[elbucko]

A final media embarrassment came in 1991, when Carl Sagan predicted on Nightline that Kuwaiti oil fires would produce a nuclear winter effect, causing a "year without a summer," and endangering crops around the world. Sagan stressed this outcome was so likely that "it should affect the war plans." None of it happened.

I remember this well. Sagan also predicted it would take years to extinguish the oil fires set by a retreating Iraqi army. The Texan oil well fire fighters had the wells extinguished in six months.

I liked Carl Sagan. He began by making science elegant and beautiful to the common folk. He went too far when he went political and started to believe his own press releases.

[Benrand]

I liked Sagan too, Cosmos was excellent, one of the good things PBS did.

But he obviously used his position to perpetrate fraud and that is unacceptable. I wish he were here to debate Crichton.

BILLions and BILLions...I learned what a googol plex was from him and stunned my 5th grade math teacher by bringng it up in class. :o)

[Moonman62]

I liked Carl Sagan. He began by making science elegant and beautiful to the common folk. He went too far when he went political and started to believe his own press releases.

Sagan was awsome in his early career. Sadly, toward the end, he was pathetic -- more interested in smoking pot and impressing his ultra liberal third wife, than getting it right.

[attiladhun2]

Carl Sagan had political agendas of his own. I believe he was pretty far to left politically. He opposed the Gulf War and so came up with this bullcrap about the Kuwaiti oil fires. Anyone with half a brain knows that heavy concentrations of particulates in the air will soon draw condensation and fall to the gorund as rain or snow.