Maverick Genius

by Phillip F. Schewe

  Speaking in these terms—implanted transmitters, bandwidth, and neurology—Dyson can sound reassuringly scientific. But in his earlier NYRB piece he wrapped up his discussion, seemingly with a note of pride, by disclosing that one of his grandmothers had been a “notorious and successful faith healer.” He neglected to define what he meant by “successful” faith healing.8

  Dyson contributed a Foreword to a 2007 book called Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer. The book provides a history of ESP. Dyson is of two minds. As a scientist, he informs us, he doesn’t believe the stories in the book. As a human being, however, he wants to believe. As a scientist he would have to suspect fraud or misguided interpretations of the purported paranormal events. As a human being he finds some of the stories convincing. “My own position,” he tells us, is “that ESP is real, as the anecdotal evidence suggests, but cannot be tested with the clumsy tools of science.”9

  This is the heretical Dyson. Here and in other cases like this, in the opinion of some scientists, Dyson crosses the boundary of credulity. Has he become too much the theofictionist? Has he taken the novels of Olaf Stapledon and tales of Martian telepathy too much to heart? Others will say that by keeping an open mind, he is upholding the true spirit of science. Depending on whether or not you accept Dyson’s vision of reality as valid, he is a prophet or a crank.

  WETTER SAHARA, WARMER SIBERIA

  Is Freeman Dyson a prophet? Does he speak true? We won’t be able to decide until we see some of his visions borne out. Colonizing comets? Artificial intelligence? Origin of life? Too early to tell. Will the U.S. nuclear weapon inventory be reduced to zero? Possibly. Does extrasensory perception operate within or rather among human minds? It might take decades or centuries to answer. And that’s the trouble with prophetical orations. It can take a lot of time, a biblical amount of time, to settle the issue of truth.

  The specter of climate change approximates an end-of-days topic of seemingly biblical proportion. Dyson’s heretical view of ESP is hidden away in obscure publications. Not so his heretical view of climate change. If you didn’t know who Freeman Dyson was before, you got to know him when his face appeared on the March 29, 2009, cover of The New York Times Magazine.

  The article inside was devoted mostly to portraying Dyson as a kindly gent, still active in scientific and public affairs at the age of eighty-five, fully alert, anything but senile, beloved and respected by friends and colleagues. But in the course of the interview, climate questions were asked and climate opinions were given, and it’s as if the whole rest of the man’s career didn’t exist. Quantum science, test ban treaties, reactor engineering, tactical nukes in Vietnam, theofiction: none of that mattered. He was a climate skeptic. He wasn’t sure that the dire warnings issued by the “experts” were believable. That’s all many people knew about him.

  How could a guy with such a splendid record of achievement, of wide experience, of vast perspective, arrive at such an unexpected and unorthodox attitude about climate? How could this liberal, antinuclear, Democrat-voting, good-deed-doing crusader side with the climate weirdos? At least on this topic he had become the heresiarch, the heretic in chief.

  The profile naturally provoked letters to the editor of the Times. Dyson’s writings in The New York Review of Books provoked letters. And now that there was a blogosphere, hundreds of worked-up amateur writers could also tender their opinions. To many Dyson was courageous, to many more a fool.

  In a post-profile profile, Dyson was unapologetic. He was peeved because the Times had distorted his interest in the matter. The subject of global warming represented only a small part of his interests, he said. He didn’t want a leading role in the climate debate. That was the job for younger researchers. He would, however, not shy away from stating his views on so important an issue. As if to prove the point, he provided just the kind of juicy quote guaranteed to keep the controversy smoldering. He was glad that some developing nations had decided to become rich, even if this meant a greater embrace of fossil fuels.10 “I’m happy every time the Chinese and Indians make a strong statement about going ahead with burning coal.”11 He points to the economic resurgence of China—fueled by an immense energy expenditure—as being the “most important improvement in the human condition in the last half century.”12

  What bothered him most was what he perceived as a growing intolerance for unorthodox opinions among his scientific colleagues. Some scientists who should have maintained a rigorous standard of proof when it came to interpreting data were being led astray by charismatic figures, and then blamed others who did not join them. Dyson asserted that former vice president Al Gore—whose movie An Inconvenient Truth had been a cause célèbre the year before—was not just being alarmist but had become the chief propagandist for or the high priest of a secular religion, the religion of climate change, a belief system in which scientific facts are trumped by politics. Au contraire: some say that it is Dyson who ignores or misinterprets the facts.

  How did he end up on the wrong side, as many of his scientific friends would say, of the carbon issue? Not surprisingly, the route by which Dyson came to hold his climate views is complicated. First of all, Dyson does not believe that the climate issue is a gigantic hoax. He does not deny that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are rising and that human activity is largely to blame. He does not deny that climate is changing or that some bad consequences will follow, such as a rise in sea level and population dislocation. He does say, however, that some of the changes might be good. Warmer temperatures would, for example, extend the growing season in many places.

  His main objection to the consensus scientific view, encapsulated in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is that it rests on poor data and faulty computer models. Dyson suggests that computer simulations of climate, long-term weather, do an able job of accounting for carbon dioxide uptake in the sky and in the oceans but not in that other vast terrestrial sheath, the biosphere. We should be accurately measuring the worldwide growth of soil. Extra soil would retain extra CO2. Dyson argues that forecasts of dire climate consequences—intensified droughts, floods, sea-level rise—are not sufficiently firm to justify the large expenditures needed to slow carbon emissions by doing such things as junking coal-fired power plants.

  But couldn’t we carry out those mitigation plans anyway, even if the models aren’t quite right? Shouldn’t we be cautious on a matter of such great importance? After all, we all take out fire insurance on our homes, even though the chance of our homes burning down is small. Dyson’s answer to this objection is that undertaking an extensive and expensive program of carbon mitigation will distract society from other ills that loom larger: hunger, public health, literacy, poverty, corruption, and war. Each year millions succumb to these blights.

  In the years leading up to the New York Times piece, Dyson published numerous review articles guardedly expressing his climate views. Only when the Times piece appeared, however, did his apostasy become well known. Amid the furor that followed were many assertions that although Dyson might be smart, he wasn’t smart on this topic, and that he should mind his own business.

  This turns out to be untrue. Recall that as early as 1972 and for several summers thereafter, he worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory with colleagues such as Jack Gibbons (later President Clinton’s science advisor) on early computer climate modeling. Doubts arose in his mind even then about the efficacy of modeling and the quality of soil data. He disagreed with his Jason colleagues over the same issues. This is when he became a climate heretic. He felt that the carbon problem, as it was beginning to form in scientific circles if not yet in the larger social consciousness, had more to do with soil management than with atmospheric mitigation.

  He differed strongly enough from his Oak Ridge associates that he wrote a manifesto about his agricultural scheme.13 In a research paper in 1977 in a journal called Energy, he suggested that a hypothe
tical rise in atmospheric CO2 might be addressed by capturing it with trees or swamp plants bioengineered to grow larger roots. The roots, he said, would incorporate the CO2. This carbon would stay put in the form of new topsoil.14

  But maybe we don’t need to worry, since the extra CO2 and the rising warmth it brings might be a positive benefit. Can this be true? Can such a colossal intervention in nature be good for anyone? Dyson has been rehearsing an answer for several decades. Actually, one of his fullest treatments of the subject came very early, as a 1974 speech at an energy meeting in Madrid. He pointed to several examples of past or future environmental modification. We saw these examples in Chapter 11: a greener England, a wetter Sahara, and a warmer Siberia, and a possible doubling of the arable land on Earth.15

  Global warming, Dyson likes to point out, is not global. Warming is much more pronounced in dry places than in wet places, in cold places more than in warm places, in polar areas more than in tropical areas, at night more than during the day, at high elevations more than in lowlands, and in winter more than in summer.16 These disparities make climate change hard to pin down as being one thing, a single thing to be dreaded or corrected at great cost. How can we cure the patient if we haven’t yet diagnosed the illness?

  Vigilant scientists and engineers have learned to look for the hidden costs or unintended consequences of new technology. Dyson likes to add that there are also hidden costs of saying no to certain innovations—whether in the development of new medicines or the introduction of new crops or the deployment of new modes of transportation.

  Remaking nature is exactly what the human species has been doing since the advent of agriculture 12,000 years ago, Dyson insists. Animal husbandry, the culling of grain species, in vitro fertilization, the diversion of rivers, the burning of forests, are just a few of the large-scale human interventions. Many of the highly regarded plant and animal species in England now are nonnative. Pollution and other technological depredations are still problems in some areas, but major strides have been made in cleaning up cities and rivers. England is again a pretty good place in which to live despite many layers of artificiality.

  CARBON HUMANISM

  “First comes feeding, then morality”

  The Threepenny Opera, BERTOLT BRECHT

  But what if greenhouse warming does not result smoothly in an agricultural cornucopia in Siberia and the Sahara? And what if bioengineering and other carbon mitigation schemes aren’t up to handling the great carbon burden? Well, then we might just have to confront a great social divide, one not mentioned in the Times article.

  This is the prospective conflict between naturalists and humanists. These two communities overlap considerably, and many adherents would be reluctant to have to decide between these two worthy isms. In Dyson’s view, feeding people comes first:

  If people do not have enough to eat, we cannot expect them to put much effort into protecting the biosphere. In the long run, preservation of the biosphere will only be possible if people everywhere have a decent standard of living. The humanist ethic does not regard an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as evil, if the increase is associated with worldwide economic prosperity, and if the poorer half of humanity gets its fair share of the benefits.17

  Can it be that simple? The Chinese burn coal to make electricity, while on the other side of the Pacific, Americans would capture carbon dioxide to make dirt? Isn’t Dyson being shortsighted? By feeding those alive now by burning more coal, aren’t we choking those alive a hundred years from now? Dyson’s answer to this objection is often to say that unanticipated technological innovations and new scientific insights will rescue us from seemingly intractable problems.

  Should we count on these future innovations? Many scientists, even those who consider themselves as Dyson’s friends, say that his optimism is misplaced, and that he overestimates the ability of bioengineering to produce plants that store more carbon in their roots. One recent study published in the journal Science, for example, shows that crop yield does not necessarily go up for increased levels of CO2.18 Some critics go further and say that Dyson gets facts wrong. Computer models, they say, are much better nowadays than they were during Dyson’s summers at Oak Ridge.

  As a scientist, Dyson ought to amend his views as new information becomes available. But the heretic is not recanting. No new carbon data or improved climate models have persuaded him to change his mind. He sticks to his food-first imperative. We can try to reduce our use of fossil fuels, he says, but if the unwelcome choice lies between people starving or keeping the coal-fired generators running, then we should keep burning coal.

  This argument seems all the more contradictory for a man who has several times written and spoken about the differences between what he calls green and gray technology. Gray things include physics, factories, plutonium, and technology in general. Green things include biology, gardens, manure, and children. Dyson usually roots for green over gray. He makes sure to say that gray things are important; gray thinking has facilitated many good things, such as Newton’s laws of motion, modern medicine, fast transport, higher literacy, and more food. But in the long run green things hold a higher promise of making the world more livable.

  Dyson cannot be exactly a naturalist or humanist. Instead he tries to reconcile them, or at least enunciate the nature of their divergence:

  Naturalists believe that nature knows best. For them the highest value is to respect the natural order of things. Any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil. Excessive burning of fossil fuels is evil. Changing nature’s desert, either the Sahara desert or the ocean desert, into a managed ecosystem where giraffes or tuna fish may flourish, is likewise evil. Nature knows best, and anything we do to improve upon Nature will only bring trouble.

  And humanists?

  The humanist ethic begins with the belief that humans are an essential part of nature. Through human minds the biosphere has acquired the capacity to steer its own evolution, and now we are in charge. Humans have the right and the duty to reconstruct nature so that humans and the biosphere can both survive and prosper. For humanists, the highest value is harmonious coexistence between humans and nature. The greatest evils are poverty, underdevelopment, unemployment, disease, and hunger, all the conditions that deprive people of opportunities and limit their freedoms.… The humanist ethic accepts the responsibility to guide the evolution of the planet.19

  Does it have to be humanist or environmentalist? We’d like to say this is a false dichotomy. But then wouldn’t we too, like Dyson, be guilty of wishful thinking, hoping or expecting that technological fixes, such as wonderful alternative energy sources that allow us to cut back on the use of fossil fuel, will rescue us from having to choose between mass starvation and climate catastrophe?

  Current scientific evidence suggests Dyson is almost surely wrong about the good consequences of climate change outweighing the bad. But he is not wrong to insist that two billion Chinese and Indians should aspire to live as well as Westerners. How to accommodate these aspirations into a working model for global civilization will probably be more difficult even than reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

  One can compare Dyson’s climate dilemma to another drama. In Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play, An Enemy of the People, set in a small Norwegian town, a moralistic doctor helps to develop a system of therapeutic baths that will soon bring wealth to the citizens in the form of a lucrative tourist trade. Then the doctor discovers that the water system is polluted. He takes this news to his brother, the town’s mayor. The doctor is shocked when the mayor tells him to keep the news to himself. The doctor does not keep it to himself and instead indignantly goes to the public with his admittedly unwelcome revelation. Rather than being acclaimed for his honesty, he is shunned as a troublemaker.

  If we were recasting the climate story as the pursuit or questioning of inconvenient scientific truths, how would we assign the parts of mayor and doctor? If John Adams were to write an opera called Doctor Climate
, what part would we give to Freeman Dyson and which to Al Gore?

  Of course this is a silly comparison to make. Both Gore and Dyson seem to be honestly confronting the same set of facts. Neither of them is an enemy of the people. Many humanists and naturalists alike have respect for the accomplishments and courage of both the former vice president and the professor. But can Dyson and Gore both be right on the issue of climate change? It could be more apt to say that one of them doesn’t necessarily have to be wrong. The uncomfortable reality here is that because of the importance of this issue, something will have to happen. Long before definitive scientific facts can be delivered, legislators, businesses, and citizens will have to decide on a course of action.

  PET DINOSAURS

  If you find Dyson’s climate views discomforting, wait until you see what he says about biotechnology. Prophecy and heresy go together. Heretics diverge from orthodoxy. They are splinterers. Heretics are also prophets if, in the course of time, their vision is vindicated. Many are heretics, few prove prophets.

  Prophets look for signs of change wherever they can. In a lecture at Boston University in 2005 Freeman Dyson recalls taking his grandson to a reptile exposition in San Diego. Like a dog show or an automotive show, a variety of new reptile types, specially bred, were on display at the expo. That day, Dyson’s immediate preoccupation was escaping without having to buy his grandson a snake. But the occasion of his visit inspired a New York Review essay about the pace of biotechnology developments.

  Dyson likes to view the world in terms of doublets: theorists and experimentalists, concepts and tools, naturalists and humanists. One of his favorite dichotomies, as we have seen, is the division of technology into green and gray. Both parts of this duet are necessary. In the history of technology and science, many gray revolutions are evident. The semiconducting world of electronics and its offspring, the Internet and email, are all around us. Physics-based science and gray-based technology are still powerful.