“Carbon Dioxide Is Necessary and Ubiquitous”

Lawrence Solomon, in the Financial Post, writes:

The justices of the United States Supreme Court this week became the world’s most august global warming sceptics.  Not by virtue of their legal reasoning—the global warming case they decided turned on a technical legal issue—but in their surprising commentary.  Global warming is by no means a settled issue, they made clear, suggesting it would be foolhardy to assume it was.

“The court, we caution, endorses no particular view of the complicated issues related to carbon-dioxide emissions and climate change,” reads the 8-0 decision, delivered by the court’s acclaimed liberal, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The court decision noted that the Environmental Protection Agency itself had “Acknowledg[ed] that not all scientists agreed on the causes and consequences of the rise in global temperatures,” before suggesting readers consult “views opposing” the conventional wisdom.  Specifically, the justices’ recommended reading was a superb profile of Princeton’s Freeman Dyson, perhaps America’s most respected scientist, written in the New York Times Magazine, March 29, 2009.

Freeman, an unabashed skeptic, believes that carbon dioxide, rather than being harmful, is both necessary and desirable, arguing that “increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

Somewhat in the same vein, Justice Ginsburg notes carbon dioxide is necessary and ubiquitous, and thus shouldn’t be the target of indiscriminate attacks.  “After all, we each emit carbon dioxide merely by breathing,” she notes, repeating a point that Dyson couldn’t have said better himself.

See “The Civil Heretic”, by Nicholas Dawidoff, in the New York Times Magazine:

Dyson is well aware that “most consider me wrong about global warming.”  That educated Americans tend to agree with the conclusion about global warming reached earlier this month at the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen (“inaction is inexcusable”) only increases Dyson’s resistance.  Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus.  The Nobel physics laureate Steven Weinberg admires Dyson’s physics—he says he thinks the Nobel committee fleeced him by not awarding his work on quantum electrodynamics with the prize—but Weinberg parts ways with his sensibility: “I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice.”

Dyson says he doesn’t want his legacy to be defined by climate change, but his dissension from the orthodoxy of global warming is significant because of his stature and his devotion to the integrity of science.  Dyson has said he believes that the truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won’t come to pass.  In Infinite in All Directions, he writes that nature’s laws “make the universe as interesting as possible.”  This also happens to be a fine description of Dyson’s own relationship to science.  In the words of Avishai Margalit, a philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study, “He’s a consistent reminder of another possibility.”  When Dyson joins the public conversation about climate change by expressing concern about the “enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories,” these reservations come from a place of experience.  Whatever else he is, Dyson is the good scientist; he asks the hard questions.  He could also be a lonely prophet. Or, as he acknowledges, he could be dead wrong. 

It was four years ago that Dyson began publicly stating his doubts about climate change.  Speaking at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, Dyson announced that “all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.”  Since then he has only heated up his misgivings, declaring in a 2007 interview with Salon.com that “the fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn’t scare me at all” and writing in an essay for The New York Review of Books, the left-leaning publication that is to gravitas what the Beagle was to Darwin, that climate change has become an “obsession”—the primary article of faith for “a worldwide secular religion” known as environmentalism.  Among those he considers true believers, Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.”  Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.”  [...]

For Hansen, the dark agent of the looming environmental apocalypse is carbon dioxide contained in coal smoke.  Coal, he has written, “is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet.”  Hansen has referred to railroad cars transporting coal as “death trains.”  Dyson, on the other hand, told me in conversations and e-mail messages that “Jim Hansen’s crusade against coal overstates the harm carbon dioxide can do.”  Dyson well remembers the lethal black London coal fog of his youth when, after a day of visiting the city, he would return to his hometown of Winchester with his white shirt collar turned black.  Coal, Dyson says, contains “real pollutants” like soot, sulphur and nitrogen oxides, “really nasty stuff that makes people sick and looks ugly.”  These are “rightly considered a moral evil,” he says, but they “can be reduced to low levels by scrubbers at an affordable cost.”  He says Hansen “exploits” the toxic elements of burning coal as a way of condemning the carbon dioxide it releases, “which cannot be reduced at an affordable cost, but does not do any substantial harm.”  [...]

Dyson says it’s only principle that leads him to question global warming: “According to the global-warming people, I say what I say because I’m paid by the oil industry.  Of course I’m not, but that’s part of their rhetoric.  If you doubt it, you’re a bad person, a tool of the oil or coal industry.”  Global warming, he added, “has become a party line.”