![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
~
Gregg Easterbrook, an acerbic student of eco-pessimism, offers a "Law of Doomsaying": Predict catastrophe no later than 10 years hence but no sooner than five years away -- soon enough to terrify, but far enough off that people will forget if you are wrong. Because Crichton remembers yesterday's discarded certitudes, millions of his readers will be wholesomely skeptical of today's.
-- George F. Will for The Washington Post
Mr. Will uses his column space today to sing the praises of Michael Crichton's new novel, State of Fear. It is apparently about global warming and how activists manipulate issues and data for their causes, and most interestingly, Mr. Crichton's angle is to depict the environmentalists as the bad guys who try to use fear to have their way, creating a bogey man of global warming.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Monk is among the vast array of progressives who see global warming as a dark and ominous symptom of corrupt corporate domination. Although one finds Crichton's prose style to be hardly more than functional, Monk is tempted to give this novel a read, in the interest of taking a better look at the other side through a more reader-friendly medium. It promises to be an interesting book.
___ ___ ___
In today's segmented America, Michael Crichton's new novel, "State of Fear," might seem to be reading just for red states. Granted, a character resembling Martin Sheen -- Crichton's character is a prototypical Hollywood liberal who plays the president in a television series -- meets an appropriately grisly fate. But blue states, too -- no, especially -- need Crichton's fable about the ecology of public opinion.
"State of Fear," with a first printing of 1.5 million copies, resembles Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" -- about 6 million copies sold since 1957 -- as a political broadside woven into an entertaining story. But whereas Rand had only an idea -- a good one (capitalism is splendid), but only one -- Crichton has information. "State of Fear" is the world's first page turner that people will want to read in one gulp (a long gulp: 600 pages, counting appendices) even though it has lots of real scientific graphs, and footnotes citing journals such as Progress in Physical Geography and Transactions -- American Geophysical Union.
Crichton's subject is today's fear that global warming will cause catastrophic climate change, a belief now so conventional that it seems to require no supporting data. Crichton's subject is also how conventional wisdom is manufactured in a credulous and media-drenched society.
Various factions have interests -- monetary, political, even emotional -- in cultivating fears. The fears invariably seem to require more government subservience to environmentalists and more government supervision of our lives.
Crichton's villains are environmental hysterics who are innocent of information but overflowing with certitudes and moral vanity. His heroes resemble Navy SEALs tenured at MIT, foiling the villains with guns and graphs.
The villains are frustrated because the data do not prove that global warming is causing rising sea levels and other catastrophes. So they concoct high-tech schemes to manufacture catastrophes they can ascribe to global warming -- flash floods in the American West, the calving of an Antarctic iceberg 100 miles across, and a tsunami that would roar at 500 mph across the Pacific and smash California's coast on the last day of a Los Angeles conference on abrupt climate change.
The theory of global warming -- Crichton says warming has amounted to just half a degree Celsius in 100 years -- is that "greenhouse gases," particularly carbon dioxide, trap heat on Earth, causing . . . well, no one knows what, or when. Crichton's heroic skeptics delight in noting such things as the decline of global temperatures from 1940 to 1970. And that since 1970, glaciers in Iceland have been advancing. And that Antarctica is getting colder and its ice is getting thicker.
Last week Fiona Harvey, the Financial Times' environmental correspondent, fresh from yet another international confabulation on climate change, wrote that while Earth's cloud cover "is thought" to have increased recently, no one knows whether this is good or bad. Is the heat-trapping by the clouds' water vapor greater or less than the sun's heat reflected back off the clouds into space?
Climate-change forecasts, Harvey writes, are like financial forecasts but involve a vastly more complex array of variables. The climate forecasts, based on computer models analyzing the past, tell us that we do not know how much warming is occurring, whether it is a transitory episode or how much warming is dangerous -- or perhaps beneficial.
One of the good guys in "State of Fear" cites Montaigne's axiom: "Nothing is so firmly believed as that which least is known." Which is why 30 years ago the fashionable panic was about global cooling. The New York Times (Aug. 14, 1975) reported "many signs" that "Earth may be heading for another ice age." Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned about "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation." "Continued rapid cooling of the Earth" (Global Ecology, 1971) could herald "a full-blown 10,000-year ice age" (Science, March 1, 1975). The Christian Science Monitor reported (Aug. 27, 1974) that Nebraska's armadillos were retreating south from the cooling.
Last week The Post reported that global warming has caused a decline in Alaska's porcupine caribou herd and has lured the golden orange prothonotary warbler back from southern wintering grounds to Richmond a day earlier for nearly two decades. Or since global cooling stopped. Maybe.
Gregg Easterbrook, an acerbic student of eco-pessimism, offers a "Law of Doomsaying": Predict catastrophe no later than 10 years hence but no sooner than five years away -- soon enough to terrify, but far enough off that people will forget if you are wrong. Because Crichton remembers yesterday's discarded certitudes, millions of his readers will be wholesomely skeptical of today's.
-- George F. Will, "Global Warming? Hot Air"
***********
(December 24, 2004)
And here is a contrary review. Monk wanted to do some more checking before getting the book, and now he is disinclined to have a go at it.
...........
The odious villains in Michael Crichton's new thriller, the folks (as President Bush might put it) who kill, maim and terrorize, aren't members of Al Qaeda or any other jihadi movement. They aren't Bondian bad guys like Goldfinger, Dr. No or Scaramanga. They aren't drug lords or gang members or associates of Tony Soprano.
No, the evil ones in ''State of Fear'' are tree-hugging environmentalists, believers in global warming, proponents of the Kyoto Protocol. Their surveillance operatives drive politically correct, hybrid Priuses; their hit men use an exotic, poisonous Australian octopus as their weapon of choice. Their unwitting (and sometimes, witting) allies are -- natch! -- the liberal media, trial lawyers, Hollywood celebrities, mainstream environmental groups (like the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society) and other blue-state apparatchiks.
This might all be very amusing as a ''Saturday Night Live'' sketch, but Mr. Crichton doesn't seem to have amusement on his mind. This thriller comes equipped with footnotes, charts, an authorial manifesto and two appendixes (''Why Politicized Science Is Dangerous'' and ''Sources of Data for Graphs'').
The novel itself reads like a shrill, preposterous right-wing answer to this year's shrill, preposterous but campily entertaining global warming disaster movie ''The Day After Tomorrow.'' In that special effects extravaganza, global warming (its dangers ignored by a Dick Cheneyesque vice president) is the enemy, leading to deadly climate changes and disturbances in the weather that leave New York flooded and frozen, and Los Angeles beset by swarms of killer tornadoes.
In Mr. Crichton's ham-handed novel, the dangers of global warming are nothing but a lot of hype: scare scenarios, promoted by shameless environmentalists eager to use bad science to raise money and draw attention to their cause. For that matter, the ludicrous plot revolves around efforts by radical members of an environmental group called NERF (National Environmental Resource Fund) to surreptitiously trigger a series of natural disasters including a supersize hurricane and a giant tsunami that would hit California with 60-foot waves; these disasters would be timed to coincide with the group's big media conference, thereby awakening the public to the dangers of climate change wrought by global warming.
As in earlier Crichton books, the characters in this novel practically come with Post-it notes on their foreheads indicating whether they are good guys or bad guys. The radical leaders of the environmentalists -- including the head of NERF, Nicholas Drake, an ascetic Ralph Nader type -- are ruthless control freaks (in another novel, they might well have been greedy corporate tycoons or power-mad politicians). Their followers are a bunch of self-righteous bubble-headed Gulfstream liberals, Hollywood types who drive sport utility vehicles while preaching the virtues of gasoline conservation. One tree-hugger, who will meet a particularly horrifying fate, shares the résumé of the real-life actor and activist Martin Sheen: he is best known for having played the president of the United States in a once-popular television show.
As for Mr. Crichton's good guys -- the people trying to thwart the nefarious NERF plot to wreak natural destruction in the name of saving the planet -- they are led by a brainy former M.I.T. professor named John Kenner, who, it's suggested, knows everything about everything. Kenner is accompanied on his global peregrinations by a ''Jurassic Park''-like crew of handsome young people, who prove adept at surviving all manner of perils, from frostbite in Antarctica to death by multiple lightning strikes to captivity by cannibals in the South Pacific. People say standard-issue thriller things like ''Time is short, Sarah. Very short.'' That is, when they aren't dropping scientific terms like ''cavitation units'' and ''propagation time.''
One subplot in ''State of Fear'' involves the disappearance or death of a wealthy contributor to NERF; another, a proposed lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency to be filed by a small Pacific island nation. Half movie treatment, half ideological screed, ''State of Fear'' careers between action set pieces (the requisite car chases, shootouts and narrow escapes from grisly ends) and talky disquisitions full of technical language and cherry-picked facts meant to hammer home the author's points. And Mr. Crichton does indeed have a message, as an afterword titled ''Author's Message'' attests. Among his stated beliefs: ''I suspect the people of 2100 will be much richer than we are, consume more energy, have a smaller global population and enjoy more wilderness than we have today. I don't think we have to worry about them.'' And: ''I blame environmental organizations every bit as much as developers and strip miners'' for current failures in wilderness management.
In an appendix, he goes on to draw parallels between global warming theories and the notorious theory of eugenics floated a century ago: ''I am not arguing that global warming is the same as eugenics. But the similarities are not superficial. And I do claim that open and frank discussion of the data, and of the issues, is being suppressed.''Given these dogmatic assertions and his lumbering efforts to make the novel's story line illustrate these theories, it seems disingenuous in the extreme of Mr. Crichton to claim: ''Everybody has an agenda. Except me.'' Of course, he could simply be trying (like some of the characters in the novel) to drum up publicity for himself by being provocative and contrarian.
After all, it's hard to imagine people buying this sorry excuse for a thriller on its storytelling merits alone.
-- Michiko Kakutani for The NY Times
Gregg Easterbrook, an acerbic student of eco-pessimism, offers a "Law of Doomsaying": Predict catastrophe no later than 10 years hence but no sooner than five years away -- soon enough to terrify, but far enough off that people will forget if you are wrong. Because Crichton remembers yesterday's discarded certitudes, millions of his readers will be wholesomely skeptical of today's.
-- George F. Will for The Washington Post
Mr. Will uses his column space today to sing the praises of Michael Crichton's new novel, State of Fear. It is apparently about global warming and how activists manipulate issues and data for their causes, and most interestingly, Mr. Crichton's angle is to depict the environmentalists as the bad guys who try to use fear to have their way, creating a bogey man of global warming.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Monk is among the vast array of progressives who see global warming as a dark and ominous symptom of corrupt corporate domination. Although one finds Crichton's prose style to be hardly more than functional, Monk is tempted to give this novel a read, in the interest of taking a better look at the other side through a more reader-friendly medium. It promises to be an interesting book.
___ ___ ___
In today's segmented America, Michael Crichton's new novel, "State of Fear," might seem to be reading just for red states. Granted, a character resembling Martin Sheen -- Crichton's character is a prototypical Hollywood liberal who plays the president in a television series -- meets an appropriately grisly fate. But blue states, too -- no, especially -- need Crichton's fable about the ecology of public opinion.
"State of Fear," with a first printing of 1.5 million copies, resembles Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" -- about 6 million copies sold since 1957 -- as a political broadside woven into an entertaining story. But whereas Rand had only an idea -- a good one (capitalism is splendid), but only one -- Crichton has information. "State of Fear" is the world's first page turner that people will want to read in one gulp (a long gulp: 600 pages, counting appendices) even though it has lots of real scientific graphs, and footnotes citing journals such as Progress in Physical Geography and Transactions -- American Geophysical Union.
Crichton's subject is today's fear that global warming will cause catastrophic climate change, a belief now so conventional that it seems to require no supporting data. Crichton's subject is also how conventional wisdom is manufactured in a credulous and media-drenched society.
Various factions have interests -- monetary, political, even emotional -- in cultivating fears. The fears invariably seem to require more government subservience to environmentalists and more government supervision of our lives.
Crichton's villains are environmental hysterics who are innocent of information but overflowing with certitudes and moral vanity. His heroes resemble Navy SEALs tenured at MIT, foiling the villains with guns and graphs.
The villains are frustrated because the data do not prove that global warming is causing rising sea levels and other catastrophes. So they concoct high-tech schemes to manufacture catastrophes they can ascribe to global warming -- flash floods in the American West, the calving of an Antarctic iceberg 100 miles across, and a tsunami that would roar at 500 mph across the Pacific and smash California's coast on the last day of a Los Angeles conference on abrupt climate change.
The theory of global warming -- Crichton says warming has amounted to just half a degree Celsius in 100 years -- is that "greenhouse gases," particularly carbon dioxide, trap heat on Earth, causing . . . well, no one knows what, or when. Crichton's heroic skeptics delight in noting such things as the decline of global temperatures from 1940 to 1970. And that since 1970, glaciers in Iceland have been advancing. And that Antarctica is getting colder and its ice is getting thicker.
Last week Fiona Harvey, the Financial Times' environmental correspondent, fresh from yet another international confabulation on climate change, wrote that while Earth's cloud cover "is thought" to have increased recently, no one knows whether this is good or bad. Is the heat-trapping by the clouds' water vapor greater or less than the sun's heat reflected back off the clouds into space?
Climate-change forecasts, Harvey writes, are like financial forecasts but involve a vastly more complex array of variables. The climate forecasts, based on computer models analyzing the past, tell us that we do not know how much warming is occurring, whether it is a transitory episode or how much warming is dangerous -- or perhaps beneficial.
One of the good guys in "State of Fear" cites Montaigne's axiom: "Nothing is so firmly believed as that which least is known." Which is why 30 years ago the fashionable panic was about global cooling. The New York Times (Aug. 14, 1975) reported "many signs" that "Earth may be heading for another ice age." Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned about "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation." "Continued rapid cooling of the Earth" (Global Ecology, 1971) could herald "a full-blown 10,000-year ice age" (Science, March 1, 1975). The Christian Science Monitor reported (Aug. 27, 1974) that Nebraska's armadillos were retreating south from the cooling.
Last week The Post reported that global warming has caused a decline in Alaska's porcupine caribou herd and has lured the golden orange prothonotary warbler back from southern wintering grounds to Richmond a day earlier for nearly two decades. Or since global cooling stopped. Maybe.
Gregg Easterbrook, an acerbic student of eco-pessimism, offers a "Law of Doomsaying": Predict catastrophe no later than 10 years hence but no sooner than five years away -- soon enough to terrify, but far enough off that people will forget if you are wrong. Because Crichton remembers yesterday's discarded certitudes, millions of his readers will be wholesomely skeptical of today's.
-- George F. Will, "Global Warming? Hot Air"
***********
(December 24, 2004)
And here is a contrary review. Monk wanted to do some more checking before getting the book, and now he is disinclined to have a go at it.
...........
The odious villains in Michael Crichton's new thriller, the folks (as President Bush might put it) who kill, maim and terrorize, aren't members of Al Qaeda or any other jihadi movement. They aren't Bondian bad guys like Goldfinger, Dr. No or Scaramanga. They aren't drug lords or gang members or associates of Tony Soprano.
No, the evil ones in ''State of Fear'' are tree-hugging environmentalists, believers in global warming, proponents of the Kyoto Protocol. Their surveillance operatives drive politically correct, hybrid Priuses; their hit men use an exotic, poisonous Australian octopus as their weapon of choice. Their unwitting (and sometimes, witting) allies are -- natch! -- the liberal media, trial lawyers, Hollywood celebrities, mainstream environmental groups (like the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society) and other blue-state apparatchiks.
This might all be very amusing as a ''Saturday Night Live'' sketch, but Mr. Crichton doesn't seem to have amusement on his mind. This thriller comes equipped with footnotes, charts, an authorial manifesto and two appendixes (''Why Politicized Science Is Dangerous'' and ''Sources of Data for Graphs'').
The novel itself reads like a shrill, preposterous right-wing answer to this year's shrill, preposterous but campily entertaining global warming disaster movie ''The Day After Tomorrow.'' In that special effects extravaganza, global warming (its dangers ignored by a Dick Cheneyesque vice president) is the enemy, leading to deadly climate changes and disturbances in the weather that leave New York flooded and frozen, and Los Angeles beset by swarms of killer tornadoes.
In Mr. Crichton's ham-handed novel, the dangers of global warming are nothing but a lot of hype: scare scenarios, promoted by shameless environmentalists eager to use bad science to raise money and draw attention to their cause. For that matter, the ludicrous plot revolves around efforts by radical members of an environmental group called NERF (National Environmental Resource Fund) to surreptitiously trigger a series of natural disasters including a supersize hurricane and a giant tsunami that would hit California with 60-foot waves; these disasters would be timed to coincide with the group's big media conference, thereby awakening the public to the dangers of climate change wrought by global warming.
As in earlier Crichton books, the characters in this novel practically come with Post-it notes on their foreheads indicating whether they are good guys or bad guys. The radical leaders of the environmentalists -- including the head of NERF, Nicholas Drake, an ascetic Ralph Nader type -- are ruthless control freaks (in another novel, they might well have been greedy corporate tycoons or power-mad politicians). Their followers are a bunch of self-righteous bubble-headed Gulfstream liberals, Hollywood types who drive sport utility vehicles while preaching the virtues of gasoline conservation. One tree-hugger, who will meet a particularly horrifying fate, shares the résumé of the real-life actor and activist Martin Sheen: he is best known for having played the president of the United States in a once-popular television show.
As for Mr. Crichton's good guys -- the people trying to thwart the nefarious NERF plot to wreak natural destruction in the name of saving the planet -- they are led by a brainy former M.I.T. professor named John Kenner, who, it's suggested, knows everything about everything. Kenner is accompanied on his global peregrinations by a ''Jurassic Park''-like crew of handsome young people, who prove adept at surviving all manner of perils, from frostbite in Antarctica to death by multiple lightning strikes to captivity by cannibals in the South Pacific. People say standard-issue thriller things like ''Time is short, Sarah. Very short.'' That is, when they aren't dropping scientific terms like ''cavitation units'' and ''propagation time.''
One subplot in ''State of Fear'' involves the disappearance or death of a wealthy contributor to NERF; another, a proposed lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency to be filed by a small Pacific island nation. Half movie treatment, half ideological screed, ''State of Fear'' careers between action set pieces (the requisite car chases, shootouts and narrow escapes from grisly ends) and talky disquisitions full of technical language and cherry-picked facts meant to hammer home the author's points. And Mr. Crichton does indeed have a message, as an afterword titled ''Author's Message'' attests. Among his stated beliefs: ''I suspect the people of 2100 will be much richer than we are, consume more energy, have a smaller global population and enjoy more wilderness than we have today. I don't think we have to worry about them.'' And: ''I blame environmental organizations every bit as much as developers and strip miners'' for current failures in wilderness management.
In an appendix, he goes on to draw parallels between global warming theories and the notorious theory of eugenics floated a century ago: ''I am not arguing that global warming is the same as eugenics. But the similarities are not superficial. And I do claim that open and frank discussion of the data, and of the issues, is being suppressed.''Given these dogmatic assertions and his lumbering efforts to make the novel's story line illustrate these theories, it seems disingenuous in the extreme of Mr. Crichton to claim: ''Everybody has an agenda. Except me.'' Of course, he could simply be trying (like some of the characters in the novel) to drum up publicity for himself by being provocative and contrarian.
After all, it's hard to imagine people buying this sorry excuse for a thriller on its storytelling merits alone.
-- Michiko Kakutani for The NY Times
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-12-24 12:41 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2004-12-24 12:50 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2004-12-24 01:03 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2004-12-24 01:58 am (UTC)From:The weather is related to atmospheric composition, but we should also remember just how much it has changed in historical record. For instance, that the Sahara was a forest in Roman times; that in Roman times, the city of York was a place where you could grow grapes - not now possible without going a few hundred miles south; and that in the 17th century (1677) and 19th century (1895) the Thames froze over - quite a feat when you consider what was in the water at the time, and how it would have depressed the freezing point.
So there have been wider swings in temperature over the last two thousand years or so than we are now seeing; what is ominous, appears to be that the rate at which the average temperature is changing is unprecedented - or so it seems to me. Data, anyone?
I couldn't say whether anyone can 'prove' global warming is related to carbon emissions. However it can easily be proven that most of those who are against measures being taken have a stake in them not being taken; and it seems prudent and sensible to treat such a vital matter of concern as too dangerous to allow to go without an effort to rectify it.
If we pull the carbon and find after a decade or two that the world is still warming, it has gone beyond our control. If it stops warming, well, we maybe wrecked some parts of some economies (if we have no imagination or skill) but we get to keep the world.
What would be really worrying would be the prospect of the Arctic unfreezing; that would reduce the amount of light reflected back off the snow, causing more heat to be retained, and the change might be irreversible. Objective one is to act in such time that that is still preventable.
Meanwhile we haven't had a bad winter here in Sheffield for 17 years. Catch it while it lasts?
The Thames in 1677 (http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/MOLsite/piclib/pages/bigpicture.asp?id=14)
The Thames in the 19th century (http://www.ukweatherworld.co.uk/forum/thread-view.asp?threadid=16893&posts=12)
no subject
Date: 2004-12-24 02:56 am (UTC)From:As for your insatiable thirst for data, you might be interested in picking up the book yourself, as it is supposedly full of data and charts.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-24 03:06 am (UTC)From:I am not up to date with the data re global warming, hence my reticence to say more, but it seems proven that the atmosphere responds to what we are doing with it, given the rise and fall of the ozone hole in the south. How far the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is responsible for global warming would be beyond me to say, but one can see that if the relationship is at all likely, then dealing with it is of the utmost importance.
The first thing I know of that would make change apparently irreversible, is the Arctic ice sheet, whose disappearance would change the whole world's heat balance. That much is the condensed version of all I can say for sure. As for science, I am about as conventional as you can get.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-24 03:25 am (UTC)From:I think it a very bad thing if global warming is accepted without question - and the general population does nothing else, they don't have the data or the nous to interpret it (I don't know that I have either; it is a highly specialised area). But the ozone hole is an established phenomenon, and has responded to treatment; so we know that we can and do alter the atmosphere.
Prudence suggests that the case for controlling carbon emissions is strong; there are viable alternatives to carbon technology that are not being exploited. Maybe they are not quite as cheap, but the technological advances involved will probably have other benefits as well. One could take much the same measures simply in order to extend the lifetime of the worlds fossil fuel reserves, though it has to be said that in the 1980s it was commonly believed we would have run out of them already. That we haven't, is partly because we have learned to take the pain of increased energy prices.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-24 03:36 am (UTC)From:I'm wondering if there's some slight of hand here, with them having us focus on how there may not be real or significant global warming, and hence less reason to readjust on that basis, while avoiding the ozone hole which perhaps requires some of the same readjustments in our economy.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-24 04:27 am (UTC)From:Providing my somewhat old information is still correct (and the absence of 'hole' headlines suggests that this is so) that shows that we can control our atmosphere through appropriate action. That is all that we can learn from that incident. It can say nothing about the validity of global warming theories, which are quite separate.
It is easy to show that carbon dioxide levels influence the amount of heat retained by the earth, but harder to show how much, and what the effects will be in detail. Naturally there are those who are worried about this, and those who are worried about the effects of trying to do something about it. Predictions are based on computer models of the earths atmosphere, which can be checked against new data as time goes by; that new data is then used to refine the model and make it more accurate.
Almost all the money is worried about taking action, as it threatens existing industries with potentially expensive change. All the worry about the world, right or wrong, appears to be solely from scientific grounds; however not all scientific thought agrees that global warming is a significant problem.
I don't see that anyone has a vested interest in talking up global warming in despite of the evidence, except those who have money in wave power or solar energy.
The world is warming, but whether by enough to cause problems, and whether that is due primarily to carbon output or cyclical effects is debatable. The thing I most want to know is whether the rate of increase is unprecedented. That would be a convincing indicator to me. Reliable data about temperature variation going back millions of years can be inferred from a variety of sources.
Any judgements of mine must be restricted in scope, because I don't think if I read the data from a popular book it would convince me one way or the other; I would need more - in the academic journals - and in honesty it is not strictly my field, and I would be listening, not contributing. In science, first know what you don't know. But all of the above I can say with confidence.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-24 05:00 am (UTC)From:I think their argument is suggested in Will's comment, when he says, "Various factions have interests -- monetary, political, even emotional -- in cultivating fears. The fears invariably seem to require more government subservience to environmentalists and more government supervision of our lives."
At least in America, we are familiar with the conservative argument that much of liberal activism is about power, acquired through supposed demagoguery. Such is argued to be the case for the welfare system, in which liberals are said to have a vested interest in enlarging so that they can effectively wield more power and resources. This argument is also often made when it comes to our educational system, as the interested liberal parties are even called educrats - people supposedly more interested in getting bigger budgets while ostensibly being indifferent to results.
I think this is also the argument that conservatives make regarding environmentalists, or who they might label as the more extreme environmentalists, including those who harp on global warming. Hence, this is framed as being more of a real debate.
because I don't think if I read the data from a popular book it would convince me one way or the other
Seeing how you seem to be quite interested in the subject, it might be worth reading what promises to be a significant part of our cultural debate (like "The Da Vinci Code"), if nothing else. Moreover, I expect some of the data to be good, probably taken from academic journals, whether fairly or not I cannot say.
no subject
Date: 2004-12-24 08:17 am (UTC)From:The thing that remains of interest to me is the rate of change of global temperature - similar to the speed of a car rather than it's position on the road. That is the one statistic that would influence my opinion, because it would show that there was a clear cause for the supposed global warming effect, and the onus would then be on trying to find that cause; carbon emissions would be the obvious candidate, as they have increased rapidly.
The global temperature has varied a lot over recorded history, well outside the ranges we are getting now it appears, but I have no way of telling whether it is changing faster than it has done previously, except very limited news reports. These tend to confirm that temperature is changing faster than before, but not in the kind of detail I require.
However I still think there is a sound case for reducing dependence on fossil fuels as early as possible whether global warming exists or not; fossil fuels will run out, and whoever prepares themselves earliest, suffers least. The USA stands to be prime sufferer as the major oil importer.
Then there is the political case; not being held hostage over oil supplies by the worst people to deal with in the world - the Arabs.
I am usually ill disposed to believe that government agencies will spend money efficiently. They are set up in such a way as to do anything else instead, and are run by people who do not have the hard experience of having to risk their own money instead of other peoples. I seem to be a closet American. :)
It would be nice to have more time to read, but with the effective loss of Sarah I have more work than I can cope with, and all my leisure time gets spent with my children. Plus I am one of the slower readers you would find - long ago I made a decision to take my time over reading, which was probably for all the wrong reasons, but is hard to change at this stage. I enjoy reading very throughly, but plenty of people run through books at three times the speed I do. Another surprise for you? :)
I am guessing "the Da Vinci code" makes some claim about Da Vinci having encoded something highly remarkable in the content of his various and very copious works?
What gets me is the people who write about their wonderful new idea about Physics involving eleven dimensional realities and particles to suit. Then they go on to describe how to find those particles you would need particle accelerators the size of the universe. Excuse me while I yawn. They are peddling their imagination, until they can do some hard proof. A look backwards through the publications made in science quickly reveals that a lot of what is supposed is quickly found out not to be so. The public are not aware of what is conjecture and what is hard science. The Nobel committee are highly retrospective about awarding science prizes because it is often ten or twenty years until something revolutionary can genuinely be said to have been thoroughly proven as fact. But of course you can't sell a paperback about ideas that are twenty ideas old, only ones about things that are new but have a 90%+ chance of holding no water at all. The public don't realise this.