Another factor I think that plays in here is a bit of hubris about who has access to truth. Someone of Freeman Dyson's caliber is used to being the one who can see further into complexity to find truth. When someone has these talents, they tend to see all problems as problems they have special access to. If they see a lot of people without their abilities believing a thing with a lot of complexity, this creates the conditions to flip to being contrarians about that subject. I believe this kind of reactive contrarianism has happened in climate science quite a bit.

The bias here is that highly talented people sometimes cannot fathom that the ability to see some truths is broadly distributed. But in the case of human behavior, our ability to see truth is broadly distributed, much more so than the science someone like Freeman Dyson can do. And if that human behavior factor is the key variable, then the broad consensus can be correct.

Yes, there is certainly an archetype of "Accomplished physicist who has ventured outside their area of expertise and is patronizing the locals with confident proclamations that `this would all be trivial if you knew math better and made these obvious simplifying assumptions`".

Occasionally a figure like that is actually correct — for example, Schrödinger bringing the concept of entropy over to biology and thereby influencing Francis Crick to search for the gene.

But many more are, to put it politely, not Schrödinger.

I also find it interesting how he correctly recognized that the problem is not simple fluid dynamics but then made two major mistakes assuming that he correctly identified all of the complicating factors and concluding that he had a more accurate understanding than the thousands of people who’d been working in the field for decades. This is practically insulting when he just asserts that climate scientists are staying in comfortable offices without verifying their assumptions, as if there are a number of fields where people are doing fieldwork to collect things like ice core samples, measuring ocean conditions, surveying plant and animal communities, etc.

This is, of course, a notorious intellectual pitfall for both physicists and elder scientists but I think in this case it’s more a question of insufficiently vetting information. He wasn’t just wrong in some novel manner but in exactly the ways that the fossil fuel industry’s propagandists were saying in the 90s and early 2000s, down to the decoy concerns about public health and disaster relief (both of which are becoming much harder due to climate inaction). This essay seems like a good example for how susceptible smart people can be to the message that they’re savvy enough to see something most people missed.

100%, it reads like 'I found a clever flaw and followed it up with an unrigorous conclusion because I was blinded by my cleverness'.

His conclusion that oh the soil can recapture carbon also reminded me of generally smart & accomplished but non-expert people online these days that lean on unrealistic tech solutions they just heard about as being an adequate mitigation for climate change. 'Oh just have ships burn bunker fuel again to put sulfur in the air', 'we can seed the clouds', 'we'll surely build technologies like carbon capture that will solve this'.

Rather than fall into the nerd snipe trap of trying to analyze these technologies and their deployment and effect, it's far easier to see it for what it really is: cope. People don't want to face up to how existentially scary and out of control things are in our climate, so they rationalize their fears away. It's understandable, but it's also not sound analysis, and can be safely dismissed as such.

I think your last point is really important. Once you accept that climate scientists are right, you start to think about all of the ways your lifestyle depends on cheap carbon emissions and the things you’ll be doing less, not to mention all of the fun ecosystem and disease implications. It’s sooooooo much easier just to hope that the multi-billion dollar campaign saying business as usual will be fine is right, because otherwise you’re pretty much saying your children won’t have a world as good as you did.

> you start to think about all of the ways your lifestyle depends on cheap carbon emissions

Been there

Done that.

Driving my car. That is it. I do need to get an electric car for taking the dog (and me) to the beech, then I am done.

* The vast majority of my food is local

* My clothes are natural fibres

* My electricity is > 80% from renewables.

The real problem is not lifestyle, it is systemic. I think it is bad form to blame people, who unlike me, have no way out of burning fossils. If we stop burning fossils, for most of us, our lives will get better, not worse.

Some very rich people will be less rich. That is the real problem

I wasn’t blaming people – it’s systemic (c.f. needing to buy a car) – but rather thinking about the inevitability of change. People like getting imported fruit in the middle of winter. We like taking airplane flights for weekend excursions. Tons of people want to retire to cheap houses next to the beach in Florida, coastal or barrier islands, etc.

Entire generations were sold on those being middle class ambitions, and we don’t have a viable path where that’s sustainable. That doesn’t mean we live in abject misery, but most of it is something which most adults were told was a sign of how much better we have it than our predecessors so it feels like failure.