article from Michael Crichton

[Frostbite]

"I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and
never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence
for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can
tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by urbanization,
including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is
shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing. I can tell you
that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that there is no
known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in
the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded
a totally new technology-like nuclear fusion-was necessary, otherwise
nothing could be done and in the meantime all efforts would be a waste of
time. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative
technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong."

The entire article

I haven't read the entire thing, it's way too damn long, but does anyone have any thoughts about this?

 

[Andonyx]

anyone have any thoughts about this?

Well, first I could care less what Crichton has to say on the subject honestly...

BUT!

I know very little about the subject and certainly not enough to refute or support any of these conlusions....except, the Sahara thing. He's fallen for a lot of BS evidence plenty of people do because there was a short contraction of the desert over a six year period:

This comparison shows that the Sahara Desert grew smaller between 1984 and 1990, but the contraction of the desert does not necessarily mean that the Sahara is getting smaller over the long term. Between 1980 and 1984 the desert grew steadily larger. Data gathered during this four-year period showed the southern boundary of the Sahara creeping southward as much as 240 kilometers.

http://eospso.gsfc.nasa.gov/eos_homepage/for_educators/eos_edu_pack/p17.php

You might look to Crichton for entretainment, but please don't look to him for good science.

 

[Dylab]

I read the essay and while I am not sure overall of the point he argued I thought overall it was long on rhetoric and short on facts.

One of the things that bothered is this part:

Okay, so, the preachers made a mistake. They got one prediction wrong; they're human. So what. Unfortunately, it's not just one prediction. It's a whole slew of them. We are running out of oil. We are running out of all natural resources. Paul Ehrlich: 60 million Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s. Forty thousand species become extinct every year. Half of all species on the planet will be extinct by 2000. And on and on and on.

Who are the "preachers". Did the scientific community as an whole argue this? Were they a large international group?

My favorite part of the essay is this:

I can, with a lot of time, give you the factual basis for these views, and I can cite the appropriate journal articles not in whacko magazines, but in the most prestigeous science journals, such as Science and Nature. But such references probably won't impact more than a handful of you, because the beliefs of a religion are not dependant on facts, but rather are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.

This is something I would expect a troll on a message board to say.

 

[EvilYeti]

This has been brought up before in the Politics thread. I find the essay extremely irritating.

Firstly, Chrichton has made career out of gloom-and-doom scenarios of science gone awry. I've heard more than one genetic engineering researcher gripe that "Jurassic Park" set back public perception of their field by ten years. He's the last person that should be complaining about others folks doing the same regarding environmental issues.

Secondly, the science in his novels is pure crap. I wouldn't trust this guy to do high school alegebra.

Thirdly, he makes the common mistake that since some individuals have made bogus predictions in the past our current scientific projections are bogus as well. This is an erroneous conclusion. One has no relevance on the other.

Lastly, the evidence for global warming is overwhemling. If Chrichton actually read any of the journals he claims to, he would know this.