[pavlov]

Another plausible explanation is that Dyson’s generation of scientists mostly ignored climate. It was a “yin” problem when these men were looking to make their mark on a “yang” problem — new physics, thinking machines, conquest of some new domain.

Now the yin problem has revealed itself as an existential threat to the growth-centric way of life built upon the work of the great minds of the 20th century. Unsurprisingly they and their disciples are reluctant to accept this.

[TopHand]

In the mid 1980's I attended a library sale. I bought a collection of Science News magazines that covered the whole year of 1959. For those of you who don't know that was the International Geophysical Year. I don't feel like digging it out right now, but there was a short piece about a scientist who was studying the effects of carbon dioxide on the climate. I did not find a follow up article, but it does demonstrate that this has been going on a long time. Just because your old doesn't mean you haven't considered it.

[yongjik]

Yes, it's a very old problem. Greenhouse effect was first considered by Arrhenius... in 1896.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius#Greenhouse_ef...

[TopHand]

Thank you for the link. I suspected it went back further than 1959, but could not come up with a publication for it. I should have searched wikipedia. I had a great interest in the Ice Age in my youth. Most of the books I read on the subject were older than 1959. The idea that the Ice Ages were caused by the green house effect was quite prominent in most of them. They did not extrapolate it to industrial, Agriculture, and individual pollution. Though I do recall a theory I read that the Agricultural Revolution is what ended the last Ice Age.

[Fnoord]

I was taught about the problem in elementary school in The Netherlands at around the year of 1990. We had it as "theme week". Which means we had to, for example. make a collage about it. At another time (around same year) we had such about alternative energy as well ("alternatives to the status quo ie. coal").

[dirtydroog]

I can recall being taught about acid rain in Ireland in the 1980's

[pavlov]

Yes, it's been going on for a long time. And the Dysons and Feynmans of the science world didn't care, because this topic wasn't sufficiently big and axiomatic for them. That was my point.

[tanseydavid]

>> because this topic wasn't sufficiently big and axiomatic for them. That was my point.

That was your SPECULATION.

[fmajid]

I remember being a big advocate for nuclear power from the mid-1980s when I was in high school, precisely because it was the only way to fight the greenhouse effect as it was known back then.

Dyson is exhibiting a pathology common among physicists, a sort of Dunning-Kruger effect along the lines of “physics is hard, therefore everything else is easy for me”. We see it often when they dabble in social sciences, or biology, or economics. The complete opposite of intellectual humility and the scientific method.

[lonelappde]

That's not what Dunning-Kruger is.

[thedance]

That was a pretty verbose version of Ok, Boomer.

[stonogo]

There are endless ways to phrase "old people who don't know much about something still insist their opinions should be given equal weight as experts" but "ok boomer" is probably the most succinct.