Crichton, M
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see uber1 TheBrain
gore alluded to sci fi novel
behind bastards sez key
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cmd jlf
That same year, the Locke Foundation distributed to all members of the state legislature the Michael Crichton novel "State of Fear," a work of fiction that promoted the views of Dr. Fred Singer, a prominent climate skeptic. Singer has held positions with the Cato Institute, which was co-founded in 1977 by Charles Koch and funded by the Kochs, and with other Koch-financed groups including the American Council on Science and Health, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Frontiers of Freedom, Heritage Foundation, Institute for Humane Studies, and the National Center for Policy Analysis.
mashey 2012
p102
Crichton on Global Warming IRS-2E, IRS-3E, IRS-4E
“How much of the science in State of Fear is accurate, and how much
is fiction?518 Here is a summary of the scientific claims about global warming
that appear in the book.”
“*most of the warming in the past century occurred before 1940, before CO2
emissions could have been a major factor (p. 84);”
False or misleading:Meme-35 The year 1940 was chosen carefully, but
more warming occurred since then, even with increased cooling aerosols.
519CO2 was already a major factor, along with the Sun, but the Sun has
changed little in last 30 years. The footnote applies to the next, as well.
“* global temperatures fell between 1940 and 1970 even as CO2 levels increased
(p. 86);”
Misleading: RC. This is generally attributed to increased industrial aerosols
plus some internal variability, and the major “bucket corrections” had not
yet occurred. 520
“*temperature readings from reporting stations outside the United States are
poorly maintained and staffed and probably inaccurate; those in the United
States, which are probably more accurate, show little or no warming trend (pp.
88-89);”
False: ~Meme-05. USA is good, many others are good or at least adequate.
Most show warming, including USA, unless one cherry-picks the years.
“*full professors from MIT, Harvard, Columbia, Duke, Virginia, Colorado, UC
Berkeley, and other prestigious schools, ... the former president of the National
Academy of Sciences ... will argue that global warming is at best unproven, and
at worst pure fantasy” (p. 90);”
True, but very misleading: There are always a few contrarians, including
one great statistician who would not accept smoking-cancer link. The
former president of the National Academy was Frederick Seitz, whom even
Philip Morris deemed “not sufficiently rational to offer advice” in 1989.
“*temperature sensors on satellites report much less warming in the upper
atmosphere (which the theory of global warming predicts should warm first)
than is reported by temperature sensors on the ground (p. 99);”
False and incompetent: Meme-38 In 2005, the erroneous UAH numbers
for the lower atmosphere (troposphere) already showed warming, if less
518 Not much is accurate, most is fiction.
519tamino.wordpress.com/2010/08/23/antrhopogenic-global-cooling (that is URL)
520 www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/06/of-buckets-and-blogs ...
...104
Z.2005.04-12 James M. Taylor
Science Verifies Crichton’s State of Fear Assertions524
Book’s citations pass factual background check IRS-2E, IRS-3E
“Michael Crichton’s new novel, State of Fear, has created a whirlwind of
controversy as global warming alarmists try frantically to discredit the author’s
tenacious assault on global warming theory. Before State of Fear, the left-leaning
editorial hierarchy of major national media outlets successfully weeded
out the scientific skepticism toward alarmist global warming theory before
television and newspaper stories reached the general public. Crichton’s end-run
around censorship has created a maelstrom of wrath and fury from alarmists,
who realize the millions of citizens reading his novel will likely translate into
millions of newly converted skeptics of global warming alarmism.”
Z.2005.05-1a James M. Taylor
Crichton’s State of Fear Lauded in Congress
“Best-selling novels are not often praised in Senate floor speeches. Of course, it
is not often that best-selling novels offer riveting discourse on important
scientific research and public policy matters. On January 4, Sen. James Inhofe
(R-OK) …” plus another half-page on p.13
2005.07-13 S.T. Karnick
Civilization and its Malcontents
Full page book review of Michael Crichton’s State of Fear.
Z.2006.10-14 Brian Bishop
Skeptics Debate Credibility of Environmentalists’ Claims
“During the debate, novelist and medical doctor Michael Crichton was asked
how much evidence would be necessary to end the debate about predictions of
catastrophic climate change.”
Z.2007.05-1 James M. Taylor
Climate Realists Beat Alarmists in NY Debate525
“Realists” were Michael Crichton, Richard Lindzen, Philip
Stott.“Alarmists” were Brenda Ekwurzel (UCS), Gavin
Schmidt (NASA GISS), Richard Somerville (Scripps). ...
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naomi o sci bk 1019:
...These conspiracy theories, in some cases, can seem credible because scientists aren’t actually telling the truth about their motivations and their values. If you leave a hole, if you leave a gap, if you don’t tell people what’s going on, it’s easy for people to fill in that gap with their own imaginary whatever.
My argument is, let’s be honest and open about our values, because I think when you do that what you discover is that actually you have good values. Most scientists I know have really good values, they want to make the world a better place, they want to help the economy by inventing technologies that generate jobs, they want to preserve the natural environment, they want to keep children safe from childhood diseases. These are all really meritorious things, so why hide them? Why not say, “I work on vaccine safety because I want children to be safe?” Or, “I work on climate change because I want your children to grow up in a world that is as beautiful and wonderful as the world we grew up in?”
I have found that when I speak that way to people, they really like it! It moves them, and it makes me into a human being. We know from social scientists that people are more likely to accept information from a person they trust.
So I think that we’ve made a mistake in refusing to talk about our values. I think it’s good to talk about our values, and I’m not ashamed of my values. I think have good values. And I know, because I have Christian friends, that many of my values are shared by my Christian friends. So if I can talk about those values so that Christians who might otherwise be skeptical of a Jewish intellectual from the Northeast might say, “Oh, well, she’s Jewish, but we have the Ten Commandments, we actually agree about a lot of things.”
You end up with a picture of science with no magic bullet to ensure scientific truth, but a powerful argument why we should trust scientists, due to the holistic picture you’ve painted. But you also at one point make a boiled-down argument by drawing an analogy with why we trust plumbers, which I thought was beautiful in its simplicity. Could you explain?
Part of it is an argument in favor of expertise. It’s very trendy right now to disrespect experts, and to say experts are always getting things wrong. But in fact, most experts get things right. And the reason for that is they have specialized training. It’s not some magic trick. It’s that experts spend a lot of time learning how to do something. We all know that’s true.
The reason why we use plumbers — to use a mundane example out of everyday life we all know — we don’t go to the dentist if we have a leak, we call a plumber. We do that because the person has specialized knowledge and skills that we don’t have ourselves.
So my argument is that scientist aren’t some special, canonized category of human beings, different from other kinds of experts. They’re simply the experts in our society who try and understand the natural world. So if I have a problem with my teeth, I will not go to a climate scientist. But if I have a question about the climate system, then I should be going to a climate scientist. It’s the same with vaccinations or whatever else.
You go on to consider examples were some might claim that science failed. I’d like to talk specifically about the example of eugenics, because of its moral weight in the public imagination. You argue that it does not cast science into doubt but actually illustrates some of your arguments.
Eugenics is a really important example for two reasons. It was a horrible thing, and to the extent the scientists were involved in it, which they were, we can’t sweep that under the rug. And the second reason is because climate change deniers love to use eugenics to try to discredit climate science.
Particularly, Michael Crichton was a big advocate of the argument that scientists were wrong about eugenics, therefore we should not trust them about climate change. Now obviously that’s a completely illogical argument: Just because some group of scientists a hundred years ago were wrong about X, that in no way proves that an entirely different group of scientists a hundred years later are wrong about Y. So it’s an illogical argument, but it has a certain moral force because it is a reminder that scientists can sometimes go down tracks that are not just wrong intellectually, but also problematic morally.
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debate with schmidt (linzen) post mortem:
Adventures on the East Side
Filed under:
— gavin @ 15 March 2007 -
- dig
So that was …. interesting.
First off, I’d like to thank the commenters for all of the suggestions and ideas to the previous post. They were certainly useful. In particularly, the connection with the difficulties faced by evolutionists in debates vs. creationists proved to be very a propos. Our side played it it pretty straight – the basic IPCC line (Richard Somerville), commentary on the how ‘scientized’ political debates abuse science (me, though without using the word ‘scientized’!) and the projections and potential solutions (Brenda Ekwurzel). Crichton went with the crowd-pleasing condemnation of private jet-flying liberals – very popular, even among the private jet-flying Eastsiders present) and the apparent hypocrisy of people who think that global warming is a problem using any energy at all. Lindzen used his standard presentation – CO2 will be trivial effect, no one knows anything about aerosols, sensitivity from the 20th Century is tiny, and by the way global warming stopped in 1998. Stott is a bit of a force of nature and essentially accused anyone who thinks global warming is a problem of explicitly rooting for misery and poverty in the third world. He also brought up the whole cosmic ray issue as the next big thing in climate science.
Update: The transcript is now available – though be aware that it has not yet been verified for accuracy. Audio + Podcast.
The podcast should be available next Wednesday (I’ll link it here once it’s available), and so you can judge for yourselves, but I’m afraid the actual audience (who by temperament I’d say were split roughly half/half on the question) were apparently more convinced by the entertaining narratives from Crichton and Stott (not so sure about Lindzen) than they were by our drier fare. Entertainment-wise it’s hard to blame them. Crichton is extremely polished and Stott has a touch of the revivalist preacher about him. Comparatively, we were pretty dull.
I had started off with a thought that Lindzen and Stott, in particular, would avoid the more specious pseudo-scientific claims they’ve used in other fora since there were people who would seriously challenge them at this debate. In the event, they stuck very closely to their standard script. Lindzen used the ‘GW stopped in 1998′ argument which even Crichton acknowledged later was lame. He also used the ‘aerosols are completely uncertain’ but ‘sensitivity to CO2 from the 20th Century is precisely defined’ in adjoining paragraphs without any apparent cognitive dissonance. Stott didn’t use the medieval English vineyards meme (as he did in TGGWS) – but maybe he read the RC article ahead of time.
The Q&A was curious since most questions were very much of the ‘I read the Wall Street Journal editorial page’ style, and I thought we did okay, except possibly when I suggested to the audience that the cosmic ray argument was being used to fool them, which didn’t go over well – no-one likes being told they’re being had (especially when they are). My bad.
The organisers asked us afterwards whether we’d have done much different in hindsight. Looking back, the answer is mostly no. We are scientists, and we talk about science and we’re not going start getting into questions of personal morality and wider political agendas – and obviously that put us at a sharp disadvantage (shades of David Mamet?).
One minor detail that might be interesting is that the organisers put on luxury SUVs for the participants to get to the restaurant – 5 blocks away. None of our side used them (preferring to walk), but all of the other side did.
So are such debates worthwhile? On balance, I’d probably answer no (regardless of the outcome). The time constraints preclude serious examination of any points of controversy and the number of spurious talking points can seriously overwhelm the ability of others to rebut them. Taking a ‘meta’ approach (as I attempted) is certainly not a guaranteed solution. However, this live audience were a rather select bunch, and so maybe this will go over differently on the radio. There it might not matter that Crichton is so tall…
- See more at: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/adventures-on-the-east-side/#sthash.KWdbmqPZ.dpuf
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/adventures-on-the-east-side/
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MoD:
j gordon edwards sjsu, oregon inst affil
court case 1977 http://cases.justia.com/us-court-of-appeals/F2/556/113/68241/
cribbed by crichton state of fear novel
capitalism, like marxism cliams to be sci 249
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2008 press club talk: http://www.pe.tamu.edu/DL_Program/graduate_seminar_series/Documents/MichaelCrichton_global%20warming.pdf
Rove set up mtg w/ B2?!
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That same year, the Locke Foundationdistributed to all members of the state legislature the Michael Crichton novel "State of Fear," a work of fiction that promoted the views ofDr.:{**Fred Singer**}:, a prominent climate skeptic. Singer has held positions with the Cato Institute, which was co-founded in 1977 by Charles Koch and funded by the Kochs, and with other Koch-financed groups including the American Council on Science and Health, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Frontiers of Freedom, Heritage Foundation, Institute for Humane Studies, and the National Center for Policy Analysis.
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The late author and scientist Michael Crichton spoke witheringly of this pattern in a speech at Cal Tech. He said, "I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that should be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled."He went on, "Let's be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. In science consensus is irrelevant.What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus." He's right, of course: Galileo was a denier. Darwin was a denier. Einstein denied virtually everything men "knew" at the time.
Crichton concluded by saying, "There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period."
grist on daniels
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Michael Crichton, world’s most famous global warming denier, dies
November 5, 2008
Famed global warming denier and science-fiction author, Michael Crichton, has died in Los Angeles. He became famous as a pulse-pounding writer who helped create the techno-thriller genre with best-sellers (and hit movies) like Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain.
Then he used his fame in the most destructive way possible — to cast doubt on the overwhelming scientific understanding of global warming, to urge people not to take action against the gravest preventable threat to the health and well-being of future generations.
In 2004, he published State of Fear, a deeply flawed novelthat attacks climate science and climate scientists. Although a work of fiction, the book had a clear political agenda, as evidenced by Crichton’s December 7, 2004 press release:
STATE OF FEAR raises critical questions about the facts we believe in, without question, on the strength of esteemed experts and the media. Although the story is fiction, Michael Crichton writes from a firm foundation of actual research challenging common assumptions about global warming.
The mistake-riddled book (see below) contains a gratuitous Appendix titled “Why Politicized Science Is Dangerous,” where Crichton draws a direct and lengthy analogy between climate science and eugenics and Soviet biology under Lysenko, where all dissent to the party line was crushed and some Soviet geneticists were executed. With no evidence whatsoever, he claims, that in climate science, “open and frank discussion of the data, and of the issues, is being suppressed.”
Sadly, Crichton chose to use his fame to smear the work of countless scientists who are trying to predict and prevent the unintended consequences of humanity’s dangerous experiment with unrestricted emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
In a 2006 New Republicinterview, he articulated the twin credos of global warming denial and delay:
Such is the road to ruin. Those who advance such a view deserve the strongest of labels, the strongest of condemnation.
Crichton spoke frequently against climate scientists and climate action, including public debates and testimony at a Senate hearing chaired by James Inhofe (R-OK), where Crichton took the opportunity to once again accuse the entire scientific community of fudging the science of climate change.
Crichton even helped persuade President Bush that he was wise to do nothing to address global warming. In 2006, Fred Barnes, executive editor of The Weekly Standard, wrote of Bush’s opposition to the Kyoto global warming treaty:
Though he didn’t say so publicly,Bush is a dissenter on the theory of global warming…. He avidly read Michael Crichton’s 2004 novelState of Fear, whose villain falsifies scientific studies to justify draconian steps to curb global warming.Crichton himself has studied the issue extensively and concluded that global warming is an unproven theory and that the threat is vastly overstated.Early in 2005, political adviser Karl Rove arranged for Crichton to meet with Bush at the White House. They talked for an hour and were in near-total agreement.
Such is Crichton’s legacy to future generations.
As a one-time M.I.T. techno-geek, I was once an enormous fan of Crichton’s work. But then he wrote “that rarest of books, an intellectually dishonest novel,” as I wrote in Technology Review three years ago.
Crichton made a fortune exploiting the public’s fears: Prey (fear of nanotechnology),Rising Sun(fear of Japanese technological supremacy), and Jurassic Park(fear of biotechnology). These books attack the hubris of those who use technology without wisdom. In Prey, he warns, “The total system we call the biosphere is so complicated that we cannot know in advance the consequences of anything that we do.” [CHEMOPHOBIA]
Given the author’s past, one might have expected that a Crichton book on global warming would warn about the risk of catastrophic climate change — the unintended consequences of humanity’s reckless, irreversible experiment on the biosphere. ButState of Feartook the reverse view. Crichton argued that the environmental and scientific communities have fabricated the threat. He wanted readers to fear those who argue that climate change is real, caused by human technologies, and dangerous.
Because the evidence for–and scientific understanding of–the human causes of climate change is now so overwhelming, Crichton could not make his case simply on the evidence. Instead, he had to distort the facts and accuse the scientific community of bad faith in order to make his case. And he did so, repeatedly.
Crichton portrayed environmentalists as uninformed, hypocritical, or simply evil. He created a scientist-hero, John Kenner, to save the day. (For added credibility, Kenner was an MITprofessor — though he sounded more like Rush Limbaugh than any MIT faculty member I’ve met.) Speaking through Kenner, Crichton made a faulty case against the environmentalists. Kenner said, for instance, that a real NASA climatologist, James Hansen, has been discredited for overestimating the impact of global warming “by three hundred percent” during 1988 testimony in Congress. In fact, Hansen’s prediction was very close to accurate. The smear Crichton cited was created 10 years later, when global-warming skeptic Patrick Michaels misrepresented the testimony (see RealClimate’s “Hansen’s 1988 projections“).
Crichton also strained to discredit global-warming fears by presenting them as faddish. He had one environmentalist say (incorrectly), “in the 1970s, allthe climate scientists believed anice age was coming.” For a debunking of this classic denier myth, see “Another denier talking point — ‘global cooling’ — bites the dust.”
A full factual debunking of the book can be found on realclimate.org — “Michael Crichton’s State of Confusion II: Return of the Science” and “Michael Crichton’s State of Confusion.”
Crichton’s dissembling even leaked into the book’s bibliography, where Crichton mischaracterizes the landmark 2002 National Research Council report Abrupt Climate Change, claiming, “The text concludes that abrupt climate change might occur sometime in the future, triggered by mechanisms not yet understood.” That is simply not true. The report concludes plainly, “Abrupt climate changes were especially common when the climate system was being forced to change most rapidly. Thus, greenhouse warming … may increase the possibility of large, abrupt, and unwelcome regional or global climatic events” (emphasis added to both quotes).
Why would Crichton mischaracterize the report in his bibliography? Because one of his main goals in the book was to undermine the case that global warming causes abruptclimate change and extremeweather events. In his story, a mainstream environmental group plots to create extreme weather events that will cause the deaths of thousands of people timed to coincide with a conference on abrupt climate change in order to trick the public into accepting global warming as truth. In a bizarre coincidence, the book’s climax had the evil environmentalists carefully plan a seismic tsunami-just weeks before an actual tsunami devastated Southeast Asia.
But the truth is stronger than fiction. Seismic tsunamis are caused by earth tremors. They are not caused by global warming! Any climate scientist knows that. This was a stunning blunder by Crichton, utterly underming any claim that he understands climate science.
His PR firm issued a news release about his death:
No.
Had Crichton never engaged in the global warming arena, had he never written State of Fear, his impressive body of work would probably have ensured a positive legacy for decades to come. But by becoming perhaps the most famous popular global warming denier and delayer in the world, he ensured that future generations — who will have to suffer the horrific consequences humanity’s denial and delay — will remember him primarily for his anti-scientific effort to accelerate humanity’s self-destruction.
Related Posts:
- Why scientists aren’t more persuasive, Part 2: Why deniers out-debate “smart talkers”
- Global Warming, Tsunamis, and Michael Crichton’s Big Blunder
- Blog of the Day: Crichton’s Fictions
- Franken Calls for Crichton-Climate Progress Debate. We Accept.
http://climateprogress.org/2008/11/05/michael-crichton-worlds-most-famous-global-warming-denier-dies/