LARRY ELDER: Death Threats Against Musk Once Again Shows How Much The Left Values Science
In March 2009, The New York Times wrote a lengthy piece about renowned physicist Freeman Dyson, then 85. Four years earlier, Dyson began publicly to express doubts about the global warming or “climate change” alarmism…
In March 2009, The New York Times wrote a lengthy piece about renowned physicist Freeman Dyson, then 85. Four years earlier, Dyson began publicly to express doubts about the global warming or “climate change” alarmism promoted by the likes of former Vice President Al Gore, whom Dyson disparaged as “an opportunist” engaging in “lousy science.”
About Dyson’s intellect and stature, the Times wrote: “Dyson is a scientist whose intelligence is revered by other scientists — William Press, former deputy director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and now a professor of computer science at the University of Texas, calls him ‘infinitely smart.’ Dyson — a mathematics prodigy who came to this country at 23 and right away contributed seminal work to physics by unifying quantum and electrodynamic theory — not only did path-breaking science of his own; he also witnessed the development of modern physics, thinking alongside most of the luminous figures of the age, including Einstein, Richard Feynman, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Witten, the ‘high priest of string theory’ …”
Described politically as an “Obama-loving, (George W.) Bush-loathing liberal,” Dyson immersed himself in the science of climate change, read the prominent and influential studies and watched Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”
After this deep dive, Dyson said he was coming “out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned” while acknowledging “most consider me wrong about global warming.”
About climate change alarmism, Dyson concluded: “The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models. They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models. … Most of the evolution of life occurred on a planet substantially warmer than it is now and substantially richer in carbon dioxide.”
One would think that Dyson’s observations would cause at lease some of the most ardent climate change alarmists to say, “Dyson is brilliant. What does he see that I don’t? If one of the world’s leading physicists, universally recognized as a genius, thinks climate change alarmism is nonsense and that nonscientist Al Gore is full of it, perhaps I need to rethink this?”