Climatologists are no Einsteins, says his successor

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Paul Mulshine @ The Star Ledger:

Freeman Dyson is a physicist who has been teaching at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton since Albert Einstein was there. When Einstein died in 1955, there was an opening for the title of “most brilliant physicist on the planet.” Dyson has filled it.

So when the global-warming movement came along, a lot of people wondered why he didn’t come along with it. The reason he’s a skeptic is simple, the 89-year-old Dyson said when I phoned him.

“I think any good scientist ought to be a skeptic,” Dyson said.

Dyson came to this country from his native England at age 23 and immediately made major breakthroughs in quantum theory. After that he worked on a nuclear-powered rocket (see video below). Then in the late 1970s, he got involved with early research on climate change at the Institute for Energy Analysis in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

That research, which involved scientists from many disciplines, was based on experimentation. The scientists studied such questions as how atmospheric carbon dioxide interacts with plant life and the role of clouds in warming.

But that approach lost out to the computer-modeling approach favored by climate scientists. And that approach was flawed from the beginning, Dyson said.

“I just think they don’t understand the climate,” he said of climatologists. “Their computer models are full of fudge factors.”

A major fudge factor concerns the role of clouds. The greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide on its own is limited. To get to the apocalyptic projections trumpeted by Al Gore and company, the models have to include assumptions that CO-2 will cause clouds to form in a way that produces more warming.

“The models are extremely oversimplified,” he said. “They don’t represent the clouds in detail at all. They simply use a fudge factor to represent the clouds.”

Dyson said his skepticism about those computer models was borne out by recent reports of a study by Ed Hawkins of the University of Reading in Great Britain that showed global temperatures were flat between 2000 and 2010 — even though we humans poured record amounts of CO-2 into the atmosphere during that decade.

That was vindication for a man who was termed “a civil heretic” in a New York Times Magazine article on his contrarian views. Dyson embraces that label, with its implication that what he opposes is a religious movement. So does his fellow Princeton physicist and fellow skeptic, William Happer.

“There are people who just need a cause that’s bigger than themselves,” said Happer. “Then they can feel virtuous and say other people are not virtuous.”

To show how uncivil this crowd can get, Happer e-mailed me an article about an Australian professor who proposes — quite seriously — the death penalty for heretics such as Dyson. As did Galileo, they can get a reprieve if they recant.

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To those who believe in man made AGW it is their religion. Ever try to convince anyone their religion is false? Good luck.

C AN I go beyond there in the UNIVERSE, from a news paper from CANADA,
about that 2 billion COSMIC RAY DETECTOR of 7 tons which was sent into international space station
in 2011, has a 3foot [ 0.91 meter] magnet ring at it’s core, transmiting data to CERN a FRANCE base,
will search ANTI MATTER and DARK MATTER [I’m just reading]
the finding seeing an excess of POSITRONS [ positively charged sub atomic particles]
whose surging energies tell us they might have been created, when particles of DARK MATTER collided
and destroyed each other,
it will allow us [the scientists] whenever our current POSITRONs observation has a DARK MATTER OR
PULSAR ORIGIN.
found the footprint of could be DARK MATTER, that substance believed to hold the COSMOS together,
that DARK MATTER believe to be ONE QUATER of all the MATTER in THE UNIVERSE,
ALPHA MAGNETIC SPECTROMETER SHOW EVIDENCE of new PHYSIC PHENOMENA
THAT could be the strange unknown DARK MATTER,
I thought it could be interesting to learn,
you might tell if it has a connection with us earthling and does it come because of our influencial actions or are they THE only INFLUENCE on our EARTH, partialy ? or in full?
thank you
I did shrink the content of that newspaper so to fit here,