Ok to be fair searching for a good reference specifically in book form isn't as efficient as turning up articles and websites.
For the "models are inherently reliable" schtick (holy heck, where would be if every field of science had motivated trolls jumping out of the woodwork to decry "models"--ffs the dynamics of a single atom--let alone molecule--are still based on models that need to be calibrated and make predictions)...please have a gander at how climate models are constructed and cross-validated. A good reference is https://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models.htm. It'd be great if we could instead take a look at how much computational power and painstaking care has gone into tuning and analyzing models. One important technique is that a model must be able to reconstruct the past based on limited data. That's one useful check that they aren't just generating complete garbage, but actually model some important underlying system dynamics. I do not work on climate models but I do work on performance of computer systems and after having a look at the math and modeling that goes into climate I can confidently say that we understand climate better than we understand the performance of computer systems which we designed and built ourselves.
As for the "CO2 is incredibly beneficial to plants"...people also test this and it turns out not as much as claimed, there are other limiting factors, like Nitrogen, and oh by the way, that all assumes that they are not significantly negatively affected by climate change as well. A good reference, from actual experts, here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-d.... The truth is that nobody is seriously jazzed about more CO2 somehow increasing crop production. Which really shows how outdated and simplistic Dyson's thinking was.
titzer|5 years ago
For the "models are inherently reliable" schtick (holy heck, where would be if every field of science had motivated trolls jumping out of the woodwork to decry "models"--ffs the dynamics of a single atom--let alone molecule--are still based on models that need to be calibrated and make predictions)...please have a gander at how climate models are constructed and cross-validated. A good reference is https://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models.htm. It'd be great if we could instead take a look at how much computational power and painstaking care has gone into tuning and analyzing models. One important technique is that a model must be able to reconstruct the past based on limited data. That's one useful check that they aren't just generating complete garbage, but actually model some important underlying system dynamics. I do not work on climate models but I do work on performance of computer systems and after having a look at the math and modeling that goes into climate I can confidently say that we understand climate better than we understand the performance of computer systems which we designed and built ourselves.
As for the "CO2 is incredibly beneficial to plants"...people also test this and it turns out not as much as claimed, there are other limiting factors, like Nitrogen, and oh by the way, that all assumes that they are not significantly negatively affected by climate change as well. A good reference, from actual experts, here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-d.... The truth is that nobody is seriously jazzed about more CO2 somehow increasing crop production. Which really shows how outdated and simplistic Dyson's thinking was.