Perhaps this is the environmental dilemma of our day: we have lost all track of what exactly it is we are engaged in.  Is it the search for truth?  Or is it a game of smoke and mirrors designed to obfuscate a hidden social agenda?

If we alone were to ask this question, it would carry little weight in many circles.  But when one of the scientific giants of our time not only asks the unaskable, but answers it, all honest people should pause to consider his thoughts on the subject.

We speak of the respected and respectful Freeman J. Dyson, professor emeritus of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who gives his personal observations on "The Science and Politics of Climate" in a Back Page essay in the May 1999 issue of the APS News of the American Physical Society, which this year awarded him its Joseph Burton Forum Award.

Dyson begins by reflecting on the career of Syukuro Manabe, who in the 1960s was running global climate models on the supercomputer at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton.  He recounts how Manabe, "over and over again," told everybody not to believe the numbers he gave them, that they were merely aids to understanding the first rudimentary attempts to model earth's complex climate system.  But, as Dyson recounts it, "they wanted numbers, he gave them numbers, so they naturally believed the numbers," they, of course, being the politicians who recognized the power of a strong social lever when they saw one, along with the people they eventually converted to their cause.

A simple answer to a simple problem: that's the way the issue was presented to the public.  But that approach, according to Dyson, "is seriously misleading."  As he has observed things develop in the push for CO2 emission restrictions, "the public is led to believe that the carbon dioxide problem has a single cause and a single consequence," specifically, "the single cause is fossil fuel burning, the single consequence is global warming."  In reality, however, there are "multiple causes and multiple consequences," some of which, he says, "may be at least as important as global warming - increasing crop yields and growth of forests, for example."

Dyson next describes a number of research initiatives that could go a long way towards giving us the answers we need to resolve the complex global change issues that confront us, but which in some instances are actually being threatened by environmental activists.  Then he gives us the good news.  And the bad news.

The good news is that we are finally putting serious effort and money into real-world observations that "are essential if we are ever to have an accurate picture of climate."  The bad news is that "the climate models on which so much effort is expended are unreliable because they still use fudge-factors rather than physics to represent important things like evaporation and convection, clouds and rainfall."  Even "the latest and biggest climate models," according to Dyson, who is as well qualified as anyone to comment on them, have numerous "defects that make them unreliable."

In closing, Dyson states that "the bad news does not mean that climate models are worthless," nor do we mean to infer such.  They are, as he puts it, "essential tools for understanding climate," but "they are not yet adequate tools for predicting climate."  His final words succinctly and accurately sum up the issue:

"If we persevere patiently with observing the real world and improving the models, the time will come when we are able both to understand and to predict.  Until then, we must continue to warn the politicians and the public: don't believe the numbers just because they come out of a supercomputer."

Amen and amen to his wonderful sermon.  Science should always precede politics.