reply to public comments from Freeman Dyson expressing skepticism about climate change

No one is perfect, not even Nobel Prize winners, especially when they speak far outside their core areas of expertise. (Dyson did not share the Nobel prize with Feynmann, Schwinger and Tomonoga, but he is the only surviving creator of that great achievement, far more important than the average Nobel Prize.) 

Even Dyson's statements on the topic are literally true, they bespeak a lack of deep study of climate change, which actually is a very serious threat to human life DESPITE the gross mistakes made by many of the political spokesmen for climate change. Long ago, Western scientists rightly laughed at certain voodoo witch doctors who used moldy bread in their rituals... only to sober up when penicillin was discovered. Dyson is right about Al Gore, but if this were Dyson's core field he might look more deeply into the substantive issues themselves. 

Dyson is partly echoing what he has heard from a Princeton colleague, Happer, who testified before the Senate that all the climate models are wrong because they are not calibrated to real time-series data, and because they do not account for differences in absorption of light at different frequencies. Senator Inhofe, leader of the anti-warming movement, invited Happer as his most credible witness in that hearing. Since I was on Republican staff assigned to that committee (EPW) at the time, I looked VERY deeply into the issues, and followed up later on questions still left unanswered in the hearings or in any followups. At the time, I telephoned Professor Carl Wunsch of MIT, who appears as a prominent skeptic in the famous video attacking Gore and climate change in general, to check on Happer's claims. Wunsch agreed that many OTHER climate models violated the rules of real science, but HIS model DOES fully account for the frequency band effect, and he even says that his colleagues do not make that blunder either. His model was fitted to time-series data using the modern algorithm (theorem-based not heuristic based) which I proved decades ago, which is the foundation of the "new AI" and "deep learning." 

(If you doubt that, click on www.werbos.com/Mind.htm.) Similar stories showed up on the humidity (eta) issue. 

The one big loose end from that hearing: A Republican witness said: "You folks panic over 500 ppm, but more than half the lifetime of vertebrates on earth, it was 2000 ppm or more, and life went on as usual." But late that year, the NSF Geosciences Directorate hosted a talk by Peter Ward, whom they billed as the world's number one front line empirical expert on mass extinctions of life on earth. His evidence was crystal clear that 5-10 times in the past, H2S and consequent radiation did reach levels high enough to kill every human on earth, if humans had been alive at the time. At the most recent, large mammals did exist on earth... and all died, leading to a re-evolution from scratch. Ward's book, Under a Green Kky, admits that there is need for new research to pin down the risk -- so on my own, I did look into such questions. See www.werbos.com/Atacama.pdf (and earlier posts on this blog). 

Bottom line: 

1. YES, we urgently need new research , more efficient research better focused on the threat. But the best guess which I offer you now is unbiased, and as accurate a mean case as we now have. 

2. The key risk, that thermohaline currents may get blocked, HAS ALREADY HAPPENED. It is too late to ask whether global warming will shut down these currents (and silly to waste energy debating whose fault it is). The most important currents, the Antarctic ones, have ALREADY shut down. The best data (even now the best available from NOAA, due in part to budget cuts) suggest 40 years before the layers which bring oxygen to the Pacific get zeroed out.

3.  Fertilizer availability, not acid or cyanobacteria, looks like the main limiting factor or "second trigger" for mass production of H2S at the levels experienced in the PT event. (Much worse than the recent event I mentioned.) Runoff of fertilizer to the oceans is now much more than ever before in earth history, due to massive changes in land use already done by humans. (Labs with good assay capabilities could map out the range of fatal conditions through aquarium-level research!!) 

In the Atacama paper, I urged new investment and research not only in earth-based solar but in space based solar (which some in Dyson's family WOULD support), and in general an "all of the above" focused strategic effort to survive. I wish Trump would appoint Lowell Wood to be science advisor, to do more justice to physical engineering than Happer has, but ALSO be ready to lead new international efforts in diverse approaches to geoengineering RD&D (much less expensive than the wasteful Waxman bill would have been). Wood was good enough to be science advisor to Ed Teller after all, has LOTS of crosscutting experience, and has enough security to survive the venue. 

it's a matter of life or death.... but, Like Jim Hansen himself, I am retired... and have seen what the swamp really is.

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A bit more explanation, in response to feedback from an intelligent skeptic:

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I too have spent many years, trying to tame complex multilevel models in areas like electronic and photonic systems, energy economics, and PDE. It is tricky to predict what kind of complex behavior may come out of such a "simple" macroscopic object as the television in your living room -- but it is easy to predict what you will see on the screen after the power goes out. For the ocean currents (THC) which bring oxygen to the Pacific Ocean, the power has already gone out. There is no sign that the physical mechanism which has caused this (fresh water pouring off the Antarctic Continent)  will end any time soon. There is arguably some hope that the situation is not as desperate as it seems, but there is equally reason to worry it might be worse -- and we really urgently need to find out more precisely what that implies and what we can do about it. 

The situation in the Arctic Ocean and North Atlantic is smaller and known with less precision, but is coming on much faster, mainly because the Arctic Ocean is smaller. I have been amazed at how far "tunnel vision" and myopia go in studies of the Arctic situation. 

I used to think everyone in developed nations had a seventh grade science class, where they taught them what a convection current is. We have known for centuries that convection currents in the atmosphere are caused by heating of surface air, which then becomes less dense and rises. The great THC which bring oxygen to the oceans are also convection currents, caused by surface water near the poles becoming MORE dense when heated, and therefore sink. It wouldn't work that way, except that WATER is a strange material which under certain limited conditions becomes MORE dense when heated. We have known what those conditions are for centuries; they are a function of saltiness (salinity) and temperature. For given levels of salinity, the curves giving density as a function of temperature have been published many times over. (I found them easily on the web in past years.) The folks studying the recent sputterings of the northern, warming Gulf Stream have paid attention only to salinity gradients (what also caused the Antarctic shutdown), but when surface temperature reaches the cutoff point (about 0 degrees C at prevailing salinity), end game. It looks like it will take 40 years to reach disaster in the Pacofic, because of the deep layers with stored oxygen, but Arctic could be much much faster, and the termination of the Gulf Stream could make Trump's talk about accommodating refugees from Norway more real than expected. 

THIS IS NOT a rant trying to get around to some political motive. What I ACTUALLY care about here is whether we all live or die in the end. That's not a second priority matter!!! The moment I heard the end of Peter ward's talk at NSF, I was driven by the question: What is REALLY going on here, and what could we do about it? But clearly it would call for political, organizational and communication skills better than I have been able to marshall. I just hope one of you is better in one or more of those areas.

Good luck. We need it. 

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For the density curves of water, see: 

http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/seaice/index.html

The temperature of maximum density gets down to about zero degrees C at the prevailing salinity of North Atlantic and Arctic, as you can see from the cirve on that web page.