A silver lining to the cloudy conventional wisdom of global warming and an egalitarian future for biotechnology where children play games creating new genetically engineered life forms like they now play computer games were among the “heretical thoughts,” shared by Institute for Advanced Study Professor Emeritus Freeman Dyson with members of Princeton’s business community last week.

”I’m not saying global warming doesn’t exist. I am saying that the problems are grossly exaggerated,” Professor Dyson told a luncheon gathering of the Princeton Regional Chamber of Commerce at the Marriott Princeton Hotel on Thursday. The dire warnings are taking resources away from grappling with the world’s real and immediate problems, such as poverty, infectious disease, public education, and the health and preservation of animals and people around the world — “the building of dikes around the city of New Orleans,” he said.

”I’m not saying we shouldn’t be worried. I’m saying people are mostly worrying about the wrong things,” Professor Dyson said. “What is dangerous is people believing their own predictions. That is the trap Al Gore fell into.”

Predictions of global warming, and its consequences, are created with computer models, which solve the equations of fluid dynamics and meteorology in fine fashion, but don’t touch “the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and biology of the fields, the swamps,” Professor Dyson said. “They do a very poor job describing the world we live in,” he said, a world “muddy and messy and full of things we don’t understand.”

Professor Dyson — who noted “solar energy will probably be the cheap source of energy within the next 50, 100 years” — cited research which shows that 5,000 years ago “there is strong evidence that the Sahara at that time was wet. The Sahara then must have been like the Serengeti today.”

This period was one of the warmest and wettest in the recent past of the planet, so perhaps letting carbon dioxide accumulate today will result in going back to a “wet Sahara” climate, he said, one which society might prefer.

Professor Dyson brought up “biomass” and asked his audience to remember only one number: “one hundredth of an inch.” He said there is “a very favorable rate of exchange between the carbon in the atmosphere and the carbon in the soil,” with carbon in the air absorbed into the soil easily and efficiently.

If the biomass on the planet’s surface, “biomass is our topsoil,” was increased by one hundredth of an inch a year it would counter the growth of carbon dioxide emissions produced by all the nations of the world, Professor Dyson said. Innovations like developing ways to plant crops without plowing, using genetically engineering to put more biomass into crop roots, would instead lead the way to a sustainable planet, where China and India’s economic growth— new wealth where there was once poverty which he told the audience it should be happy about, not fear — and generation of carbon dioxide could be balanced by an America where crop growth and innovation provided vast new food resources.

”It is a problem of land management not a problem of meteorology,” Professor Dyson said.

Professor Dyson noted that just as early pioneers of modern computing saw them only as large, complex tools used by a select few and “failed to foresee computers growing small enough and cheap enough for housewives doing income tax returns and kids doing homework,” so pioneers of biotechnology fail to see the technology “becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized.”

With adults’ love of breeding orchids and other flowers, and kids’ love of reptiles and other pets, once genetic engineering technology gets into the hands of housewives and children, there will be “an explosion of diversity, of new living creatures, rather than a monoculture of crops which the corporate world would prefer,” Professor Dyson said.

”The final evolution will be biotechnology games. The winner could be the kid whose egg grows the prickliest cactus, or whose egg hatches the cutest creature,” he said.

Many questions will arise over regulation and misuse of the technology, Professor Dyson said, citing the preceding analogy of computer hackers. “If we allow kids to play around with roses and snakes, we still have to stop them from playing around with viruses.”