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Very, very, very old story.
Posted on 01/28/2005 7:29:42 AM PST by presidio9
WASHINGTON - A provocative new novel that says fears of global warming are unjustified and stoked by an environmentalist-media conspiracy is taking Washington by storm.
“State of Fear,” a novel by Michael Crichton, the best-selling author of “Jurassic Park,” and the creator of the TV show “ER”, compares scientists who warn of global warming to advocates of eugenics who said that the mixing of races would ruin the world’s genetic stock.
In an appendix explaining his position, Crichton writes: “Nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be a natural phenomenon. Nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be man-made. Nobody knows how much warming will occur in the next century."
Sixteen of 18 top U.S. climate scientists interviewed by Knight Ridder, however, said the Harvard-trained author is bending scientific data and distorting research.
“Wrong, wrong, wrong," said Martin Hoffert, a professor of physics at New York University. “The best face I can put on this is that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. The worst is that he’s intentionally deceiving people as he accuses environmentalists (of doing) in ‘State of Fear.’ "
The overwhelming majority of climate scientists say the world is warming, mainly because of emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The biggest increase in those gases comes from the burning of fossil fuels. U.S. and foreign authorities predict a 5-degree Fahrenheit increase in the world’s average temperature by the end of the century. Ice sheets are melting, and species of birds and animals have moved to new areas because of warming.
Nevertheless, Crichton’s novel has grabbed the fancy of Washington political conservatives. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman James Inhofe, R-Okla., in a Senate speech this month, called the book “the real story" of climate change. Conservative think tanks and columnists promote the novel.
On Friday, Crichton hits Washington, speaking to the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute and the National Press Club. His publicist, Jennifer Swihart, says he’s also having a private “high-profile meeting” with someone she isn’t allowed to name.
Jerry Mahlman, a senior climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., attributes Washington’s embrace of Crichton to fear: “The fundamental reality of the elementary physics of global warming is spooking the heck out of people and they’re looking for ways to get out of it.”
Crichton’s supporters credit his research skill, writing ability and celebrity. Crichton’s book is “influential for the simple reason that he did it," said Frank Maisano, an energy lobbyist who fights global warming measures. “He is a rock star in terms of telling stories.”
Two climate scientists said they loved Crichton’s book.
“It was a fun read and the science was handled intelligently and responsibly," said MIT meteorology professor Richard Lindzen. “Crichton has studied the science for the last three years and comes to the issue with intelligence as well as a professional scientific background.”
For his part, Crichton writes, “Everybody has an agenda. Except me."
"State of Fear" follows a mainstream environmental group’s foray into terrorism. The environmentalists try to trigger a tsunami, flash floods and calving icebergs to convince the world of the dangers of climate change and raise more money.
Amid that plot, Crichton drops in graphs and footnotes to buttress his contention that global warming isn’t a real problem.
Three scientists - Hoffert, physicist Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California, and NASA’s James Hansen - told Knight Ridder that Crichton distorted their research in the novel.
Crichton declined to be interviewed or to answer 10 questions that were e-mailed to him through his publicist.
Hansen, the director of the Goddard Institute of Space Sciences, takes issue with Crichton’s contention that Hansen’s 1988 prediction for warming was off by 300 percent. Hansen said his paper presented three predictions of future warming and said the middle case was the most likely. Crichton took the highest prediction and ignored the middle-case scenario, which was off by 20 percent, according to Hansen.
“How would you describe what Mr. Crichton did? Science fiction? Scientific fraud?” Hansen wrote.
To challenge the warming predictions, Crichton also cites dropping temperatures in places such as Punta Arenas, Chile; Greenville, S.C.; Truman, Mo.; and Ann Arbor, Mich.
While some places have cooled, responded Henry Pollack, a professor of geophysics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, far more places have gotten hotter. That’s especially true, he added, for the 79 percent of the world that's covered by oceans.
The world’s overall temperature is rising, according to the federal government’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. Last year was the fourth hottest ever recorded. The five hottest years on record have all occurred since 1998. The 10 hottest years on record have all occurred since 1990. The last month to record below-average temperature was July 1985.
No need to. Just get graphs of global temperatures for the last 12000 years, the last 100,000 years and the last 400,000 years, and see if anybody with two brain cells to rub together can assert that temperatures in any given location on earth should repeat exactly every year. Forever.
Cross-checking the Hockey Stick (Find this Global Warming article in your library?)
GREENHOUSE WARMING: A SHRINKING THREAT
The Indisputable Science of Global Warming: The Climes They Are A-Changin'
BTTT!!!!!!
I could have personally lived without the cannablism...
He not only "drops" them in, he foot notes them. So, they are also very easy to confirm.
I thought that character was more of a cross between Martin Sheen (plays a pres on TV) and Ed Beagley..enviro whacko
Ed Beagley..enviro whacko.....
__________________
That's who I pictured as I read the book. No Martin Sheen at all.
Take a look at the very long bibliography. Michael Crichton digested tons of material to write this book. Some books had to do with savagery in primitive tribes.
I wonder if this the same group of scientists that in the middle 70s were predicting an earth cooling trend resulting in approaching ice age.
Heeeeeeeeeeere's an unbiased article. /s
Ping!
I would never link
Begley and Sheen. Don't forget,
Crichton himself is
a New Age-type guy
(read his his non-fiction Travels).
Frankly, I believe
Crichton and Begley
are friends. They both signed off on
a dolphin letter:
-----------------------------------------------------
Dear President Clinton:
We are deeply troubled that your State Department is publicly committed to weakening the "dolphin-safe" tuna label to allow the chase, capture, injury, and killing of dolphins. Today, U.S. supermarket shelves carry only tuna caught without setting nets on dolphins. Foreign countries which continue to kill dolphins in order to catch tuna should not be allowed to flood our market with dolphin-unsafe tuna.
...
Please intervene to reverse this policy. Sincerely.
Eddie Albert, Alec Baldwin, Kim Basinger, Brigitte Bardot, Bob Barker, Daniel Benzali, Ed Begley Jr, Clint Black, Lorenzo Di Bonaventura, Pierce Brosnan, LaVar Burton, Nicolas Cage, Keith Carradine, Jim Carrey, Chevy & Jayni Chase, Toni Childs, Michael Crichton, Sean Connery, Ted Danson, Jean Paul DeJoria, Dick Donner & Lauren Shuler- Donner, Cary Elwes, Carrie Fisher, Michael J. Fox, Richard Gere, Brian James, James Garner, Larry Hagman, Tom Hanks, Woody Harrelson, Mariette Hartley, Tippie Herden, Don Henley, David Hoberman, Dustin Hoffman, Lauren Holly, Rand Holston, Peter Horton, Perry Katz, K.D. Lang, Stan Lee, Julian Lennon, Ray Liotta, Esai Morales, Peter Morton, Jerry & Ann Moss, Rupert & Anne Murdoch, Jack Nicholson, Gregory Peck, Joe Pesci, Michelle Phillips, Stephanie Powers, Mimi Rogers, Joel Schumacher, George C. Scott, Pauly Shore, Joel Silver, Alicia Silverstone, Keely Shaye Smith, Oliver Stone, Sharon Stone, Lily Tomlin, John Travolta, Betty White, Robin Williams, Robin Wright, Vilmos Zsigmond
General Patton signed that piece of pap?!! He deserves a slap!!!
What an utter PANTLOAD!!!
Exactly. I devoured this book on the way to the Inauguration and back. These scientists go for the popular vote method of science ... not the method used for scientific rigor.
Satanic Gases. Don't know the author - he's been on KSFO a number of times, including with Brian Sussman, who is a meteorologist and recently left the the leftist world of Bay Area TV. Some of the inside stories he tells are fascinating!
I dunno. With all the drinking he did, Sheen came to mind and stayed there. :-)
“Wrong, wrong, wrong," said Martin Hoffert, a professor of physics at New York University. “The best face I can put on this is that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. The worst is that he’s intentionally deceiving people as he accuses environmentalists (of doing) in ‘State of Fear.’ "
Hmmm, seems pretty clear cut to me:
"On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but - which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This 'double ethical bind' we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both." (Steven Schneider, Quoted in Discover, pp. 45-48, Oct. 1989; see also (Dixy Lee Ray in 'Trashing the Planet', 1990) and (American Physical Society, APS News August/September 1996).
"Scientists who want to attract attention to themselves, who want to attract great funding to themselves, have to (find a) way to scare the public . . . and this you can achieve only by making things bigger and more dangerous than they really are." (Petr Chylek, Professor of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, commenting on reports that Greenland's glaciers are melting. Halifax Chronicle-Herald, August 22, 2001)
"A global climate treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the [enhanced] greenhouse effect"
(Richard Benedict, US Conservation Foundation)
"The data don't matter. We're not basing our recommendations [for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions] upon the data. We're basing them upon the climate models"
(Chris Folland, UK Meteorological Office)"The trouble with this idea is that planting trees will not lead to the societal changes we want to achieve"
--(Kyoto Delegate, 05 December 1997)
"Researchers pound the global-warming drum because they know there is politics and, therefore, money behind it. . . I've been critical of global warming and am persona non grata."
Dr. William Gray
(Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado and leading expert of hurricane prediction )
(in an interview for the Denver Rocky Mountain News, November 28, 1999)
"The climate modelers have been 'cheating' for so long, it's almost become respectable."
Richard Kerr, discussing flux adjustments in climate models in Science, 1997"Such [flux] adjustments are necessary due to deficiencies in both the atmospheric and oceanic models, especially in their parameterizations of sub-grid-scale processes."
Description of GFDL GCM
"Instead, we believe the problem resides in the computer models and in our past assumptions that the atmosphere is so well behaved. These models just don't handle processes like clouds, water vapor, and precipitation systems well enough to accurately predict how strong global warming will be, or how it will manifest itself at different heights in the atmosphere," remarked Spencer.
Is Earth's Temperature Up or Down or Both?; Feb 6, 1997 quoting Dr. Roy Spencer
Click graphic for full GW rundown
Ping me if you find one I've missed.
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