Re: [asa] Freeman Dyson on Climate Change

Alexanian, Moorad wrote:
> It often happens that one may base the physics of a process on sound physical models;

however, in order to solve such basic equations, one often makes all
sorts of

approximations. Therefore, one is never sure what the sources of the
resulting

solutions are, whether they are in the basic physics or in the
approximations

themselves. This is the case when using the Navier-Stokes equations.

Freeman Dyson is an outstanding physicist.

> Moorad
>

Thanks Moorad

As someone who would much sooner read physics than biology or geology,
as best I can tell Dyson was one of the outstanding physicists of the
mid to late 20th century in the same kind of class as the much better
known Stephen Hawkings.

Just to be clear:
I am one of those people who is willing to assign probabilities to
scientific theories. eg Newtons gravational theory as a very good
approximation at low velocities, would get a probability very close to 1
in my thinking.

Right now my acceptance that human produced greenhouse gases as being
the primary cause of global warming with results as presented by the
IPCC is in the 50% range. However as I mentioned, as best I can tell
there is a chance they could be too conservative and I assess that as
somewhere in the 10% range, thus ending with a 60% chance overall of
anthropogenic causes of global warming. But remember that the expected
return/outcome is the product of the probability and the assessed
outcome. Similar to Pascal's wager. .1 or a very bad outcome is still
bad! With those kind of probabilities and the range of bad outcomes, I
have no problem with taking remedial actions.

Dave W

For PVM to save you the effort of writing the post:
The above is such nonsense.

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Received on Tue Apr 17 10:51:33 2007