From mgolden Fri Jun  6 00:28:35 2008
Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2008 00:28:34 -0400 (EDT)
From: Mitch Golden
To: editor at nybooks dot com
Subject: Regarding "A Question of Global Warming"

To the editors:

I am sure you will receive quite a few letters in response to Freeman
Dyson's "Question of Global Warming" [NYR, June 12, 2008].  Though there are
many things I would wish to say in response, I will confine myself to a
single facet of Dyson's discussion.

Dyson claims: "In the history of science it has often happened that the
majority was wrong and refused to listen to a minority that later turned out
to be right."  This is, unfortunately, a rather misleading sentiment.

It is true that there are some historical examples of a small group of
scientists correctly persisting against a consensus that rejected their
ideas.  But in the scheme of things these examples are few and far between.
In the vast majority of cases, the vast majority turns out to be wiser than
the intractable minority.

Moreover, the few cases Dyson has in mind (Alfred Wegener and continental
drift, perhaps) are generally someone proposing a new idea that has a hard
time getting a hearing, or that needs further refinement before it can be
properly understood by the majority.

Richard Lindzen work on global warming is very far from such a case.
Lindzen's ideas have been very far from ignored - they have received
considerable scientific attention (and thanks to the search for "balance" in
the press, lots of publicity in the lay media).  Despite all this, Lindzen's
ideas have been refuted by careful scientific work, and rejected over
decades by the National Academy of Sciences and other such bodies. (Pace
Dyson's dislike of the IPCC.)

Which brings us to the question of public policy.  There are scientists
(Peter Duesberg, professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley, for
example, http://www.duesberg.com) who don't believe that AIDS is caused by a
virus.  In the spirit of "covering a wide range of views" that Dyson
appreciates in Ernesto Zedillo's book, would Dyson recommend that public
policy makers give Duesberg's view the same weight as that of the rest of
the scientific establishment when deciding what lines of research to fund to
counter the AIDS epidemic?  What will Dyson say to all the people who die
because of the misdirected resources, if, as virtually always happens, the
majority turns out to be right?


Mitch Golden