Letters to the Editor
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Details, details!
There are a lot of good postings here from different points of view. So I just wanted to refer to the recent piece in the NYT by Vaclav Havel:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/opinion/27havel.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Havel points out that there is no danger of our actually killing the planet, just that we may make it a lot less hospitable for its current inhabitants.
I think that most people today are not really aware of just how dependent our world is on burning fossil fuels, and how starkly this world differs from that of the early 19th century. Yet taken as a whole, our civilization represents a new kind of organism, one that is capable of recognizing coming problems and consciously adapting to them.
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nice interview
In fact, I think I will look for his book. As someone who works in biotech, I am very interested to read about his views.
With respect to global warming, however, which seems to be an issue he feels passionate about, I would take issue. Is he a climatologist? What kind of expertise does he have in these matters?
I know many brilliant scientists, some of whom are talented in many areas, but you usually don't find a PhD molecular biologist who is an expert at quantum physics.
Of course the issue of global warming has become a political issue, but there is a body of science that supports the concern, if I understand correctly.
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elitist & Emyth
He needs to be taken down hard so that he doesn't confuse the public.
It's been done. The guy just keeps getting up and talking again, mostly because morons who know even less than he does like what he says because it supports their political and religious agendas.
Surely someone has come up with a nice, sharply cutting label for this intellectual fallacy by now.
How about pompous twit? Dyson suffers from sophomorism. He knows just enough about a variety of subjects to say something about them without being able to say anything intelligent about them. You see a lot of this in second-year high-school students. Dyson is sophomoric by his own admission.
He's not a polymath. He's a dilettante in multiple subjects. He never earned a Ph.D. because he just doesn't have the stuff, and he's admitted that too. Any serious scientist would wipe the floor with him in a debate, which is why he refuses such debates.
For me, science is just a box of tricks, and I enjoy playing with them.
Which is true, for him. This is his way of confessing that he does not understand science. He does not even understand his own unification of three of the four forces, because his one and only 'accomplishment' amounted to fiddling with algebraic equations until he accidentally fit them together - the mathematical equivalent of working a jigsaw puzzle, and requiring no more understanding than that.
Let's ping him on just a couple of factual errors, shall we?
Most places, in fact, are better off being warmer than being colder.
Let's drop him in the Sahara and try that again, shall we?
But in fact, the bears are doing very well. The numbers of bears in the Arctic are increasing rather than decreasing. On the whole, they like it to be warm.
This is patently false. It's bizarre. They're going extinct. Polar bears are adapted to a cold climate and tolerate warm temperatures badly. A clear demonstration of Dyson's dismissal of plain facts.
the living world consisted of primitive cells and genes, which are really the same thing as viruses, traveling around exchanged from cell to cell.
Preposterous. A cell is not a virus, and neither is a gene. Neither do genes simply float around freely like gas molecules. They never have, and they don't, even when they are transferred. The guy's just talking out his ass. Send him back to freshman biology.
It's remarkable that people even listen to this guy, because he's a hack, and he knows it:
"And the 22-year-old has become even less reliable now that he's 82."
'Nuff said.
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Dyson and sunlight.
...sunlight is distributed very evenly over the globe.
Really?
Explain ice caps. Explain why the tropic are warmer than the poles.
How pathetic can you get?
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Dyson and computers.
The biggest part of the computer industry is computer games.
No, the biggest part of the computer industry is transaction processing in retail and finance.
Dyson should stick to subjects he knows something about.
No telling what that might be. The guy's a cesspool of misinformation.
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Dyson and religion.
For me, religion is much more about a community of people than about belief. It's fine literature and music. As far as I can tell, people who belong to my church don't necessarily believe anything.
That's not religion. That's claptrap. Apparently he doesn't know how to use a dictionary.
Somebody should explain what religion is to Dyson. Use very small words.
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Optimism
Surely that's the word to define Dyson. Is it unwarranted? The World Conservation Union Redlist was updated just this month. In reiterating the polar bear's Vulnerable status (the step before Endangered) they offered this: "Due to their long generation time and the current greater speed of global warming, it seems unlikely that polar bear will be able to adapt to the current warming trend in the Arctic. If climatic trends continue polar bears may become extirpated from most of their range within 100 years." Politicized? Scientists desparate for funding? Maybe. But I just can't share Dyson's optimism on this point. In suggesting that climate change has always been going on, that glaciers have always expanded and retreated, he evades the obvious: it's not just that it's happening, it's how fast it's happening.
But optimism in regards to technology in general is not entirely a bad thing; it offers an antidote to the reflexive opposition many display towards labratory solutions to our collective problems. (How we are going to feed ten billion people in 2050 without GM foods is beyond me.) And Dyson did offer up the theoretical Dyson sphere once upon a time: a system of satellites meant to capture the entire energy output of a star. He's bent his mind to the "how can we survive?" question many times. As much as his ability to "do the math" is impressive, I applaud his imagination.