heavyweight sparring on climate change

Last week, lauded physicist Freeman Dyson published a provocative essay called Heretical Thoughts about Science and Society that challenged “all the fuss about global warming”:

My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

This week, former Science and Nature editor, Alun Anderson hits back with a rebuttal:

First and foremost, of course, we would like to know what to expect. And here I would agree, just for a moment, with half of another of Dyson’s heresies. Our models of climate change do not entirely capture “the real world we live in”. We do know that temperatures are rising faster in the Arctic than almost any other place and that the extent of the sea ice is shrinking with dramatic speed but our models aren’t accurate. That said, Dyson is totally wrong with the second half of his criticism, that the climate experts end up believing their own imperfect models when they should “put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening”.

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