06-22-2006, 07:03 AM
Quote:I have determined that I can trust Michael Crichton and his opinion because he has done the research.
And what, exactly, do you think gives a celebrity author any more authority about the issue than a celebrity ex-presidental candidate?
The main criticism about Michael Crichton's hack-job of a book is that it misuses research, employing positional science. He takes the data from scientists, but doesn't use their analysis or conclusions, choosing instead to draw his own - often directly contradictory - conclusions. Many of the scientists he cites have come forward and protested the misrepresentation of their work.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=74
http://go.ucsusa.org/global_environment/gl...cfm?pageID=1670
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nati..._warming04.html
The global-warming-panic crowd certainly makes excessive, overblown statements about the imminence and scale of the threat. Fringe leftist environmentalists would have you believe that human activity is solely to blame for every natural calamity since the dawn of industry, and we know that's not true and to dismiss it. But statements that nothing at all is happening and that the Earth now is one-hundred-percent unaffected by human activity are equally overblown, and yet, these statements often seem somehow more reasonable to some people.
Sometimes weather is just weather. Sometimes it isn't. People like Crichton and Gore arguing ideologically - not scientifically - that it's all one or the other only get in the way of real climate scientists that are actually engaged in the search for what is going on.