Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 00:04:31 -0400 (EDT)
From: Mitch Golden
To: magazine nytimes com
Subject: Regarding Freeman Dyson

To the editor:

Your profile of Freeman Dyson captured his technical brilliance and his
"heresy" on some matters of global warming.  It is easy to miss the contrast
between the difficulty of persuading Dyson of climate science and his odd
credulousness that geoengineering projects will solve the greenhouse gas
problem.

To avoid taking action to reduce emissions, which Dyson believes will be too
expensive, he has proposed planting one quarter of the planet's arable land
with bioengineered "carbon-eating" trees, flooding the ocean with
super-phytoplankton, and/or flying giant kites to change the climate of
Antarctica (see "'The Question of Global Warming': An Exchange", The NY
Review of Books, Sept. 25, 2008, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21811 ).

That these ideas are unlikely to work as expected was recently demonstrated
in an experiment that tried the phytoplankton idea on a small scale.
Instead of capturing CO2, the phytoplankton were eaten by shrimp (see
"Hungry shrimp eat climate change experiment", New Scientist, Mar. 25, 2009,
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16842-hungry-shrimp-eat-climate-change
-experiment.html
)

Perhaps an explanation of Dyson's myopic optimism is this: Dyson came from
the great generation of scientists that solved many of the fundamental
mysteries, ended WWII, and created transistors and computers.  Most
scientists are no longer as easily persuaded that humanity can solve all its
problems with clever technology.

Dr. Mitchell Golden