Sunday, December 12, 2004

CRICHTON RUFFLES THE FEATHERS

Brilliant science fiction novelist Michael Crichton is really ruffling the feathers of our intellectual establishment. There is an article in Slate that pulls out all stops in an attempt to denigrate him and his latest novel. Why? Because Crichton casts Greenies as villains and documents at great length the shoddy "science" behind the global warming myth. What they really hate, of course, is that Crichton's great popularity and authoritativeness will bring the Greenie fraud to the attention of millions of people.


Wittingshire has the following apt comment on the matter:

Michael Crichton threw Today Show's Matt Lauer into a metaphysical crisis Tuesday.

Over a novel?

Crichton began his career as a scientist/physician and, according to the press release for his new novel, "STATE OF FEAR raises critical questions about the facts we believe in, without question, on the strength of esteemed experts and the media."

The rhetorical gimmick works like this: "All scientists agree, so shut up and fall into line." In a speech last year at Caltech, Crichton showed how scientists repeatedly used this bullying tactic to prop up theories that were later debunked: "Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had. . . . The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus."





GLOBAL WARMING SHOULD BE GOOD FOR CORAL

Greenies are always agonizing about the claimed imminent "death" of coral reefs

"Coral reefs could be growing 35 per cent faster by the next century because of global warming, it was claimed yesterday. A new study suggests the effects of warmer waters might offset damage caused by greenhouse gases as higher amounts of dissolved carbon dioxide reduce the levels of calcium and carbonate in seawater needed to make corals.

A team from the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, modelled interactions between the atmosphere, oceans and ice. They calculated the sea’s surface temperature and the levels of calcium carbonate in the water up to 2100 before estimating how these changes would affect the formation of corals. They found that warmer water would increase the rate of coral calcification, outweighing the detrimental effect of lower calcium carbonate levels. By 2100, corals would be growing 35 per cent faster than they do today, they predicted.

But the finding, reported in New Scientist magazine, is rejected by other scientists, who argue that the Australian team did not consider bleaching, which occurs when warmer waters cause corals to expel the algae that live within them and on which they depend for survival."

If this "bleaching" is a problem, isn't it odd that corals live in waters that range widely in temperature? The water gets very warm in shallow tropical seas. How come the corals don't all die there? They in fact flourish there, of course

Source

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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