Big Think 
Freeman Dyson: Climate Change Predictions Are “Absurd”
New videos DAILY: https://bigth.ink/youtube
Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos: https://bigth.ink/Edge
———————————————————————————-
“We don’t only have to worry about warming,” the physicist argues. “It could very well be the climate gets colder. Nobody knows”—and we waste time arguing when we should be preparing.
———————————————————————————-
Freeman J. Dyson:
Freeman J. Dyson is Professor Emeritus of Mathematical Physics and Astrophysics in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He has taught as a professor at the Institute since 1953, prior to which he was a professor for two years at Cornell University. His work on quantum electrodynamics marked an epoch in physics, with the techniques he used in this domain forming the foundation for most modern theoretical work in elementary particle physics and the quantum many-body problem. He is also celebrated as an author on science and related topics; his books include “Disturbing the Universe” (1966), “Weapons and Hope” (1984), “The Scientist as Rebel” (2006), and “A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe” (2007).
———————————————————————————-
TRANSCRIPT:
Question: How do you currently rate the likelihood of climate catastrophe?
Freeman Dyson: Well that’s a big subject, of course, and I mean I don’t like the word catastrophe. I don’t think there is any catastrophe there, but certainly the climate is changing and that’s important. It’s always been changing. There has never been a time when the climate stayed put for any length of time, and so I would say all the evidence we have is that we’re having some effect on the climate. It’s not clear whether it’s good or bad. It’s not clear whether it’s going to become a catastrophe or not and as far as I’m concerned it’s very foolish to do anything spectacular to… What we should be doing is dealing with the problems in detail. I mean the first thing is we should build dikes around New Orleans, and I mean there are simple practical things we can do which really would help, like building dikes around cities which are exposed to hurricanes or tsunamis and so these kind of practical measures could be enormously helpful. I mean we’ve seen just in the last few months, we’ve seen two big earthquakes, one in Haiti and one in Chile, and what we’ve seen is that the earthquake in Chile was much larger, but the damage actually was smaller, the reason being that Chileans had taken more trouble to build buildings that would resist earthquakes and so you can… it actually helps enormously to strengthen your buildings. Of course I mean Chile has the advantage of being a richer country to start with, but it’s a dramatic proof of what you can do. You can actually take a natural catastrophe and reduce the damage by a factor of 100 or so just by quite simple measures; just by having good building codes and the same is true of climate. There are all sorts of things we can do in a practical way. It’s not — we don’t only have to worry about warming. We also have to worry about cooling, and it could very well be the climate gets colder. Nobody knows, and there are many things we should be doing to prepare for that and they’re not all that expensive, but what I think is absurd, what I disagree with very strongly, is the idea that climate is predictable, that we can sort of do things 100 years in advance knowing what is going to happen. That is just not… That is just not the way it is.
Recorded March 5th, 2010
Interviewed by Austin Allen
source
About The Author
Don't think for one second that both sides aren't controlled by the same people. Climate change believer group and denier group. Both controlled. Middle ground will be the result. Synthesis. This guy is part of the middle ground. That connection between his finger tips he keeps doing alone shows this.
Such a superficial interview lacking in facts and arguments. It´s simply saying things that one could hear in any talk show or bar. Like it or not, this video doesn´t bring any additional content to the debate.
Eleven years ago. And they are still promoting the lies. We nothing more than a fart in the wind
You just want to emitt fossil fuels with a clean consience, I dont think climate deniers believe their own lies, is earth flat to??
BT should take down this clip
The problem with these conservative predictions of “it’s not clear” as he says but what if he’s wrong? Oops, sorry the planet is dying now I guess I was wrong, we should’ve done something. The stupidity of this argument is that you cannot go back once the damage is done we’re dead as a species. Look at the conservative study by Exxon from the 1970s, which predicted everything but they buried the study, NASA study, the Koch brothers oil billionaire private study that backfired on them. As Einstein said, “two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity.”
I literally remember th entering ice age hoax.. and huge holes In the ozone…and oceans rising taking out great Seth's of shore lines and cities… lol
He looks like the asylum guy from beauty and the beast 😆
Humans are not changing Earth's climate, period!
Google “context” always seems to be from liberal art majors with delusions of human control and who hate liberty
Absolutely right..
Little can be done about climate change earthquakes etc BUT PREVENTION is still the best.
Just look at Japan and Iran and Indonesia.
Japan introduced many strict building codes and the result fewer damages and lives lost
In both Iran and Indonesia after each quake big damage and lives lost.
Sadly those governments do very lttle except stuff their pockets..
It should be noted that Freeman Dyson is commenting on a topic that is severely outside of any area of expertise he has. He never did any published research on this topic and thus should never be taken as an authority on climate change. He’s is the embodiment of the appeal to authority fallacy.
This has aged well. It barely snowed in Southern Ontario this year. Shoveled the drive way once! Starting to see the changes yearly. Different bugs every year, strange early growth. Bulbs should NOT be sprouting in February! Just use your eyes people.
Who is this freemasonic bs'er
Try to explain the fact that climate changes to a climate alarmist and they will get confused and claim that you are proving their point that the climate is changing. A bunch of chicken littles and that is insulting to chickens who truly are bird brains.
You can't predict the weather. But do you know why?
1. All chaotic systems are unpredictable.
2. The climate is a chaotic system.
3. Therefore, the climate is unpredictable.
The term "chaos" is commonly used to refer to disorder or confusion. In science, chaos is a conceptual paradox that has a precise mathematical meaning:
A chaotic system is a deterministic system that is difficult to predict.
A deterministic system is defined as one whose state at one time completely determines its state for all future times. Therefore, we normally think that a deterministic system is entirely predictable, and this is mathematically true. So what does it mean for a chaotic system to be difficult to predict?
The real question is how accurate a prediction can be made for what length of time given a certain amount of information. A deterministic system can be challenging to predict because what happens in the future can be very sensitive to the system's current state. Because it is impossible to measure the system's current state with complete precision, it may be impossible to predict the system's distant future. This property, called "sensitivity to initial conditions," has been popularly called the Butterfly Effect, based on the idea that a large storm in New England may be due to a butterfly flutter in China. In a chaotic system, which displays sensitivity to initial conditions, a small change in the conditions at one point (say, a butterfly's effect on air currents) could drastically change the course of events later on, even to the point of creating a storm.
A technical way to describe this sensitivity is as the divergence of trajectories of the system. Over time, a system starting from one state becomes less and less similar (farther and farther away in state space) to a system that starts out in a similar but not exactly the same state. Thus, while measurements may be close, they are not exactly the same as the system's actual state. Over time, the system's actual trajectory will diverge from that predicted based on the measurements. This means that the more accurately the initial state is known, the more accurate a prediction can be. The problem is that in many practical cases, the degree of accuracy needed to make useful predictions is impossible to obtain.
The paradox of chaos challenges traditional concepts of science, which suggest that a reasonable amount of knowledge of a deterministic system should enable us to predict its behavior. For chaotic systems, as long as any uncertainty remains in the precision of our measurements, our ability to predict is quite limited.
Chaos is not the only source of unpredictability in a system's behavior. Conceptually, there are three sources of unpredictability: the influence of random noise, the effect of the environment on the system, and a lack of knowledge of the initial conditions. The third is the one considered by studies of chaos.
To better understand the impossibility of predicting the climate, watch a video of a double pendulum. That is the simplest example of chaotic behavior. Despite the fact that the system is simple and deterministic, it's behavior is unpredictable. You will understand why predicting the climate would be akin to predicting the behavior of a gazillion interacting double pendulums.
Is there a way I can make a regular payment to the climate change solution?
Simply because a person is really smart, this does not mean that he's right about everything. Einstein was wrong about quantum mechanics.
what an idiot. "could be the climate gets cooler". What has he been smoking these past 60 years of dramatic warming?
I didn't realize this channel had also jumped on the climate denier bandwagon or at least decided to act as a platform for those who do. Very sad, because otherwise, at a cursory glance at least, the videos seem to be relatively solid sci com.
DANGER AHEAD
recent article
"But what would happen if the world did suddenly stop extracting fossil fuels? And what does that mean for attempts to phase out something humanity has depended on for centuries?
Most everyone agrees that a sudden, abrupt halt in fossil fuel production — if, for example, the United States and Saudi Arabia and every other large producer shut down their oil wells all at the same time — would be catastrophic.
Within a few weeks, a lack of oil — still the major fuel used for trucking and shipping goods worldwide — would impede deliveries of food and other essential goods.
“Even if I could walk to the grocery store, there’d be no food there,” Gross explained. Governments would probably work to curb demand and ration remaining stores of fossil fuels — but even those reserves would last for only so long. The United States’ strategic petroleum reserve, for example, currently holds around 347 million barrels of oil; that would last the country just 17 days at current levels of use. It would last the world just 3½ days.
————————————————————————————————————————————–
Other nations are planting fast growing trees as trees convert carbon dioxide to oxygen and it's working. The Ukraine energy deals Hunter made were a grab and take of what Russia depended on for energy. They invaded the Ukraine just 6 weeks after Biden's Executive Order on what? ENERGY and with the US stopping all fossil fuels the Executive Order states we will PURCHASE from "international partners" Those deals Hunter was making. See why Biden is making us pay for his stupid war for them to control resources and get even richer from human suffering, just not right. Blinken said we will suffer "of course" because all transition is hard (from fossil fuels) and there's no going back. Problem? Anyone see the massive number of new energy plants, windmills, etc being built replacing what we need? NO. Anyone watch back when Biden announced his energy plan? How happy he was about electric vehicles (Hunter has 10% in the EV battery trade) and a member in the audience was able to ask one question before Biden was pulled off stage. "How will we run all the appliances in our houses without electricity?" Biden said "Just plug them into your new electric vehicles!"
What a selfless, thoughtful man with a show of realism that puts the climate change ringmasters to shame- the landfill sites of the world are full of their waste climate predictions based on their scientific ‘concensus’- in light of that why aren’t they campaigning (advising) for nuclear power🤔
One of THE greatest minds of the 20th Century!
At 19 he was using Maths for the RAF to predict where German bombing raids would target mext.
Then in WW2 he worked at Los Alamos, then on the H-Bomb … meanwhile making important contributions to Quantum Theory!
Died aged 99!
Clouds are main climate controller. He's lost it. Earthquakes are not climate related. Theory is CO2 causes warming. If climate cools theory is wrong. IPCC predictions are false.
Thank goodness Professor Dyson brings in some of was erstwhile common sense
More like small think. What a disgrace for this channel to have put this video up. So many deniers in the comments, so many people who dont get science and who are so disconnected from reality even now. It is scary and astounding. It has already started. People and animals are suffering and dying. And every denier here, this video, they r all part of it
I'm inclined to if not trust, the listen to the argument here because he openly says We don't know for sure! and leaves space for scientific inquiry, while proposing solutions to very real and palpable issues, which do demonstratively work.
My wife and I fight about Climate Change all the time. She is for the dire predictions. I tell her honestly that I hope she is right, because of the money that is going into it. We had a prediction here in S E Queensland before Christmas,24, saying we were going into a dry spell. Well it hasn't stopped raining. She fires up if I dare to mention it.
Looking back to 12 yrs ago the absurdity of the blabber coming out of dysons mouth is mind blowing. The world is literally bursting into flames and some peoples solution is denial…
Now 12 years old, and more poor aging of climate science denial. Warmest year on record was 2023, ocean temp records being set constantly. Place your bets to lose another round, science deniers.
This whole climate change crisis is a hoax and a money grab
Love how most retards believe climate change so glad i drive a car hahaah
It’s not clear to him because money. It didn’t go with him either.
Climate models and the current IPA report seems to have left out the known data from the 1930s where there were years of extreme drought.
This was 12 years ago, climate change research is so vast now
This all about taxes for governments. This just another way to steal more away from citizens around the world.
One of the big problems with climate change predictions are absurd 'experts' like Freeman Dyson. I'm 84 and Dyson appears even older than me so we'll both be gone soon. We'll miss the terrible starvation and death caused by RAPID climate change. Small, stop-gap measures at this point are meaningless. We need BIG solutions supported by governments around the world.
13 straight record months for earth. Predictions about earth warmer each decade are 100% correct. I bet all scientists who are not peer reviewed in this topic (that includes Dyson) that the 2020s will be warmer than the 2010s, which were warmer than the 2000s, which were warmer than the 1990s, which…
Its my first time watching freeman dyson . He looks like an ELF . 😱😱
Isn’t it clearly to see how undercomplex and dumbed down he describes climate change. It shows that he didn’t really look a bit more deeply into it and jumped to simple conclusions. Over 90% of scientists in this field agree that climate change is serious threat to the global ecosystem. Not everything is absolutely clear but it is a high risk situation. (And not just a buch more hurricanes and tsunamis.) If we agree that scientific system works not too bad, we can trust the results of the scientific analysis. And to Feeman Dyson as a scientist: look up „Noble disease“. Search for climate change videos of Sabine Hosenfelder for a well balanced discussion on the topic. Start with the video „Should I be terrified of climate change?“ where she also criticizes fear mongering btw.
I don't think that many people know who Freeman Dyson was. If they knew, his views would be in the millions. "This formulation of QED was pioneered by Freeman Dyson, Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, three of whom won the Nobel Prize for their work". Three scientists came up with the same theory of QED, using totally different methods. Dyson was the brilliant mathematician who was able to show how all three came to the same conclusion using disparate means and methods. A brilliant achievement, for which he did not receive the Nobel Prize. He was also a companion and best friend of Feynman. His thoughts and achievements are recorded on several dozen short formats on YouTube.
The UN statement is complete bullshit.
The interesting mistake he made is he said it may get cooler. The one thing we know with certainty is that we will go into another glacial advance in the future.
HOW DARE YOU!<<<<<<<greta, the brat Thurnberg.😅😅😅😅😅
The evidence is clear and mountainous, humans are responsible for sending Earth into a much faster warming trend. Those thar deny are only ignorant or bought. It doesn't take a scientist to see that.
I have no patience for idiots either.
Cooling and inpredictability … this is just.. No
Hmm…Let's say there were 1500+ nuclear tests on this planet, yes a wopping 1500 bombs that have exploded! That is so much power and radiation and sure it has effect, people are dying of many deceases, but to say it has become a huge problem, is a overstatement. Knowing that the sun is constantly shining on earth and the radiation from the sun is casting here the ionisation is it a problem? no…Even the lie from the 90's which was the broken Ozone shpere is such a LIE, just like the climate change now and the '' tiping point''' It is all a big LIE!! Making people affriad is what works to lead them in a certain direction or to let them stay on the coarse they are on that is why it is being used. The earth is capible of many destructive influences from the universe AND from earth. But it will recover always for God has said, this earth will continue for ever, the crops will grow and the weather will change during the year that is what God has decided for this earth. So all you money you are now putting into the climate issue is wasted money….The day of judgement is coming and within two decades the big invasion will begin! And it will last ONE day, that is the power of GOD. ONE DAY!!!