From The Times Magazine comes this engaging profile of Freeman Dyson as global warming skeptic. Author Nicholas Dawidoff avoids the petty political controversalizing on the subject and instead keeps the focus on Dyson’s interactions with his peers, both friend and foe.

Chief among Dyson’s foes is James Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. Dyson considers Hansen crippled by his own conventional wisdom:

“It’s always possible Hansen could turn out to be right,” he says of the climate scientist. “If what he says were obviously wrong, he wouldn’t have achieved what he has. But Hansen has turned his science into ideology. He’s a very persuasive fellow and has the air of knowing everything. He has all the credentials. I have none.  I don’t have a Ph.D. He’s published hundreds of papers on climate. I haven’t. By the public standard he’s qualified to talk and I’m not.”

Hansen responds by claiming the special authority that Dyson mocks:

“if he is going to wander into something with major consequences for humanity and other life on the planet, then he should first do his homework — which he obviously has not done on global warming.”

One can imagine Hansen’s frustration. Dyson calmly shifts between three lines of attack: scientific, moral, and futuristic. He may not own Hansen’s credentials, but he owns two-thirds of the argument.

On the moral question, Dyson asks the global warming alarmists to consider the use of coal to raise the standard of living for the millions in China and India. How absolute is their position against cheap coal-powered energy? Pretty absolute, apparently, but now Dyson has them counting the cost of their position in lives.

They only way they can justify such costs is to leap far beyond their measurements and models and engage in dystopic speculation. Backed into a moral corner, they become futurists — and thus encounter Dyson at his most freewheeling and inventive. Where the global warming alarmists postulate a fixed future except for the worst-case trajectories of their models, Dyson postulates any number of futures.

What if global warming is preventing a new ice age? What if increased atmospheric carbon dioxide actually benefits agriculture? What if we genetically engineered carbon-eating trees? What if we just plant a trillion normal trees?

In Infinite in All Directions, Dyson describes a time he suppressed his skepticism. As a supporter of the nuclear freeze movement, Dyson welcomed Carl Sagan’s idea of nuclear winter. It was a powerful way to draw attention to the risks of nuclear war. Privately, Dyson thought a nuclear greenhouse just as likely. Sagan was thinking in terms of Martian dust storms. Dyson thought in terms of London smog.

I’ve wondered since if Dyson may have regretted that solidarity. Reading this article, I don’t think so. Dyson has simply lived through too much history — military, political, and scientific — to be easily rolled.