A good story, partly about Freeman Dyson's status as an AGW skeptic. There's also a nice video about the Orion Project (nuclear bomb-powered rockets) and Dyson's participation in it.
I've read a lot about Freeman Dyson, and watched several documentaries that he was part of. One of his children (Esther) is prominent in the software industry; I've met her several times at conferences and once (around 1995) participated in a fascinating panel discussion that included her, about the future of the Internet. We all got it wrong, but she was arguably more right than the rest of us, predicting that the most fundamental impacts of the Internet would be on communications and social interactions. Another of his children (George) is a science historian, and I've read two of his books (both quite good).
Not so fast on Dyson being a AGW skeptic. Wiki says: Dyson agrees that anthropogenic global warming exists, and has written that "[o]ne of the main causes of warming is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting from our burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal and natural gas." What he is a skeptic of is the current state of modeling.
ReplyDeleteHIs statements concerning nuclear winter are very telling as well.