Interesting article in last weekend's NYT Magazine on Freeman Dyson. Dyson is a member of physics "greatest generation" that emerged from WWII. While he didn't invent the vacuum, he did unify several theories, hung out with Richard Feynman, and provided the scientific rationale for a Star Trek episode. The declared purpose of the article was to describe how such an eminent scientists became an outspoken climate change skeptic, but the article was mostly just an interesting biography of a notable scientist. My interpretation, based on the few snippets about Dyson's views on climate change, is that he is not objecting to much of the scientific rationale behind global warming, but rather is uncomfortable with some of the hyperbole from folks like Al Gore. I have to say, I agree. I think that the scientific basis behind climate change is very strong. There is definitely uncertainty over some of the details, for example, how ecosystems will respond and whether certain ecosystems will become sources or sinks, but the basic idea that CO2 in the atmosphere is contributing to general warming is supported by multiple lines of evidence. A much thornier issue is what to do about it? In the article, Dyson is quoted as saying that industrialization in China has been a good thing, lifting millions out of poverty but at the cost of additional CO2. While China is particularly dramatic, both in terms of the CO2 costs and the benefit to their society, you could make similar cases about any country. Many of these decisions come down to rationale considerations, for example, comparing the costs of coping with rising sea level versus the costs of reducing CO2 emissions. Science, for example, improved regional predictions of climate change impacts, could help with these calculations. However, as Dyson points out, many of the decisions are moral: is it fair for the developed world, who became the "developed world" by accessing cheap fossil fuels, to ask underdeveloped countries to sacrifice economic growth? Thornier still, when do you declare a country "developed" and ask it to pay an increased share of CO2 reductions? My point is that most of the climate change debate has little to do with science. It's up to us and the people we elect to figure out how we will respond. Our ability to make rationale and even moral decisions is not helped by unscientific appeals to emotion from the left or pseudoscientific arguments against climate change from the right.
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