Eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has recently been critic with the overall emphasis on Global warming as the main problem to focus upon. His latest review for The New York Review of Books , The question of global warming, ends with some food for thought:
Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound… This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.
Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics … are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice…
Dyson is widely known in theoretical physics for Dyson’s equation, prominent in particle physics, but also in condensed matter physics. In liquid state physics this equation is closely related to the fundamental Ornstein-Zernike equation. This beautiful equation calls for its own entry (in the future).
The collaboration of Dr. Dyson and The New York Review of Books has been going on from the 80’s, with a series of articles and one compilation book, The Scientist as Rebel.
28 July, 2008 at 2:12 pm
I think this is an interesting point of view, from Bob Park’s “What’s new” of July 25, 2008:
UNCOOL: LOT OF HEAT FROM GLOBAL-WARMING DENIERS.
Suppose, I asked myself, that the deniers are right and the CO2 thing is a mistake? What will happen if the world takes the CO2 thing seriously, adopting common sense measures to counter anthropogenic warming and there never was any warming in the first place? 1) there will more non-renewable resources to leave to our progeny; 2) we will breath cleaner air and see the stars again, the way we saw them half a century ago; 3) we could stop paving over the planet, and 4) cut down on the number of
billionaires. If we’re wrong we could have a party. We could have a party either way.