A remarkable profile runs in this week's New York Times Magazine of the Anglo-American physicist Freeman Dyson, one of the last remaining figures of 20th-century science who inspire offshoot industries of cortex envy (after his death, expect titles like, "What Dyson Told His Roto-Rooter Repair Man") and wring every semantic drop out of the term "genius." The piece could have easily been written as a kitsch tribute to a beautiful mind that set itself the superhuman task of contemplating the cosmos and answering the question of why there's something instead of nothing. In fairness, there are a few too many subatomic metaphors for my taste, but the profile fascinates because it's about one of Dyson's own offshoot preoccupations--doubting the dire projections about global warming:

Science is not a matter of opinion; it is a question of data. Climate change is an issue for which Dyson is asking for more evidence, and leading climate scientists are replying by saying if we wait for sufficient proof to satisfy you, it may be too late. That is the position of a more moderate expert on climate change, William Chameides, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke University, who says, “I don’t think it’s time to panic,” but contends that, because of global warming, “more sea-level rise is inevitable and will displace millions; melting high-altitude glaciers will threaten the food supplies for perhaps a billion or more; and ocean acidification could undermine the food supply of another billion or so.” Dyson strongly disagrees with each of these points, and there follows, as you move back and forth between the two positions, claims and counterclaims, a dense thicket of mitigating scientific indicators that all have the timbre of truth and the ring of potential plausibility. One of Dyson’s more significant surmises is that a warming climate could be forestalling a new ice age. Is he wrong? No one can say for sure. Beyond the specific points of factual dispute, Dyson has said that it all boils down to “a deeper disagreement about values” between those who think “nature knows best” and that “any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil,” and “humanists,” like himself, who contend that protecting the existing biosphere is not as important as fighting more repugnant evils like war, poverty and unemployment.

Among Dyson's many counterpoints to the conventional wisdom is the fact that life flourished when the earth was many magnitudes of degree hotter than it is now, and so the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may not spell the kind of imminent pan-species doom that Al Gore's celebrated models do. The study of the greenhouse effect, Dyson maintains, is itself conducted in a hothouse of mutual affirmation and groupthink.

One can argue over the fanciful futurism that gives rise to Dyson's genetically engineered super-trees that process CO2 at temperature-sustainable rates. But crucial to this debate is that not only does he say that the alarmist data simply isn't there, he says that even if it were, science has a higher obligation to biology than it does to ecology. Dyson is a classical humanist who believes that the impulse for man to understand nature is rooted to his ability to alter or improve it for the immediate betterment of mankind. In the short term -- which is usually shorter than it takes to melt an iceberg -- ameliorative measures like ending poverty and lessening the daily burdens of physical toil are primary concerns.

Dyson conceives of the current Green movement as nothing short of a religion, fortified by well-endowed institutions, smitten with prophecying, and altogether disdainful of heterodoxy. This is a criticism shared by figures as politically and temperamentally diverse as Vaclav Klaus, the sitting free-marketeer president of the Czech Republic, Bjorn Lomborg, the liberal Swedish economist, Denis Dutton, the Darwinian aesthetic philosopher who edits Arts & Letters Daily, and Alexander Cockburn, the ultra-left polemicist who writes for The Nation and edits CounterPunch magazine. It's never quite accurate to claim that global warming skeptics are solidly ideologically conservative, much less stooges for Big Oil. But that hasn't stopped the more zealous crusaders from trying. Dyson himself is described here as an "Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources."

He may indeed be full of it; he'd be no scientist at all if he didn't concede the possibility. But that's precisely what distinguishes him from a chorus of Green activists who dismiss him as in over his head, misinformed, or -- what else to counter a septuagenarian with? -- senile, at least when it comes to this issue. As with all religions, they have everything to lose if they're proven wrong. Dyson simply continues onto the next hypothesis. Vindication, if it comes for either side, won't come in his or Al Gore's lifetimes. It's worth pointing out, too, that Dyson, like any serious participant in this debate, doesn't deny that the planet is heating up; he just wonders about how much and to what future effect. (This makes it disingenuous in the extreme to compare climate catastrophe skeptics to Flat Earthers or phrenologists or some other antique cultists of pseudo-science, who can be shown how they're wrong right now, in the present.)

It's certainly true that a tenured residence at the Institute for Advanced Study is no guarantee of total intellectual clarity and rigor. One of my heroes, and something of a godhead of Pure Rationality, Kurt Goedel, ended his days at the same place, a colleague and walking partner of Einstein, thinking that his refrigerator was poisoning him to death and working on the sorts of mathematical equations that start out endless. Judge for yourself whether or not Dyson's at that level. His unlikely and extraordinary career thus far testifies to the pleasure of having the last laugh:

What may trouble Dyson most about climate change are the experts. Experts are, he thinks, too often crippled by the conventional wisdom they create, leading to the belief that “they know it all.” The men he most admires tend to be what he calls “amateurs,” inventive spirits of uncredentialed brilliance like Bernhard Schmidt, an eccentric one-armed alcoholic telescope-lens designer; Milton Humason, a janitor at Mount Wilson Observatory in California whose native scientific aptitude was such that he was promoted to staff astronomer; and especially Darwin, who, Dyson says, “was really an amateur and beat the professionals at their own game.” It’s a point of pride with Dyson that in 1951 he became a member of the physics faculty at Cornell and then, two years later, moved on to the Institute for Advanced Study, where he became an influential man, a pragmatist providing solutions to the military and Congress, and also the 2000 winner of the $1 million Templeton Prize for broadening the understanding of science and religion, an award previously given to Mother Teresa and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — all without ever earning a Ph.D. Dyson may, in fact, be the ultimate outsider-insider, “the world’s most civil heretic,” as the classical composer Paul Moravec, the artistic consultant at the institute, says of him.

 

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