Dyson Cool on Global Warming

It seems to me that global warming has become as much a hot button topic as Cuba, abortion, evolution or the Holocaust. That is to say, there are people on both sides with apparently deep convictions who make claims that strongly contradict each other. I counted myself on the side of believing that global warming was real and an apparent and compelling danger, that is to say until I read this past weekend's NY Times Magazine article on Freeman Dyson.

I have always had a lot of respect for this venerated icon of the scientific intelligentsia. I have put him up there with other greats such as Richard Feynman and Bucky Fuller. Even his daughter, Esther, is a well known and respected intellectual. So, when this article told his take on global warming, it gave me pause to reconsider my opinion about it.

You can read the article for yourself but here is my short take away from it. This is in my own words and not a reflection on the thinking of Freeman Dyson. Global warming has become politicized to the point where there is very little good science behind it. Global warming has become for the liberals what terrorism is for the conservatives, that is to say a rallying cry and red herring for distracting public opinion away from more compelling topics that need discourse and public attention.

I'm not saying that global warming is just some liberal revisionist's wet dream. But Dyson's position does motivate me to revisit Al Gore's Inconvenient Trust with a more critical eye.

Bucky Fuller Revisited

I ran across an article in last Sunday's New York Times about everyones favorite cold war era stalwart visionary inventor, engineer, author, and architect Richard Buckminster Fuller.

I remember being quite impressed with this man's writings. While I was in college, I read his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth and Critical Path books. He introduced the concepts of synergetics and tensegrity to me through these writings. A prolific inventor and thinker, he held 28 patents and was great at reframing complex concepts in new and intriguing ways. People are verbs more than they are nouns. The universe is that "omni-interaccommodative, nonsimultaneous, and only partially overlapping, omni-intertransforming, self-regenerating scenario." To that affect, he was also prolific at coining new terms such as "livingry" and "dymaxion." I was so influenced by this man's work that I even named my startup company Dynamical Software, Inc. as a sort of reverent nod to this man.

Like almost any modern example of good journalism, the New York Times article references a recent event and presents a mild expose. The recent event is an upcoming exhibit (June 26, 2008 through September 21, 2008) of his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The expose is a debunking of his "suicide story" in which he claims that, after dropping out of college, failing at business, and becoming a heavy drinker, he seriously considered suicide. Just as he is on the precipice of that dark commitment, he receives an epiphany which causes him to devote his life to the betterment of mankind as a sort of cosmic experiment. Based on research at Stanford University and an upcoming book called "Reassessing R. Buckminster Fuller," the New York Times counter-claims this famous suicide story to be a myth created by Bucky himself. This research does assert that he did have a nervous breakdown after an extra-marital affair, with a women half his age, fell apart.