I was searching for duke university baseball” and found this your page (About Paul Courant | Au Courant). Not what i actually searched, but your post looked interesting.

I completely agree. Joe Romm may be confusing Dyson’s relative lack of academic credentials with a lack of peer recognition. In addition to his early contribution to Feynman diagrams, he actually came up with many original formulations that advanced the Standard Model of particle physics, after all.

Actually, the parts of the profile not about climate change aren’t bad.

But who is taking abiogenesis of, say, oil seriously, again? That wasn’t doing so, say, 10 years ago? I honestly don’t know of anyone.

I still don’t see why you bring up the strawman. Did I ever say global warming does not exist because the models are wrong, or that there would not be catastrophic warming because the models are wrong? As I said, you are imagining too much which is simply not there. Maybe that goes for both of us.

Dyson’s focus on the “unreliable computer models” is precisely why I say the models often confuse issues – it’s easy to attack the models and their output in part because they are so complex and in part because no one has demonstrated or formally proven that they are correct, nor even gone through formal procedures to prove the error of the estimates. What we need to focus on is what Dyson says and why, and address those issues. So models – well, forget the models – as you pointed out the GCMs are not necessary to show a (human induced) warming. Now the task is to make that clear to the public, because the honest truth is that the public hears nothing on the news but references/allusions to models and predicted catastrophes – all the scary stuff that sells news. The next step is to publicly question people like Dyson and ask him why he claims, for example, that the warming might overall be good for the planet; in asking such questions in public then people begin to see that many claims are made without support. I think it would be great sport to have such a person interviewed on TV and to have the interviewer ask such questions later on.

Of course things are never that simple; I always hear the tired recourse to “but in the 1960’s people were predicting a new ice age” – thanks to old articles which have since been shown to be erroneous. That sort of behavior does lead us to one very important issue of how people perceive science – they see it as unchanging and wrongly assume that something published and accepted in the past must somehow be true. No scientist I know sees things that way – many if not all scientists are familiar with things ranging from small oversights to huge plain wrong assertions so it may be a shock to some scientists that the public perception is like that. These are simply issues which we must address as they become known to us.

I apologise then for saying you were labelling Dyson as a climate change denier; I certainly misunderstood your post or read too much into it.

The question remains: how do we address people like Dyson, whom I don’t see to be an obviously fanatic denier, and help people actually understand issues. There is no formula to use really, some of the people who are involved and have studied the problems in detail need to think a lot about how to present information to the public and that process of thinking and refining ideas must simply go on indefinitely. If others are inspired and join in, so much the better. The realclimate website has had a “how to address a climate skeptic” list for a number of years; I do not advocate parroting from that list (which unfortunately many of my colleagues do), I see it as a suggestion on what might be expected and where some more learning may be desirable to address issues. Personally I never tire from hearing what others say; even the well known deniers out there provide a lot of insight not only into how they craft their stories and attempt to gain an audience (although I do roll my eyes a lot at the “new ice age” arguments), but they may also give some insight into their own flawed thinking and why they cling to their beliefs. If you can understand how and why people just don’t give up on something regardless of evidence there may be some hope yet of even winning them over; and even if it seems there is no hope, you still have valuable information.

Madscientist;

Claiming or implying that the warnings of climate scientists are exaggerated and can not be relied upon because their computer models are unreliable is a strawman.

That “Computer models are error prone and do not necessarily model reality” are both true, but not critical to deciding whether global warming is likely to present a significant problem.

As I stated above in my first reply to you

Such an assessment (of the validity of the greenhouse effect, reality of current global warming and likely climate sensitivity[likely amount of additional warming if CO2 continues to increase]) can and has been made by competent climate scientists without using computer models.

The primary conclusions drawn by climate scientists about global warming — including the most probable magnitude of the temperature increase for a CO2 doubling and the likely effects thereof — do not depend in any critical way upon the outputs from computer models.

Apart from the primary strawman issue, I would simply comment that I really think you need to do some reading on the subject of global warming and climate science in general because it is clear that you have a lot of misconceptions.

Spencer Wearts The Discovery Of Global warming is a good place to start (and, by the way, there is a section on GCM’s)

PS for future reference, you may want to refrain from attributing statements to people (in this case myself) that they never made or even implied.

For example, nowhere (on this blog, or elsewhere for that matter) have I vilified Dyson as a

“global warming denier”, “climate change denier”, or the latest phrase: ‘climate change “skeptic”‘ with those pejorative and suggestive quotation marks. ”

nor is it clear why you addressed the following statement to me

“You cannot lump them all together and simply vilify them as witches and heretics. Calling Dyson or even well-know actual global warming deniers names is an absolute waste of time.”

or this one, for example

So, on looking at the facts rather than screaming “climate denier”,

If you are indeed attributing these statements to me (as appears to be the case), then you either have a very vivid imagination or need reading glasses.

It should be perfectly clear to anyone reading my above posts that I never claimed or even implied that Dyson was a “climate change denier”. I commented on Dyson’s lack of expertise in climate science and his misguided focus on the “unreliable computer models”.