Soccer Dad

Dismissing crichton

I have to admit that I wasn't overly familiar with Michael Crichton. When I was younger I read "The Andromeda Strain." I was also aware that he was a skeptic about global warming. A critic at the New York Times uses this to accuse Crichton of violating an understanding a writer of science fiction has with his fans.

"State of Fear," in 2004, was a thriller about unlikely allies (including an environmental lawyer and a researcher turned undercover agent) who find an ecoterrorism group staging natural disasters to exaggerate the effects of global warming. But it was also a platform for Mr. Crichton to dismiss scientific concerns about climate change.

Mr. Crichton included many footnoted references to a selection of actual data -- rates of sea-level rise, frequencies of hurricanes -- as well as bibliographies and direct comments to the reader ("the people of 2100 will be much richer than we are," for example). All of this advanced a thesis: that global warming isn't as drastic as the scientific community says, that its man-made origins can't be proved and that the debate around it has become too politicized. This argument earned Mr. Crichton invitations to visit the Bush White House, and to testify before the Senate. It also elicited harsh judgments from research and policy groups that said he had misinterpreted or misused data, and had politicized the debate himself.

But here's how Crichton described the nature of the global warming movement:

As the twentieth century drew to a close, the connection between hard scientific fact and public policy became increasingly elastic. In part this was possible because of the complacency of the scientific profession; in part because of the lack of good science education among the public; in part, because of the rise of specialized advocacy groups which have been enormously effective in getting publicity and shaping policy; and in great part because of the decline of the media as an independent assessor of fact. The deterioration of the American media is dire loss for our country. When distinguished institutions like the New York Times can no longer differentiate between factual content and editorial opinion, but rather mix both freely on their front page, then who will hold anyone to a higher standard?

And so, in this elastic anything-goes world where science-or non-science-is the hand maiden of questionable public policy, we arrive at last at global warming. It is not my purpose here to rehash the details of this most magnificent of the demons haunting the world. I would just remind you of the now-familiar pattern by which these things are established. Evidentiary uncertainties are glossed over in the unseemly rush for an overarching policy, and for grants to support the policy by delivering findings that are desired by the patron. Next, the isolation of those scientists who won't get with the program, and the characterization of those scientists as outsiders and "skeptics" in quotation marks-suspect individuals with suspect motives, industry flunkies, reactionaries, or simply anti-environmental nutcases. In short order, debate ends, even though prominent scientists are uncomfortable about how things are being done.

When did "skeptic" become a dirty word in science? When did a skeptic require quotation marks around it?

To an outsider, the most significant innovation in the global warming controversy is the overt reliance that is being placed on models. Back in the days of nuclear winter, computer models were invoked to add weight to a conclusion: "These results are derived with the help of a computer model." But now large-scale computer models are seen as generating data in themselves. No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world-increasingly, models provide the data. As if they were themselves a reality. And indeed they are, when we are projecting forward. There can be no observational data about the year 2100. There are only model runs.

Overall the speech from which those paragraphs are taken, is a history of mistaken science and how non-scientific concepts are used to prove scientific "fact." It's a fascinating read. While he didn''t provide particulars of how global warming got "proven," Crichton did show the path it took to acceptance and illustrated his argument with other examples of scientific "consensus" from history.

In fact, what Crichton did wasn't so much "dismiss scientific concerns" as show that in the global warming debate, science takes a back seat to politics.

I did not read State of Fear, but as we are now in an unpredicted ten year break from global warming after which, we are assured, global warming will resume with a vengeance color me skeptical too about those "scientific concerns." They may be concerns, but they're not scientific.