Michael Crichtons State of Fear

Factual Questions
1

We all know Global Warming is happening…or is it?

Michael Crichton disagrees with the notion of Global Warming and expresses this in his book State of Fear.

I read this book over a year ago, and I forgot his main arguments. What I do remember is that this book was quite convincing in stating the fact that Global Warming is not real.

The only concrete example I can remember of straight of the book was an example regarding Antartica. Crichton stated that although the edges of Antartica were melting, in reality, the center ice sheet in Antartica was thickening.

Anybody ever read this book?

Any opinions on this issue?

What are the arguments *against * global warming?

2

I just read that book, and about a week later saw the Popular Science article that attacked it. It was pretty much what I expected; apparently Crichton cherry-picked his stats and quotes. PS said that his quote from one particular scientist was really one of three predictions the guy made, because he knew he was shooting in the dark. The fact that one of those three possibilites turned out to be off the mark isn’t damning, and in fact one of the other two has been fairly vindicated.

It reminds me of the responses to Phillip Johnson I’ve read, which boild down to, “Phil literally doesn’t understand the field and the meanings behind the terms we use.” It seems a bit of this was going on here, even with Crichton being bright enough to get through Harvard Med.

3

[QUOTE=Cardinal]
even with Crichton being bright enough to get through Harvard Med.
[/QUOTE]

Getting into a medical school, even a top one, doesn’t confer expertise in other areas of study. Nor does it signal genius (look at me for Og’s sake, I got two degrees from Johns Hopkins, and I work in a prison!)

I’m unaware if Crichton has actually kept up with medicine (I don’t believe he ever practiced, finding writing to be more lucrative), much less general scientific theory. The word on the net is that he’s more of a dabbler in popular science (like me) than a disciplined scholar. That’s hardly conclusive, but having read his books, it leaves me with the impression that he’s no scientific genius.

I respect a healthy skepticism, even (especially) about such things as Global Climate Change, but if one is going to beat the drum against a theory for which there is much credible evidence, one must have one’s ducks in a row!

4

a) I tried to read the book. Threw it away about halfway through.
b) Opinion: largely unsubstantiated crap, which is what the global warming crowd is often accused of. I didn’t find it convincing at all.

5

The contributors to www.realclimate.org, a moderated news-and-discussion site where actual scientists talk about the science of climate change at both research and popular levels, have provided a lot of refutations of the claims in Crichton’s book. This page is a good introduction.

This is what they say about the OP’s example of cooling in the interior of Antarctica:

6

[QUOTE=Qadgop the Mercotan]
Getting into a medical school, even a top one, doesn’t confer expertise in other areas of study. Nor does it signal genius (look at me for Og’s sake, I got two degrees from Johns Hopkins, and I work in a prison!)

I’m unaware if Crichton has actually kept up with medicine (I don’t believe he ever practiced, finding writing to be more lucrative), much less general scientific theory. The word on the net is that he’s more of a dabbler in popular science (like me) than a disciplined scholar. That’s hardly conclusive, but having read his books, it leaves me with the impression that he’s no scientific genius.
[/QUOTE]
Oh, you’re right. I guess I expected a Harvard “doctor” to do better at realizing that people are talking about overall trends and not every example he can think of. He seemed to try to invalidate the generalities with the few exceptions.

7

I was thinking of listing this in the “worst book you ever read” thread. Mostly because it bills itself as a novel and is just an extremely poor attempt at story telling to disguise thinly-supported political beliefs.
We really ought to file a class-action lawsuit against Crichton and publisher for fraud, for selling this as a novel. I bought it thinking there would be a story in itl.

8

I haven’t read the book, so I don’t have an opinion on that of course.

“Global warming” is just an observation. If you look at the data, it shows that the earth on average has been getting warmer since we’ve been collecting data on the temperature. The exact amount of warming depends on whose data you are using, but mostly if you graph the data you end up with something like this:

http://carto.eu.org/IMG/arton2480.jpg

It seems pretty clear that the earth is getting warmer, at a few tenths of a degree C per century. Very few people are arguing over this. It’s when you ask “why” that all of the arguments start.

Chriton has his opinion, and lots of scientists have their opinions. The scientist’s opinions tend to carry a bit more weight, but they are still just opinions. I don’t think anyone understands the complexities of the earth’s atmosphere enough to say for certain at this point.

There are a few interesting things to think about.

  1. The rise in temperature corresponds very well with the rise in the amount of pollutants that we shove up into the air. This alone is very suspicious.

  2. Average earth temperature changes usually occur very slowly. A few tenths of a degree spread over a hundred years doesn’t sound like much, but it’s fairly dramatic compared to the way the earth normally works. Normally the earth stays within a few tenths of a degree C over thousands if not millions of years.

  3. The earth’s temperature is abnormally low compared to what it was through most of the earth’s history. We might just be experiencing some sort of recovery.

  4. If we are experiencing some sort of “recovery”, it’s quite possible that the change in temperature back to a more “normal” earth could be rather catastrophic to the existing life on earth, which has grown accustomed to the cold.

  5. Overheating of the earth, particularly around the equator, is thought by some scientists to be responsible for at least one major extinction event in the earth’s history.

  6. For millions and millions of years, the temperature over a wide area of the earth was much more uniform than it is now. Picture basically Forida and New York having the same temperature, with much milder winters and summers. Scientists really don’t know why the earth was this way, or what made it change to the way it is now.

This graph is fairly interesting: http://static.flickr.com/50/112747981_6990ff2b33_o.jpg
It shows the average temperature and CO2 levels over the past 800 million years. It makes it look like the earth should be hovering somewhere around 20 deg C, which is much hotter than the 14 deg C or so that it is now.

9

[QUOTE=Kimstu]
The contributors to www.realclimate.org, a moderated news-and-discussion site where actual scientists talk about the science of climate change at both research and popular levels, have provided a lot of refutations of the claims in Crichton’s book. This page is a good introduction.

This is what they say about the OP’s example of cooling in the interior of Antarctica:
[/QUOTE]

Kimstu, the missing part in your recommendation of realclimate is that they ruthlessly censor scientists and others who do not agree with their views. This leaves the impression of science and consensus on the site, when in fact neither one exists. See here for more details.

w.

10

It was a good book, but I should say I’m not a global warming expert. I have an opinion about it – nothing more. Without become a bona fide expert (a tried and true expert) there’s not really any way any of us can say it’s bullshit or not. It’s not like quantum physics where we’re free to reproduce the results we want. It’s all data analysis, and both sides can pick and choose the data that they want to show. Climate change isn’t a science per se; it’s the study of data, and it’s open to interpretation.

One of the key arguments in the book has the ring of truth – you hear the side of the story that has the best resources to tell you that story, and there are a lot of political and financial reasons to come out on the side of global warning being true. Global warming is expressed as true daily in the press. It’s the only side of the story we hear. Is it any wonder that we immediately discount the other side without being experts?

There’s just too much data and it all points both ways. Yeah, Pit me, but none of us is an expert. Is there any reasonable way to do a double blind analysis of all of the data?

11

I don’t think this is quite what you meant to say. We aren’t free to reproduce the results we want; we’re only free to reproduce the experiments we want, which then produce whatever results they produce (which is admittedly better than climatology, where there’s very little one can do in the way of controlled experiments). You probably knew this and just mis-typed it, but there’s enough BS out there from people who think that quantum mechanics is about psychic control of experiments, or other such bleep, that I thought a pre-emptive strike was in order.

Have you ever seen the funding for those think-tanks which deny anthropogenic global warming? There are a lot of huge corporations there. People accepting the truth of anthropogenic global warming would have a strong negative effect on the bottom line of any industry which produces or uses fossil fuels. To the extent that money tells the story, it just makes the case for anthropic global warming stronger: It’s strong enough that the word can get out despite a much better-funded opposition.

12

[QUOTE=engineer_comp_geek]

This graph is fairly interesting: http://static.flickr.com/50/112747981_6990ff2b33_o.jpg
It shows the average temperature and CO2 levels over the past 800 million years. It makes it look like the earth should be hovering somewhere around 20 deg C, which is much hotter than the 14 deg C or so that it is now.
[/QUOTE]

Where did this data come from? My understanding is that ice core samples from Greenland only go back 400 000 years. They present data more like this, showing that temperature and carbon dioxide levels follow a more regular pattern.
Any ideas why the first graph is so drastically different?

13

Well, to get into a detailed discussion of opinions on the reliability or objectivity of www.realclimate.org would probably take us outside the strictly factual perspective of the General Questions forum.

You say that they “censor scientists and others who do not agree with their views”. AFAICT, the realclimate.org contributors and most other climate scientists would say instead that they decline to publish material that contains significant scientific errors. These opposing claims can be debated, but this is probably not the place to debate them.

? Sorry, I couldn’t get your link (Is Gavin Schmidt Honest? « Climate Audit) to work; all I got was a blank page.

14

[QUOTE=engineer_comp_geek]
I haven’t read the book, so I don’t have an opinion on that of course.

“Global warming” is just an observation. If you look at the data, it shows that the earth on average has been getting warmer since we’ve been collecting data on the temperature.
[/quote]
Actually, we have fairly reliable data on world temperatures going back at least two thousand years, and the trend is consistent.

[QUOTE=engineer_comp_geek]
The exact amount of warming depends on whose data you are using, but mostly if you graph the data you end up with something like this:

http://carto.eu.org/IMG/arton2480.jpg

It seems pretty clear that the earth is getting warmer, at a few tenths of a degree C per century. Very few people are arguing over this. It’s when you ask “why” that all of the arguments start.
[/quote]
There’s two loud arguments: whether it’s substantially anthropogenic is just the somewhat less nonsensical of the two. But there are still plenty of people claiming that global warming just does not exist at all or at least is not a danger. None of those arguments are particularly mainstream; they’ve pretty much been marginalized by the scientifically rational.

[QUOTE=engineer_comp_geek]
Chriton has his opinion, and lots of scientists have their opinions.
[/quote]
Crichton does not have the luxury or the knowledge base to form anything other than a mere personal opinion on this subject. There is zero justification for giving him the benefit of the doubt here. He cherry-picked his data quite disingenuously in order to justify his marginal personal opinion and get the answer he wanted to believe all along. He has great contempt for environmentalists, possibly due to his links to libertarianism (he recieved at least one award from a libertarian pseudo-science organization), and it should come as no surprise that an intellectually dishonest person will distort their views to serve their ideology.

[QUOTE=engineer_comp_geek]
The scientist’s opinions tend to carry a bit more weight, but they are still just opinions.
[/quote]
By that logic, everything is just an opinion: heliocentricity, gravity, that the sun shines. That’s not a useful model for discussion or debate, though.

[QUOTE=engineer_comp_geek]
I don’t think anyone understands the complexities of the earth’s atmosphere enough to say for certain at this point.
[/quote]
Just as no one understands the complexities of anything else to say for “certain”. But, as you well know, there are legitimate methods that allow us to approach certainty, and climate science is sufficiently advanced and understood to allow a very strong – if always provisional – finding that global warming is both real and extremely dangerous.

And don’t let the marginalized and ultimately futile debate about its anthropogenic nature keep anyone from acknowledging both that global warming is real and that humans can do something about it even in the extremely unlikely case that humans didn’t make a significant contribution to solving the problem. We’ve been doing a bang-up job already in producing a significant – though only temporary – reduction in the global warming problem by mindlessly throwing particulate pollution into the atmosphere. That particulate pollution (and only that part of our pollution) is responsible for what some call “global cooling”. Alas, it’s a no-win situation. It’s only valuable for a short-term delay in the catastrophe we face.

[QUOTE=engineer_comp_geek]
There are a few interesting things to think about.

  1. The rise in temperature corresponds very well with the rise in the amount of pollutants that we shove up into the air. This alone is very suspicious.
    [/quote]
    I don’t understand you. There is something of an inverse correlation as described just above; is that what you meant? In any case, I don’t understand the nature or cause of your suspicion.

[QUOTE=engineer_comp_geek]
3. The earth’s temperature is abnormally low compared to what it was through most of the earth’s history. We might just be experiencing some sort of recovery.

  1. If we are experiencing some sort of “recovery”, it’s quite possible that the change in temperature back to a more “normal” earth could be rather catastrophic to the existing life on earth, which has grown accustomed to the cold.
    [/quote]
    I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at with the idea of a “recovery”, but in any case, as you suggest, unless we act and act now, we’re doomed in a very short amount of time – recovery or not.
15

[QUOTE=intention]
Kimstu, the missing part in your recommendation of realclimate is that they ruthlessly censor scientists and others who do not agree with their views. This leaves the impression of science and consensus on the site, when in fact neither one exists. See here for more details.

w.
[/QUOTE]
That’s just a canard, and a tiresome one at that. It’s routinely used by crackpots and… well, pretty much exclusively crackpots. Joe Newman of so-called “free energy” infamy said the same thing, as do most every perpetual motion “inventor” and just about everyone who thinks they’ve “proved” relativity or quantum mechanics or the laws of thermodynamic to be false.

But the idea that every organization and every publication has to include the views of dissenters (to use the polite term; I’ll still call them “crackpots”) is as crazy as the “dissenters” themselves usually are.

16

[QUOTE=Balthisar]
It was a good book, but I should say I’m not a global warming expert. I have an opinion about it – nothing more. Without become a bona fide expert (a tried and true expert) there’s not really any way any of us can say it’s bullshit or not.
[/quote]
Well, I know one thing that can be called bullshit. Everyone must rely on expert scientific consensus in everything outside our own tiny and ever-shrinking personal areas of expertise (assuming we have any). Are you telling us that we can’t say that perpetual motion machines are bullshit unless we’re “tried and true experts” in the relevant areas of physics? Or that we can’t consider ghosts and other pseudo-scientific claims to be bullshit unless we’re expert “parapsychologists”? Are you telling us that we’re not allowed to reliably hold that global warming is both real and a serious threat from careful reading of the relevant scientific literature unless we’re “tried and true experts”?

[QUOTE=Balthisar]
It’s not like quantum physics where we’re free to reproduce the results we want. It’s all data analysis, and both sides can pick and choose the data that they want to show. Climate change isn’t a science per se; it’s the study of data, and it’s open to interpretation.
[/quote]
There are few scientific domains in which scientists are “free to reproduce” results on demand. By your logic, they’re all just analyzing data, all just studying data, all “just choosing the data that they want to show”!! There’s no reason to conclude that climate science is in any way less scientific than just about any other science. Your argument could come just as easily from Creationists complaining about evolutionary science – and it has!

[QUOTE=Balthisar]
One of the key arguments in the book has the ring of truth – you hear the side of the story that has the best resources to tell you that story, and there are a lot of political and financial reasons to come out on the side of global warning being true. Global warming is expressed as true daily in the press.
[/quote]
YIKES! Are you actually claiming that the overwhelming, outrageous steaming bulk of the money and power does NOT come down on the side OPPOSING the reality of global warming? Is that just what you said?? Wow! You desperately need a new broker! I’m guessing the advice they gave you about flying pig husbandry didn’t work out so great.

May I ask for a cite showing that the few scientific climate journals and the occasional general-press article about global warming – which almost always includes the anti-global-warming viewpoint (editors somehow think that’s being “neutral”, as if we should include the flat-earth viewpoint when it comes to heliocentricity) – make even a significant fraction of the money to be made by oil companies and most other energy producers and utilities by denying global warming? 'Cause I’d sure like to read your citations on that!

[QUOTE=Balthisar]
It’s the only side of the story we hear.
[/quote]
So you’re telling us that just about every newspaper and magazine article on the subject doesn’t include the anti-global warming viewpoint? I guess I was hallucinating when I read all that blatantly biased anti-GW nonsense, then.

[QUOTE=Balthisar]
There’s just too much data and it all points both ways.
[/quote]
No, it doesn’t. All the credible, scientifically reliable data shows that global warming is real and dangerous. It’s only the bullshitters with monetary biases that claim to “show” otherwise.

[QUOTE=Balthisar]
Is there any reasonable way to do a double blind analysis of all of the data?
[/QUOTE]
Double-blind analyses are required for dealing pretty much only with the placebo effect and similar areas where significant personal-emotional issues can’t be better compensated for. Climate science is not one of those domains. You don’t do double-blind analyses in physics (and climate science is just a branch of physics). There are better ways in dealing with emotional biases outside of psychology and medicine, and climatologists are using them.

17

[QUOTE=Cardinal]
I just read that book, and about a week later saw the Popular Science article that attacked it. It was pretty much what I expected; apparently Crichton cherry-picked his stats and quotes. PS said that his quote from one particular scientist was really one of three predictions the guy made, because he knew he was shooting in the dark. The fact that one of those three possibilites turned out to be off the mark isn’t damning, and in fact one of the other two has been fairly vindicated.
[/QUOTE]
Cyclical changes in climate and weather occur over time and have had as a matter of record.
The Pop-Sci and Pop-Mech. mags publish a lot of bs slants to engage the readership.
I’ve been reading and subscribing to both off and on since the mid-thirties and they are off center as much as on. Their recent article (Nov.) on hydrogen is a case in point as it is a controversial subject.

18

[QUOTE=ambushed]

I don’t understand you. There is something of an inverse correlation as described just above; is that what you meant? In any case, I don’t understand the nature or cause of your suspicion.
[/QUOTE]

Ambushed, I think you mis-read e_c_g’s post (or else I did). I think e_c_g was merely recapping, in a quite rational way, what we do and don’t know about global climate, not saying that global warming is BS, as you seem to have read it. Hence, the fact that temperature rise correlates with pollution increase makes one suspect that humans are, in fact, causing/accelerating global warming.

19

[QUOTE=toadspittle]
Ambushed, I think you mis-read e_c_g’s post (or else I did). I think e_c_g was merely recapping, in a quite rational way, what we do and don’t know about global climate, not saying that global warming is BS, as you seem to have read it. Hence, the fact that temperature rise correlates with pollution increase makes one suspect that humans are, in fact, causing/accelerating global warming.
[/QUOTE]
Okay, thanks. I clearly didn’t understand what he was getting at with the “suspicious” statement, but I’m sure you’ve got it right.

I did understand that engineer_comp_geek wasn’t disputing global warming, but there were a few odd remarks that I thought I’d probably should point out to see if e_c_g wanted to restate anything.

20

[QUOTE=spingears]
Cyclical changes in climate and weather occur over time and have had as a matter of record.
The Pop-Sci and Pop-Mech. mags publish a lot of bs slants to engage the readership.
I’ve been reading and subscribing to both off and on since the mid-thirties and they are off center as much as on. Their recent article (Nov.) on hydrogen is a case in point as it is a controversial subject.
[/QUOTE]

I agree that Popular Mechanics is not a reliable source. However, Science, Nature, and the overwhelming majority of scientists actually studying climate are.

Of course, it’s probably true that, as Balthisar says, the real story has been quashed. I mean what chance do Exxon, Mobil, General Electric and the Office of the Vice President of the United States have to get out the truth when up against the awesome economic and political might of, um, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Penguin Appreciation Society. You almost feel sorry for those poor, resourceless CEOs and Vice-Presidents valiantly trying to do what’s best for the world, whatever the cost to their own companies.