Livin' In A "State Of Fear"

[Bark Bark Bark]

Remember when the NeoConmen were up in arms about "The Day After Tomorrow?"

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/10752560.htm

"Wrong, wrong, wrong," said Martin Hoffert, a professor of physics at New York University. "The best face I can put on this is that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. The worst is that he’s intentionally deceiving people as he accuses environmentalists (of doing) in ‘State of Fear.’"

(snip)

For his part, Crichton writes, "Everybody has an agenda. Except me."

Oh, God, if only my conscience would let me invert those two quotes...

Any intelligent person familiar with Michael Crichton's recent garbage knows two things: (1) he very much indeed DOES have an agenda, and (2) his "research" ranks right down there with, oooooh, say, Ann Coulter's.

A few weeks ago, conservative commentators--and we've since learned that those come in two flavors: paid prostitute and free whore--from George F. Will, to the generic right-wing gasbags in local rags, were falling over each other to heap praise on Crichton's novel, in which "radicals," using supervillain plots that would make the writers of "Kim Possible" blush, try to induce weather disasters to convince the world that global warming is real...even though it, well, just isn't.

On Friday, Crichton hits Washington, speaking to the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute and the National Press Club. His publicist, Jennifer Swihart, says he’s also having a private “high-profile meeting” with someone she isn’t allowed to name.

Yeah, no agenda there. Guess we can put Mikey in the "prostitute" column.

But the scientists whose work Crichton cites while trying to convince readers that his horsesh*t is gold are starting to fight back.

Three scientists - Hoffert, physicist Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California, and NASA’s James Hansen - told Knight Ridder that Crichton distorted their research in the novel.

Crichton declined to be interviewed or to answer 10 questions that were e-mailed to him through his publicist.

Hansen, the director of the Goddard Institute of Space Sciences, takes issue with Crichton’s contention that Hansen’s 1988 prediction for warming was off by 300 percent. Hansen said his paper presented three predictions of future warming and said the middle case was the most likely. Crichton took the highest prediction and ignored the middle-case scenario, which was off by 20 percent, according to Hansen.

“How would you describe what Mr. Crichton did? Science fiction? Scientific fraud?” Hansen wrote.

There's more, much more, but I'm already breaking the DU excerpt rule as it is. But you sure won't hear THIS side from the "fair and balanced" crowd. (And there are URLs to additional articles and sites at the bottom of the linked page.)

Additionally, here's an article about the real world that Crichton wants you to ignore:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=624&ncid=624&e=2&u=/ap/20050129/ap_on_sc/warmer_world_i

"It's a very compelling story," he said. The glaciers — "water towers of the world" — are the most visible indicators that we are now in the first phase of global warming, Thompson said.

Last time I brought the Crichton subject up, a DU fan of his got hurt feelings. I'm sorry about that--but this? This is a lot more important. This is the real world, and it's the only one you got.

"...Are we gonna move?"
--Baby Sinclair, Jim Henson's "Dinosaurs!"