Heh: An old quote from many many years ago:

Strangely, the following two very damning speeches have disappeared from his site, which had the essays out for people to read for themselves. I suggest you copy them while you can using “Save as web page”, since it seems to me that there is a concerted effort to eradicate his speeches from the Web. God only knows how long before the tinfoil hat types (yeah, sounds like a conspiracy theory, so call ’em that) manage to notice these and delete all access to them. Ha-ha-only-serious on that. They really aren’t easy to find any more, and if you didn’t know they existed, you’d probably find little reference. There is something on them in the wiki entry, which are conveniently “unsourced and hence targeted for removal”. I’d add the above links but I’m afraid they’d disappear like the other MC web pages that have the info.

Aliens Cause Global Warming

And

Complexity Theory and Environmental Management

These two speeches should be required reading in high schools. College courses should be designed around them.

1) Crichton’s main body of work was neo-Luddite cautionary tales. In almost all cases, he looked at how things could go wrong and wrote an entertaining tale of exactly that happening… His topics in film include: Genetic Research (Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park), Robotics and AI (Westworld), Tinkering with the brain (Terminal Man)…

2) He set out to write such a tale about eco-disaster (he says this himself in State of Fear)

3) When he looked at the facts about what was known and unknown about ecology, about what environmentalists did, rather than what they said, he found a very different proposition to base a story on — and that became State of Fear, which is very much NOT a neo-Luddite cautionary tale.

In other words, looking at the science behind AGW, he found it so onerously bad that the scientist in him couldn’t write the story.

Says one hell of a lot, both about Crichton and about the basis for AGW.

Along with the late Julian Simon, he was one of the few voices for sense and reason in the realm where science and politics meet.

RA said:
Of course, when cheap science is used to motivate subsidy hunting—see ethanol—that’s a whole other level of ignorance and mendacity.

The official term you’re looking for, sir, is Rent Seeking

😉

An actual understanding of it lies at the heart of every true libertarian.

Asking a novelist to get all of the technical aspects 100% correct is fictional thinking. Crichton never pretended to get it all technically correct. He was a novelist. For me, Congo was a fun read because of all the license he took with science: great ape behavior, etc. Same goes for Jurassic Park. That said, I am a fan so perhaps I sport a bias.

Crichton was not always a great writer, but I think he was an honest one who did his homework.

Heh. I wonder how many peoople who installed granite countertops understand that granite is a source of radiation that one has purposely placed in their homes? and don’t get me started on smoke detectors…