Michael Mann is in Scientific American today, with a podcast discussing computer models and the hockey stick man has a pop at Freeman Dyson:
I have to wonder if Freeman Dyson will get on an airplane or if he’ll drive a car because a lot of the modern day conveniences of life and a lot of our technological innovations of modern life are based on phenomena so complicated that we need to be able to construct models of them before we deploy that technology.
This is a bit of straw man, and Mann in fact goes on to discuss the fact that
we can’t do experiments with multiple Earths and formulate the science of climate change as if it’s an entirely observationally based, controlled experiment.
However, after a lot of words about how models are used, he returns to his strawman.
And again, does Freeman Dyson, assuming he is willing to get on an airplane even though models have been used to test the performance of the airplane, assuming he does and he knows he’s going somewhere where they’ve predicted, where weather models have predicted rainfall for the next seven days, does he not pack his umbrella because he doesn’t believe the models? It's just in that case the worst that will happen is somebody gets wet when they wouldn’t otherwise have. In this case, the worst that can happen is that we ruin the planet.
It's not desperately edifying, is it?