I've so far only cherry-picked
this long article on eminent physicist Freeman Dyson, a brilliant man who happens to be at peace with global warming.
As the article's author puts it, this is "something far more formidable than just the latest peevish right-wing climate-change denier".
Most of Dyson's views seem to have already been aired in some form by others; for instance, that more carbon dioxide will fuel more plant growth, to the benefit of plant-dependent humanity.
But these opinions carry extra potency when they come from one of the world's leading physicists (or, as his critics suggest, former leading physicists).
For me, though, the article's stand-out sentence is this:
"…Dyson has said that it all boils down to 'a deeper disagreement about values' between those who think 'nature knows best' and that 'any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil', and 'humanists', like himself, who contend that protecting the existing biosphere is not as important as fighting more repugnant evils like war, poverty and unemployment."
On the surface, the global warming debate is about science.
What fuels the debate isn't zeal for scientific logic, though.
It's complex and intangible human things like identity, attachment to ideas, and pride.
That's what gives Freeman Dyson's thoughts a special interest: he's old enough and famous enough to be hopefully beyond all such trifling matters of the ego.
But his suggestion that humanists should be more concerned with lightening human misery than global warming needs questioning.
Dyson's positive view of warming has Earth moving into a Jurassic state of abundance.
That could indeed be a good thing if it happened over 10,000 or a million years. But not decades.
If you push the whole global warming/climate change hypothesis into a dark corner and forget about it, and unplug every climate modelling computer, you're still left with some observed trends that don't bode well for war, poverty or unemployment.
Glaciers are disappearing in the Pyrenees, along with ice from the Great Lakes. In the Arctic, polar bears are shrinking in numbers and size and in the Antarctic, phytoplankton are on the move. At home, there is the drought punishing south-eastern Australia.
It may be an everyday garden-variety climate cycle, but it also may be what we can expect from warming oceans.
These could be unconnected, short-lived events that have nothing to do with human-induced global warming. Here's hoping.
But if the trends are connected and they persist, they are going to remap the world's natural resources in a very short time. Altered water availability and climate zones mean the movement of human populations in a crowded world.
That possibility presents questions that should exercise any humanist, irrespective of belief in the global warming hypothesis.
Movement creates friction, and much more potential for the things that peturb Freeman Dyson.
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