Reply #14: Michael Crichton Wins Journalism Award From Petroleum Association [View All]

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Michael Crichton Wins Journalism Award From Petroleum Association

This is the only news article I could find on the web that mentions this.


snip


Another favorite of climate change skeptics is the author Michael Crichton. Crichton penned the novel State of Fear, which uses a load of discredited and fallacious arguments to attempt to disprove the reality of climate change, but which only succeeds in convincing this reader that his best work was written in the 1960s. What do you do when a fictional work takes a position you like? Call it journalism, of course! That's what the American Association of Petroleum Geologists have done. The AAPG have given Crichton their journalism award this year:

"It is fiction," conceded Larry Nation, communications director for the association. "But it has the absolute ring of truth."

That sounds like truthiness to me.

More after the jump


Unlike the AAPG, who are hardly going to be the most objective bunch when it comes to this topic, State of Fear is widely reviled amongst the rest of the scientific community:
The book is "demonstrably garbage," Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford climatologist, said in an interview yesterday. Petroleum geologists may like it, he said, but only because "they are ideologically connected to their product, which fills up the gas tanks of Hummers."

Daniel P. Schrag, a geochemist who directs the Harvard University Center for the Environment, called the award "a total embarrassment" that he said "reflects the politics of the oil industry and a lack of professionalism" on the association's part.

As for the book, he added, "I think it is unfortunate when somebody who has the audience that Crichton has shows such profound ignorance."


snip


http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2006/2/9/2815