Bethe was extraordinarily kind and generous to me when I was a young man and having a very rough time.
I was not a physicist, not anywhere near as brilliant as Dyson, but it is certainly true Bethe "would instantly switch his attention from his own problem to theirs." I'll never forget the moments his attention was focused on me. One moment I was feeling as if little I did mattered, the next moment I had an invitation to share dinner with him and some very important people.
Dyson was, in a certain sense, correct about climate change. Putting aside our opinions on how the world ought to be, we will have to adapt to climate changes that are already queued up in the system, otherwise this first world civilization in the history of mankind will collapse.
Dyson was a darling of the hard science fiction crowd because he promoted engineering solutions to all manner of social and environmental problems. But even if you've got the engineering solutions the social problems are much more difficult. For example, how do you relocate entire communities when their land becomes uninhabitable? How do you deal with climate change refugees? How do you convince people their way of life is unsustainable before catastrophe causes the collapse of their society?
Stupid, incurious people like president Trump and his supporters are not going to solve these problems. They will only make them worse.
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