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Some strong comments from John Holdren, director of the science, technology and public policy program at Harvard’s JFK School of Government. Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Holdren was talking about media coverage of climate change science: “You know, Michael Crichton, who has become one of the most prominent skeptics in the country, was brought by Senator Inhofe as his chief science witness at a hearing about climate science. I mean, this is a lapsed physician turned science fiction writer, who has the colossal arrogance to say under oath in a hearing when asked by Senator Feinstein, ‘Dr. Crichton, do you actually believe that your understanding of this matter is superior to that of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences?’ To which he happily answered yes. There’s no penalty for that kind of colossal combination of arrogance and ignorance unless you happen to be a scientist. There is a penalty for that sort of thing if you are a scientist. And that puts the scientists at a significant disadvantage in this kind of interaction.”
—Steve Mirsky, at the AAAS conference in Boston
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10 Comments
Add CommentFools will always look for their king, and if being "like-minded" is a strong criterion, then do legitimate scientists ever have a chance?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLike it or not climate change is political, not science. It's the religion that Crighton says it is, climate changes all the time, ever day, every century, every thousand years. The simple fact is: global warming is bullshit, and the only "scientists" who buy the bullshit are sucking from the government teat of grant money.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this> climate changes all the time
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAgreed. The ice age comes to mind.
> ...sucking from the government teat of grant money
Following the money is a good way to find polical biases. Somehow though, I'd guess there's more in it for the oil industry than science grants.
Al Gore is reported as having said on March 21, 2007 before a US House committee: "The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor [...] if your doctor tells you you need to intervene here, you don't say 'Well, I read a science fiction novel that tells me it's not a problem.'"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe above is from Wikipedia if you look up Michael Crichton.
Crichton simply doesn't have a handle on the scope of time and the weight of the variables. I watched him on Charlie Rose recently. It was obvious to me that his sense of relative values is not calibrated very well.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCrichton and Gore are in the front rank of science politics, a feature of climate science that cannot be avoided. Too much money is involved: money for grants, promotion within institutions, money the public is urged to spend or give up to reduce greenhouse gases.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisClimate science seems a special world in which little is done to assure the reliability of data and procedures used to verify the basis for public action. The IRS, SEC and FDA require companies to provide data documenting claims about their past, present and future. Why then are academics permitted to conceal data, statistical procedures and computer code? Some adjustments to data, such as satellite data, are well founded. Other data and data adjustments are poorly documented and raw data hard to find.
The public is being asked to rely on faith in scientists, not on science.
We cannot be sure that alarmist claims are not based on sloppy work or the bandwaggon effect.
Fred Colbourne (M.S. Earth Science)
What is the definition of an alarmist? If someone legitimately believes there is a danger, are they wrong to try to bring it to other people's attention?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHuman induced climate change is real; you can nit-pick at any one indicator, but if you look at the set of indicators as a whole, they are overwhelming.
The physics are simple: Atmospheric CO2 (etc) traps energy. (It has to due with the inbound wavelengths versus outbound wavelengths.) Humans have dumped many gigatons of carbon into the biosphere that had previously been sequestered underground. (That carbon falls into a low-energy chemical state by bonding with oxygen; so, it stays there a while.) The mean global temperature is rising. You have something that is known to cause an effect and you have the effect. They are closely correlated in time. It's foolishness to say they have nothing to do with each other.
I watched Crichton say that we should spend money on helping the hungry and poor instead of climate change. Helping those less fortunate is certainly a worthy cause, but let us consider the circumstances. Why are these people hungry? Let's consider the possibility that they aren't able to grow enough food to feed the population. Let's further postulate that the farmers in the population are relatively good at optimizing the amount of food that they can grow under the prevailing climate conditions in the area where they live. So, if the climate changes, or worse, simply becomes unstable or unpredictable, will they be able to grow more food, or less, in general? Less seems to be the obvious answer. How much less depends on how much change and how long it takes to happen.
Anyone who's lived around agriculture can tell you that any unusual weather is generally bad for the harvest. Too little rain during growth, too much rain during harvest, too warm in the winter, too cold in the spring, or too hot in the summer, these are all bad things as far as farmers are concerned. The devil is not in the fact that things change, but in how quickly they change. My main worry is about if the climate will change faster than our agriculture systems and infrastructure can adapt. Wheat farmers can't become potato farmers overnight. They can learn new methods and convert their equipment over time, but the financial drain is enormous. If the wet/dry, hot/cold cycles become unpredictable, forget it.
The earth, and most likely humans too, will survive whatever we do, but the time of change from one point of relative stability to the next is not going to be a pleasant time to live through.
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Edited by Chris G at 02/28/2008 11:24 AM
"Senator Feinstein, Dr. Crichton, do you actually believe that your understanding of this matter is superior to that of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOk, so then, does Gore? Clearly he thinks he's a scientist and has the proper credentials to be an authority on it. And what does the US Nat. Acad. of Sciences think of the "science" in Gore's movie?
Al Gore got a Nobel prize for fiction, yet everyone regards him as the Messiah of the New Church of AGW. As to Crichton's "colossal ego" for challenging the National Academy of Sciences, well too bad for the Academy. If they can't handle the questionings of a lowly scribe, maybe they should ask themselves why invoking closure is so critical to their movement. After all, a lowly patent clerk challenged the established dogma and changed how we think about the world, and he was no Einstein.... oh wait a minute... yes he was..
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you have think you understand how science works, take this quick quiz:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1. Consensus matter - True or False?
2. Computer models are evidence - True or False?
If you answered "True" To any of the above statements, you flunk science.