climate change and scientific heresies

[jrtom]

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge220.html#anderson

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html

I personally don't have very much of an opinion about global warming. If pressed, I will assume that it's happening and if left unchecked that its consequences may be disastrous...but I haven't done anything like the kind of meta-analysis that would be necessary in order for me to have an _informed_ opinion.

(For the record, I assume it's happening at least in part because the consequences of that assumption should lead us, in large part, to take actions that I consider to be a good idea anyway, e.g., slowing our consumption of nonrenewable resources and increased efficiency in a variety of contexts.)

Anyway, these are two essays on somewhat-opposed sides of the debate. Dyson's essay is particularly interesting because he spends a fair bit of it talking about the value of scientific heretics and heresies. He may have fallen a bit in love with being a gadfly, but I think that his basic point is sound. Worth reading, and quite readable.

Comments

consensus!

[amnesiadust.livejournal.com]

My rhetoric filter has chopped out about half of Dyson's article. What remains -- the half that actually talks about ideas for doing things, and justifies them -- is interesting, but at least as sparsely justified as the people he is (rather non-constructively) criticizing.

For example, he acknowledges that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the concentrations of which are increasing, and that it needs to be managed. He then talks about retaining topsoil being the solution to all our carbon ills, and immediately afterwards comes around and says, "well, nobody really understand ecological processes". (though to his credit, he seems to say later on that he doesn't understand either.) He also says things like "opinions differ" without saying what the magnitude of that difference is. My understanding is that there is some question about whether the globe will warm 2 degrees C vs. 10 degrees C, but that there is no question about the direction of the trend, or of the minimum Badness of the Really Bad Things that will happen even if we start mitigating RIGHT NOW. Anderson touches on this: that our models are not yet sufficiently grim to capture the reality!

The role of science in directing public policy is always touchy... In a scientific sense, heresy is absolutely worthwhile. From the point of view of a scientist, I applaud Dyson's admission of our own ignorance. From the point of view of public policy, where the job is to marginalize over our ignorance and assign weights to different outcomes in the attempt to prepare, a Pascal's wager of the kind you yourself describe makes a lot of sense. The HUGE worry I have is the line of thinking that takes Dyson's "we know little about the climate" as a justification that business as usual might not be so bad. We already have abundant evidence that human activities are harmful to the planet, and regardless of our ignorance, it seems to me that the consequences of business as usual could be catastrophic, and that we can't afford to take that chance. Thus we should assign an extremely high weight to courses of actions avoiding those possibly unlikely but extremely bad outcomes (mass extinction of the biosphere) which are within our power to address... kind of like the calculus of nuclear war.

Global warming is the poster child of today's environmental movement, and in a way I think the danger needs to be exaggerated in the public discourse in order to get the entrenched interests to appreciate something like the full magnitude of the danger we all face.

(YMMV, but I hope it doesn't. :) )