The Island of Doubt

Freeman Dyson is one of those important scientists it's impossible to ignore, even when he's dead wrong. In an interview with Salon, he says lots of silly things -- don't worry about the polar bear, religion and science are compatible, and "we have no reason to think that climate change is harmful." But you gotta love the guy anyway...

You gotta love him for two reasons. First, because he came up with the very cool idea of the Dyson sphere, a mammoth shell surrounding a star that supplies the inhabitants of the interior with the maximum amount of solar energy. Second, because he's humble enough to admit that anything he says about the future should be taken with a grain of NaCl:

"When I was a young and arrogant physicist, I tried to predict the future of physics and biology. Even a smart 22-year-old is not a reliable guide to the future of science. And the 22-year-old has become even less reliable now that he's 82."

Q. Do you think science and religion are at odds?
A. No.

Never mind that half of this country rejects biological evolution because the Old Testament begs to differ. I'd call that at odds. (ReligiousTolerance.org)

The idea that global warming is the most important problem facing the world is total nonsense and is doing a lot of harm. It distracts people's attention from much more serious problems. That's an example. It's not so much to do about science. It's really a political question.

Tell that to the couple of hundred million people now living in coastal areas who will find their homes underwater thanks to greenhouse warming already in the pipeline.

"We're going to get a metre and there's nothing we can do about it," said University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver, a lead author of the February report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Paris. "It's going to happen no matter what - the question is when." (CP, 23 Sept. 2007)

And here's an interesting quote -- not for what it says, but who's saying it:

Monday morning, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives is releasing a declaration calling climate change "the most pressing and daunting issue" today, and acknowledging the need for "aggressive" action including "absolute" emission cuts. ... Even more significant: the CEOs acknowledge a necessary part of the battle will be government intervention to raise energy prices as a means of influencing consumption. "We share the goal of slowing, stopping and reversing the growth of global greenhouse gas emissions over the shortest period of time that is reasonably achievable," the 150 CEOs announce in a declaration obtained by The Globe and Mail. (1 Oct, 2007)

In fact, the bears are doing very well.

No they aren't, say the scientists who study them, including those working for the US Geological Survey (PDF).

The whole community of climate experts is funded on the basis that it's an urgent problem. So [they] can't possibly say it's not urgent or else they'll lose their thumbs.

The whole community? Really? Then how to do explain Stephen Schwartz's lastest paper and the reaction to it? Arguing that an entire discipline's professional ethics have been co-opted by financial motives is just plain insulting -- but this is the only point on which I think Dyson goes too far.

Others might find his Panglossian faith in technology to solve all our problems even harder to swallow. For example, Dyson seems to drink from Ray Kurzweil's keg when he paints this picture:

My idea is that in 50 years, this whole problem of fossil fuels will evaporate because we'll learn how to grow trees that produce liquid fuels much more efficiently than existing trees. So we'll have an ample supply of fuel without having to dig it out of the ground. I think that's very likely to happen. Fifty years is long enough for that kind of technology to take over the world, and 50 years is short enough so that the climate won't have changed very much in the meantime.

But that doesn't bother me so much. The transhumanist idea that technology will progress fast enough to solve all our problems -- and turn us all into immortal hyperintelligent cyborgs -- is not one that I can dismiss easily. My only problem with it is that we shouldn't rely on quantum leaps in our understanding of how things work to rid of the very real threats we're already facing.

The old man, lovable as he is, should know better.