I am pleased to see this.
bttt
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http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/essd06oct97_1.htm
"Here's a reading by Charlton Heston from the prologue from Jurassic Park which is interesting to think about: BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Okay, we found this Charlton Heston piece. You people will remember this, some of you. Some of you will not. I forget what year. I think this is 1995 when we first aired this. On February 3rd of 1995 Charlton Heston called the program and wanted to read from Michael Crichton's prologue of Jurassic Park, and this is what it sounds like. HESTON: You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. Might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. You think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine. When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. Hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us. RUSH: Charlton Heston on this program from 1995 in February, and that's from Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park. He called here and wanted to read that. END TRANSCRIPT "
If Christy figures prominently, then watch out. Considering how poorly his UAH group have done on the satellite MSU data interpretation, I wouldn't give his views much credibility. He didn't even discover his own errors, it was others who figured then out. He is simply not skeptical enough about his own work.
Readers might be interested to know that the people behind this documentary are ex members of the UK Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), who used to publish the magazine LM, once "Living Marxism", the official newsletter of the RCP. They continue to push the agenda they promoted within the RCP through the Institute of Ideas and the online magazine spiked. If anyone wants to check them out, try a Google search of "Martin Durkin Against Nature" (the title of another anti-environment documentary by this programme's director from the 1980s), or "LM group revolutionary communist party".
But don't take my word for it - dig around on the web and see what the Revolutionary Communists behind this stuff are up to, and make you own mind up about their legitimacy.
I don’t think it has “the answer,” or even all the answers. I don’t think we fully understood the Earth’s climate in the 1970s, when Global Cooling was predicted, or today, when so many are in the grip of Global Warming hysteria. Clearly, the liberal politically correct global warming story is too simple. This simplicity makes for great propaganda, but poor science. This documentary does not make things simple. Things are not simple. I am impressed by all the content in this show. I don’t see how they could cram any more in the time alloted. If they do a sequel, they could address the Earth’s molten core. I doubt the core is a constant that can be safely ignored. I would have liked coverage of various long astronomical cycles. It’s just a lot more complicated than the global warming industry admits.
Should we change our lives because of half-baked climatology? Should we have changed our lives based upon Malthus, Marx, Keynes, Freud, and others? No.