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Originally Posted by Arragonis
Your list included a few non-scientists too but thanks - Dyson (a physicist) is, based on your post, entitled to question what climate science "tells us" - as are others on both sides.
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Unfortunately some scientists are as subject to wishful thinking as anyone else, especially in fields outside their specialty. Now if Dyson (or anyone else) has bothered to work through the physics of AGW, and found some glaring error that everyone else has missed, then it would be nice if he would tell us about it. But no, his reaction is just the same as the others in the denialist (accurate, descriptive term there :-)) camp. To paraphrase, "I don't want it to happen, therefore it can't possibly happen."
Now let's think a bit about the rationale for his diamond-fruiting trees as a solution to excess CO2. Can we do genetic engineering at that level? Is it even physically possible to create diamonds without extreme heat & pressure? If you replace a significant part of the plant life with inedible diamond-producing trees, what do we (and the rest of the biosphere) eat?
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Lets say I write a paper on improving car aero using "Air tabs" (see the Unicorn Corral) and you are asked to "Peer Review" it - just what exactly would you understand this to mean ? What would you do ?
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Well, if I had a car and some "air tabs", I could - in the spirit of experimental science - do some A-B-A testing to see if they worked. Or if I had a good CFD program, I could do a simulation, and compare the results of the simulation to the real-world testing...
Which brings up another interesting question: if computer simulations are a useful, and widely used, predictive tool in every field from subatomic physics to the evolution of galaxies, why do our "skeptic" friends claim they fail in the case of climate? And only in the case of climate, as they are obviously not afraid to ride in cars and airplanes designed with computer simulations, or use computers that were designed with computer simulations, or...?