I have a healthy respect for my ignorance. Everything I know is wrong. But, I don't think I'm as ignorant as many others who are proud of their knowledge. This gives me an unfair advantage sometimes, and at other times makes me a sucker for contrarian and heretical thought.

In the modern world, science and society often interact in a perverse way. We live in a technological society, and technology causes political problems. The politicians and the public expect science to provide answers to the problems. Scientific experts are paid and encouraged to provide answers. The public does not have much use for a scientist who says, “Sorry, but we don’t know”. The public prefers to listen to scientists who give confident answers to questions and make confident predictions of what will happen as a result of human activities. So it happens that the experts who talk publicly about politically contentious questions tend to speak more clearly than they think. They make confident predictions about the future, and end up believing their own predictions. Their predictions become dogmas which they do not question. The public is led to believe that the fashionable scientific dogmas are true, and it may sometimes happen that they are wrong.

Clear speech, muddled thoughts, and belief in fantasies. That's how many, many experts seem to me too. In my own field of expertise it is obvious to me, but in other fields where I lack the specific tools to debunk them it's more suspicion than certainty. I try to maintain a critical distance without overstepping my limits. It's always encouraging when I read something from someone in a better position to know that supports my intuitions.

The main subject of this piece is the problem of climate change. This is a contentious subject, involving politics and economics as well as science. The science is inextricably mixed up with politics. Everyone agrees that the climate is changing, but there are violently diverging opinions about the causes of change, about the consequences of change, and about possible remedies. I am promoting a heretical opinion, the first of three heresies that I will discuss in this piece.

My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

See, this is just how it looks to me too. They seem to have little grasp of the system as a whole, and worse, little interest. Instead they inflate their very narrow knowledge to encompass the whole, at least in their minds, and having done so fall in love with their own words. See Word for more on this problem.

To stop the carbon in the atmosphere from increasing, we only need to grow the biomass in the soil by a hundredth of an inch per year. Good topsoil contains about ten percent biomass, [Schlesinger, 1977], so a hundredth of an inch of biomass growth means about a tenth of an inch of topsoil. Changes in farming practices such as no-till farming, avoiding the use of the plow, cause biomass to grow at least as fast as this. If we plant crops without plowing the soil, more of the biomass goes into roots which stay in the soil, and less returns to the atmosphere. If we use genetic engineering to put more biomass into roots, we can probably achieve much more rapid growth of topsoil. I conclude from this calculation that the problem of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a problem of land management, not a problem of meteorology. No computer model of atmosphere and ocean can hope to predict the way we shall manage our land.

This is so sensible that I'm pinching myself. I must be dreaming. Members of the academy don't say sensible things. It may be because he is 82 years old and so no longer gives a fig what the priggish censors think since his career can't be limited by them.

I might add that we have other promising methods to draw down and sequester carbon, such as the production and use of bio-char, that would assist us in this endeavor in multiple ways, meaning that the task might be even easier - technically speaking - than Dyson asserts.

At present we do not know whether the topsoil of the United States is increasing or decreasing. Over the rest of the world, because of large-scale deforestation and erosion, the topsoil reservoir is probably decreasing. We do not know whether intelligent land-management could increase the growth of the topsoil reservoir by four billion tons of carbon per year, the amount needed to stop the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. All that we can say for sure is that this is a theoretical possibility and ought to be seriously explored.

I think we do know that the topsoil of the United States as well as the rest of the world is decreasing. We don't know exactly how much it has decreased or the exact rate at which the decrease continues, but it does not seem possible that it is increasing given that we so intensively till the soil while the wind blows and the waters flow.

Dyson's other heresies are worth reading too. It's an interesting and well written piece. He ends by spending some pixels ruminating about the nature and significance of the conflicts that make clear and open thinking so difficult for much of society.

The biosphere is the most complicated of all the things we humans have to deal with. The science of planetary ecology is still young and undeveloped. It is not surprising that honest and well-informed experts can disagree about facts. But beyond the disagreement about facts, there is another deeper disagreement about values. The disagreement about values may be described in an over-simplified way as a disagreement between naturalists and humanists. Naturalists believe that nature knows best. For them the highest value is to respect the natural order of things. Any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil. Excessive burning of fossil fuels is evil. Changing nature’s desert, either the Sahara desert or the ocean desert, into a managed ecosystem where giraffes or tunafish may flourish, is likewise evil. Nature knows best, and anything we do to improve upon Nature will only bring trouble.

The humanist ethic begins with the belief that humans are an essential part of nature. Through human minds the biosphere has acquired the capacity to steer its own evolution, and now we are in charge. Humans have the right and the duty to reconstruct nature so that humans and biosphere can both survive and prosper. For humanists, the highest value is harmonious coexistence between humans and nature. The greatest evils are poverty, underdevelopment, unemployment, disease and hunger, all the conditions that deprive people of opportunities and limit their freedoms. The humanist ethic accepts an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a small price to pay, if world-wide industrial development can alleviate the miseries of the poorer half of humanity. The humanist ethic accepts our responsibility to guide the evolution of the planet.

This is a pretty good explanation of the general conflict of values, but I see wiggle room. The naturalists are wrong - or perhaps more correctly the anti-humanist segment of the naturalist community is wrong, and can be distinguished from the rest of that community. Every living thing changes the world. Without those changes the world we cherish would not exist. We too are living things and to an extent we have not generally recognized in the past our environment is a human creation, or co-creation of humans and all other life forms. It's a joint effort - unplanned, undesigned, unanticipated and unknown, yet it is understandable, at least in principle. In some sense what the anti-humanists propose is unnatural, at least as we have previously used the word.

Naturalists and humanists can make common cause. It is only the anti-humanists that have values that are not compatible. Anti-humanists are not nature lovers, they are just human haters. Naturalists are allied with anti-humanists at this point, but it need not be so and it is in the interest of naturalists to see this. Humanists are their natural allies, and together they can develop better policies and more rational attitudes about the human condition in the natural world.