Dyson

The NYT magazine covers Freeman Dyson in a multi-page article by Nicholas Dawidoff: "The Civil Heretic." Sadly the elderly Dyson is now more famous for his current climate change contrarianism than his more interesting earlier work, or even the fun but speculative stuff like Dyson Spheres or Project Orion.

This prompted Andrew Revkin to produce a somewhat more nuanced discussion of Dyson on his Dot Earth blog: "Some Inconvenient Thinkers", although it annoyingly stops short of actually discussing why Dyson is wrong, and instead pretty falls into modern journalism's classic statement of false objectivity: "He might be right, he might be wrong. What do you think?"

Climate Progress (who really seem to dislike Revkin despite the fact he's generally does a decent job of covering science and climate change - he's certainly infinitely better than Tierney) then produced a rather uncivil blog article pointing out how Dyson has been far from civil when discussing actual qualified climate scientists. Although uncivil, it at least has some discussion of why Dyson's beliefs are simply absurd, and links to Only In It For The Gold's calmer explanation of Dyson's mistakes.

Ultimately I think Dyson's contrarianism is not as harmful as many of the other climate change contrarians, largely because Dyson's rejection of climate change are not driven by political or economic biases, but rather a mistaken belief in his scientific ability. Its somewhat sad to see once great scientists go off the deep end when they get old. Some, like Fred Hoyle, go off the deep end even before they get old.