You are grossly overstepping in your zeal to disprove your opponent. Unless of course you really do think physics and math aren't relevant to computer modelling of... statistical estimates for changes in radiation absorption based on multiple variables. You know, the very heart and soul most important component of the greenhouse effect.

Dyson's opinions as portrayed in the linked article include:
Question: ...was that article substantially accurate about your views?
Dyson:
He had his agenda. Obviously he wanted to write a piece about global warming and I was just the instrument for that, and I am not so much interested in global warming. He portrayed me as sort of obsessed with the subject, which I am definitely not. To me it is a very small part of my life. I don’t claim to be an expert. I never did.

Later he makes his position on various items known:

I was involved in climate studies seriously about 30 years ago. That’s how I got interested. There was an outfit called the Institute for Energy Analysis at Oak Ridge. I visited Oak Ridge many times, and worked with those people, and I thought they were excellent. And the beauty of it was that it was multi-disciplinary. There were experts not just on hydrodynamics of the atmosphere, which of course is important, but also experts on vegetation, on soil, on trees, and so it was sort of half biological and half physics. And I felt that was a very good balance.

After describing the work at Oak Ridge and a general assessment by everyone about the interconnectedness of the climate across disciplines:

It’s a problem of very complicated ecology, and to isolate the atmosphere and the ocean just as a hydrodynamics problem makes no sense.

Thirty years ago, there was a sort of a political split between the Oak Ridge community, which included biology, and people who were doing these fluid dynamics models, which don’t include biology. They got the lion’s share of money and attention. And since then, this group of pure modeling experts has become dominant. I got out of the field then. I didn’t like the way it was going. It left me with a bad taste.

What’s wrong with the models. I mean, I haven’t examined them in detail, (but) I know roughly what’s in them. And the basic problem is that in the case of climate, very small structures, like clouds, dominate. And you cannot model them in any realistic way. They are far too small and too diverse.

So they say, ‘We represent cloudiness by a parameter,’ but I call it a fudge factor. So then you have a formula, which tells you if you have so much cloudiness and so much humidity, and so much temperature, and so much pressure, what will be the result... But if you are using it for a different climate, when you have twice as much carbon dioxide, there is no guarantee that that’s right. There is no way to test it.

Dyson doesn't seem particularly overstepping his knowledge. He doesn't seem to be 'denying' things. He's just putting forward some pretty reasonable skepticism. Notably, the IPCC repeatedly observes as well that the impact of clouds is the single biggest unknown in current modelling, largely because it's so very, very hard to model accurately.

Make rats breath asbestos for 10 years, witness proof it's a problem.
Make rats breath tobacco smoke for 10 years, witness proof it's a problem.

With climate, what's the equivalent metric to make the degree of danger clear?

We have instrumental temperature records that are only about 100 years old. Those records show clear and steady warming.
We have records showing CO2 increasing drastically over that same time frame. We have easy and clear physics to show that CO2 traps radiation and contributes to warming.
The consensus though tapers off hard after these basic facts. The overwhelming majority of the remaining evidence is computer models of processes that act over centuries and millenia. How much confidence and weight should our policy decisions place on modelling of long term processes, when we lack really good long term data to even calibrate against?

My point isn't we should be filled with doubt and uncertainty, but merely to observe that claiming climate change is as scientifically proven to be deadly as smoking is just, false. You shouldn't be doing it, as the science doesn't support it, which if I recall is the entire basis of the concern and complaint in the first place.

I'm afraid this is just a sad statement on society. People are either unable or unwilling to rely upon the scientific method, evidence and testable, provable facts. Instead an appeal to experts and human authority are still the order of the day. We are all taught in modern education about the dark ages when secret religious texts were a central source of wisdom, and only a select few well educated scholars were deemed worthy of accurately interpreting those texts. We are taught about how terrible the impact of human corruption was on that time.

Fast forward to today though, and we now have advanced to holding scientific journals as a central source of wisdom, and only a select few well educated scholars are deemed worthy of accurately interpreting them. Is nobody else disturbed by how little difference we have made between the priesthood of old and the scientific consensus today?

The problem is the politicization of science. When the majority look for truth, and base their assessment foremost upon the credentials of men with the title of scientist rather than the evidence and results produced by science, we have already failed. We have done little more than replace religious texts that are only to be read and interpreted by scholars, with scientific journals that are only to be read and interpreted by scholars.

The entire point and improvement that the scientific method is to bring is removing the reliance on authority and corruptible humans and replacing it with subjective, testable and provable evidence instead.

Well the trickle down isn't voodoo, it's just that, a trickle. Only a small benefit making it down to the lower layers. If you take a second to count America as symbolic of trickle down capitalism and the USSR as symbolic of socialism then in practice capitalism has left the lower end better off than socialism. Of course those are terribly flawed analogies, but there is more to the notion of trickle down economics than 'voodoo'. The one thing capitalism undeniably has in it's favour is that it 'works' when the metric is economic growth, and without economic growth, everyone is sharing pieces from a smaller pie.

Your first question regarding the Dresden and Tokyo firebombings in WW2:

Your second question immediately follows as:

You can forgive me if I 'failed' to answer what was clearly put forward as a rhetorical question. I DID however very directly respond to them. Your underlying premise supposes that the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo not be compared against the costs of abandoning Europe to the Nazi's or a land invasion of Japan, but instead be judged in a vacuum of killing people is bad. You then setup the notion that when considering the morality of the 9/11 attacks we consider, what, the cost in lives of an Al Qaida landing on the beaches of Florida?

I thought my context had been clear.
You ask us to consider the actions taken during the waging of WW2 in the context of Allies and Axis powers being morally equivalent. Considered in a sense where the Allies cause for waging war was no more moral than that of the Axis.
You ask us to consider the actions taken in Al Qaida's jihad in the context of Al Qaida and Infidels as being Considered in a sense where Al Qaida's cause for waging war is no less moral than the defenses raised by the rest of us.

You then pretend to be looking for complexity...

The reality is that our world is far more complex than you are willing to accept from the outset. The reality is that there are men and powers in our world that WILL wage wars of conquest solely and only for their own benefit and no amount of good nature and moral superiority will slow them. The reality is that when those men and powers are not confronted with force and violence they simply kill more people and take more for themselves. In a situation like WW2, it needs to be understood that the Nazi party was demonstrably 'evil'. That coexisting with them was unpalatable. So far that, fighting back was morally a 'good' thing. More complex still, fighting back meant, yes, fire bombings of places like Dresden. I am GLAD the allies won, and I can hardly state with any confidence that if they'd been more gentle in their prosecution of the war that they would have triumphed.

As for you, how about providing your own answer to any of your questions. If you're given control of allied forces, do you wage war against the Nazis in Europe? Do you fight hard, or do you risk losing by being soft handed in your campaign?

You act like you are seeking complexity, but failing to try and answer some of the most difficulty questions of war you are in reality hiding from that complexity you pretend to be seeking.

I was comparing living conditions and the atrocities suffered by the Iraqi people. I didn't class American approval/disapproval as a noteworthy concern to them.

Maybe you skimmed my summary too quickly then. The worst of the abuses to and genocide of the Iraq's Shia majority took place after 1990.

I think it's most enlightening to hear your belief that the sanctions on Iraq were the fault and blame of America, rather than Saddam's steadfast refusal to abide by his obligations to allow inspections of the WMD programs dismantled in the first Gulf war. You remember, when Saddam attempted to reduce the number of UN member states by 1.

You seem to be labouring under a mistaken belief that condemning Saddam and observing the extent of his atrocities is in anyway a defense of American policy and action. It is not, but when discussing the state of Iraq today, it is a hugely important consideration and failure to recognize the extent of those decades of brutality and the impact on its people makes assessing the country impossible. It just makes it easier to say America bad, if you prefer a good/bad check mark for your assessments...

As I means of shortening discussions and ruling out having stupid ones it's easy to follow a simple rule. If anyone is urging a reduction in CO2 emissions, but is NOT pushing hard for more nuclear power, they aren't really interested in a solution and can be ignored.

Disappointing that the IPCC is flirting with failing such a basic litmus test.

If you are stupid and idiotic enough to accept the premise that Al Qaida and the US are morally equivalent actors in some Islamic holy war then you have a point. If the Nazi's were morally equivalent to the allies, then you have a point.

If you accept either of those premises though, you are an idiot, a fool, or a deliberately malicious and hateful person. Your entire POV and argument is based upon an assumption that both parties in any war are morally equal.

Enough of your moral equivalence masturbation already. Do you honestly believe that in WW2 there was no morally preferable party between the axis or allied forces? That's the only question to be discussed.

Hitler and Nazi Germany had in essence seized control of and conquered the entirety of Europe. The option was simply let Hitler and the Nazi's have it, and likely Britain as well, or fight back. Fighting back meant committing horrific acts like the fire bombing of Dresden. Without such horrific tactics of targeting civilians and the means of your enemies production, victory wasn't going to happen. The choices were taking on horrible, horrible acts like Dresden, or standing aside and watching as Hitler and the Nazis made their concentration camps across all of Europe a long standing policy of a long lived Third Reich.

I'm glad our fore fathers chose as they did, and you should be too. Instead your just sniveling like a child unhappy that the world doesn't exist in the way they wish it would.

And I beg the mods, why is this sitting at zero and the parent is +5 insightful for saying ISIS murdering civilians is no different than nations trying to stop them, as though those going on a murdering rampage are entirely equivalent and equally morally just as those trying to stop them. Sad, sad world.

This, a thousand times over.

"Apologists"?

Have your read what Japan did to China long before America ever got involved? Did Japan have any legitimate claim to self defense in it's campaign of slaughter against the mainland? Meanwhile, the American's have Pearl Harbor, and a rather clear picture of who started the fight. That's why you see people 'apologizing' for the war. Most historians though note very accurately that we killed massive numbers of people, very brutally but efficiently. They also note that it was in the context of a defensive and existential war, were the options were be the winner and do it to their people, or be the loser and have it done to you as the Japense already had in China.

I dearly do wish people posting drivel like yours would spend more of their time reading and watching what's on Al Jazeera. You speak the popular party line out west of how many people died in Iraq because of overthrowing Saddam. You talk about how horrible the sectarian violence is that followed his ouster. Al Jazeera at least has the competence to take a longer view. Specifically that the sectarian violence in Iraq was NOT created by the ouster of Saddam, nor by the war and occupation of western forces.

Saddam spent decades brutalizing the population of Iraq, and intentionally seeding sectarian division and hatred. He didn't just gas Kurdish Iraqi's, he used the gas to round up as many of them as he could. He moved them into concentration camps where he slaughtered the fighting age males, and systematically raped the women with the intention of impregnating them with half Arab children. He made a very well documented and thorough effort to essentially breed the Kurdish Iraqi's out of existence. It seems unsurprising then that the Kurd's aren't enamoured with the Sunni Iraqi's that were Saddam's power base.

Saddam waged a similarly genocidal campaign against Iraqi Shia, estimates run as high as 200 thousand Shia Iraqi's killed. Not soldiers on soldiers though, nor as a consequence of some civil war, but as a campaign of extermination where the women children were every bit the intended targets of his campaign as anyone else. He then followed that genocide up with a campaing of divide and conquer of the surviving Shia Iraqi's. He spent years catering to and even officially supporting the Shia clerics that remained in Iraq and registered themselves. This created a wonderful rift between the 'brave' Shia who'd remained Iraq from the refugees who'd fled largely to Iran during the genocide. Once the domestic Shia movement was large enough and had sufficiently distanced itself from the refugees, he then pulled out the party registration list and slaughtered everyone leading or involved with the internal Shia movement.

That's just two examples of the Stalinesque playbook that was the entirety of Saddam's rule. Yet, ignorant 'sympathetic' western suckers still stand around here making comments like yours about how much damage the west did to Iraq by removing Saddam. Some even compound the folly by noting that however bad Saddam was, at least he maintained a semblance of order.

If you followed Al Jazeera's coverage of the war, the occupation, and the ensuing violence and chaos you wouldn't be spewsing such ignorance, because they at least covered the root cause of the anger decently. Far better than any of the media out west here who have absolute blinders on to any influences but that directly attributable to us, as though the world is some manner of vacuum solely and only alterable by western action.

As you say, you are not a lawyer. If you don't know the odds of spontaneous or random resistance to round-up then you early never worked on a farm either. The courts in Canada, with actual lawyers, and with actual Ag experts decided against Percy. There's also not a farmer around that would ever even consider spraying their seed crop with roundup, as they know without doubt they have just as much success setting it aflame in hopes of gaining a flame tolerant seed. Percy absolutely set out with the intent to acquire Monsanto seed and knew without any doubt the seed he planted, grew and went to sell was the same seed patented to them. In the opinion of Canadian courts he clearly had violated patents and was charged. What's more relevant is that nobody's normal farming practices in any way were threatened or chilled or even worried by his case.