Legendary theorist and and scientist, Freeman Dysan, has recieved a stream of vitriol in his inbox ever since outing himself as a Global Warming Sceptic, according to the New York Times.
He does not hide his scorn for Al Gore, suggesting he should use his influence to solve problems that actually exist, like overfishing.
On polar bears: “The polar bears will be fine.”
On Gore’s predictions of violent Katrina-like weather: “That’s just nonsense.”
On Gore: “He certainly is a good preacher.”
Ouch.
In the article, he and his wife are reported as having a series of exchanges that show that she follows the conventional view.
“How far do you allow the oceans to rise before you say, This is no good?” she asked Dyson.
“When I see clear evidence of harm,” he said.
“Then it’s too late,” she replied. “Shouldn’t we not add to what nature’s doing?”
“The costs of what Gore tells us to do would be extremely large,” Dyson said. “By restricting CO2 you make life more expensive and hurt the poor. I’m concerned about the Chinese.”
“They’re the biggest polluters,” Imme replied.
“They’re also changing their standard of living the most, going from poor to middle class. To me that’s very precious.”
Perhaps the disagreement was due to the fact that, as Dyson said, they had been too busy to hang out much lately. While acknowledging the increase in carbon dioxide, he sees global warming as being a benign phenomenon:
Dyson agrees with the prevailing view that there are rapidly rising carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere caused by human activity. To the planet, he suggests, the rising carbon may well be a MacGuffin, a striking yet ultimately benign occurrence in what Dyson says is still “a relatively cool period in the earth’s history.” The warming, he says, is not global but local, “making cold places warmer rather than making hot places hotter.” Far from expecting any drastic harmful consequences from these increased temperatures, he says the carbon may well be salubrious — a sign that “the climate is actually improving rather than getting worse,” because carbon acts as an ideal fertilizer promoting forest growth and crop yields. “Most of the evolution of life occurred on a planet substantially warmer than it is now,” he contends, “and substantially richer in carbon dioxide.” Dyson calls ocean acidification, which many scientists say is destroying the saltwater food chain, a genuine but probably exaggerated problem. Sea levels, he says, are rising steadily, but why this is and what dangers it might portend “cannot be predicted until we know much more about its causes.”
Note that agreeing with “the prevailing view that there are rapidly rising carbon-dioxide levels” does not mean that you believe that carbon dioxide is a substantial contributor to warming (it may be the other way around), nor that warming is bad, nor that this is a particularly exceptional period of warming in the Earth’s history.
Dyson has previously written extensiely about global warming and why he is skeptical, for example in an article in the New York Review of Books (responses, and Dyson’s responses to the responses, here).
(hat tip to Tim Blair)