Michael Crichton: “Aliens Cause Global Warming”
This post is my first attempt at retrieving my old posts from the internet archives. In May of 2007, I posted this rebuttal to a speech by Michael Crichton.
Recently, my attention was directed to a speech by Michael Crichton, given at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, on January 17, 2003. I was told that, while this speech contained some of the usual fallacious skeptical arguments, there were also somewhat convincing ones. So, I’ve given it a read, and I’d like to address Crichton’s arguments.
In his lecture, Crichton spoke against “pseudoscience” and against science being too closely linked with politics. Crichton then provides several examples of what he considers to be bad science being accepted by the scientific community and the public. He starts with the the SETI project, which he considers to be a “religion”, saying that it opened the door for other “pernicious garbage”. Next, he tackles previous claims about a nuclear winter, second-hand smoke, and computer models, all of which he claims were foolish. Having established, in his mind anyways, that all of these previous examples were false, he then correlates the acceptance of these to the acceptance of global warming and provides his own remedy for the problem, which is separating each of the phases of scientific research, so as to avoid corruption of the process.
Crichton approaches this subject as though it were a trial in which humanity were being charged with causing global warming. If this were the case, he would make a great defense attorney, because he provides plenty of doubt. However, I think the case should be turned around. It is the overwhelming majority of the world’s climate scientists whose work he is attacking who are on the defense. Therefore, Crichton is required to provide some detailed scientific arguments against the work of these scientists, which he has failed to do. At one point, he actually admits that he does not intend to do so:
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 more magnificent of the demons haunting the world. I would just remind you of the now-familiar pattern by which these things are established.
I find it unfortunate that he decided to abandon the only method by which he could truly convince the world of his argument. Regardless of Crichton’s lack of any substantive scientific argument, I would still like to address many of the assertions made in his speech, as I believe that they are many times not grounded in fact.
