Freeman Dyson is a well known, and sometimes highly controversial, scientist, and a long time critic of global warming studies, although he agrees on its anthropogenic origin. His informed and critical review of two books, one of which is in fact a conference proceedings, have a lot of information for the “informed layman” You can agree or not with Dyson´s opinions, I personally disagree with some of them, but there are always challenging. A scientific book review in a general media must be scientific journalism, and this story is good one.

It's not a story, it's a book review. I've been noticing increasingly that "articles" selected for review are actually features shilling for something that someone is trying to sell. Quit that!

The economic model seems a bit simplistic from reading the review. The review should be considered worthless without a pier review by both environmental scientists and economists. The article tries to reduce the question to an economic question under an assumption of basic stability, ignoring feedback acceleration, resource wars, mass extinctions, and other trivia. The final paragraphs of the review that attacks those warning of global warming as a new kind of religious nut signifies there may be more than a little bias here, and a viewpoint colored by economic interests or political doubting of global climate change.

This is an essay book review, which provides much context on the issue (and the N.Y.R.B. is definitely not in the business of promoting books!). Dyson begins with an extensive review of the issue itself, and then discusses the two books, providing more context in those evaluations. He includes extensive information from primary sources. The reader thus gains considerable knowledge from a careful reading of the article. Thus, while it is an opinion piece, it has high journalistic content and merit.

Dyson does a fine job of presenting a summary of the books in review, and eventually evaluates the arguments and posturing of the authors. Thus Dyson both presents the books' arguments and puts them in perspective. Well written and thought-provoking in its own right.

Anyone who reads Dyson's piece might also want to consider the response to his piece on RealClimate (see link below). Dyson's claim, toward the end of the review, is interesting. "Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion". Though he endorses the ethical center of the movement, the claim that environmentalism can become something like a religion is important. There's no surprise value in hearing this claim from oil-industry 'doubters', but those doubters would generally not list nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice as competing priorities, as Dyson does. His main concern seems to be to offer a reminder that there are matters of fact that need to be considered, as ... More »