to the coal companies, or as a demented old fool well past his prime.

But in the considered opinion of the neurologist Oliver Sacks, Dyson’s friend and fellow English expatriate, this is far from the case. “His mind is still so open and flexible,” Sacks says. Which makes Dyson something far more formidable than just the latest peevish right-wing climate-change denier. Dyson is a scientist whose intelligence is revered by other scientists — William Press, former deputy director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and now a professor of computer science at the University of Texas, calls him “infinitely smart.” Dyson — a mathematics prodigy who came to this country at 23 and right away contributed seminal work to physics by unifying quantum and electrodynamic theory — not only did path-breaking 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, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Witten, the “high priest of string theory” whose office at the institute is just across the hall from Dyson’s.

...Among 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. 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. Dyson’s books display such masterly control of complex matters that smart young people read him and want to be scientists; older citizens finish his books and feel smart. _NYT

Dyson loves science, which is why he has no patience with James Hansen and the other computer modelers who make claims for their models far beyond the wildest reality. Smart thinkers such as Dyson understand how easy it is to "tweak" a computer model to get just the sort of result you want. He sees Hansen as a partisan and a hysteric, and sees Al Gore as the crudest of opportunists -- cashing in big, on the fad of the day.

You do not have to be a world class scientist to be skeptical of climate grifters such as Al Gore and James Hansen. And you do not have to be a complete idiot to believe in the faux consensus of the climate catastrophe orthodoxy. But it couldn't hurt. ;-)