Instead his Remarks to the Commonwealth Club show him to less an advocate of science and more of a second-rate Ann Coulter or Michael Moore.
The points that he really made were these: (1) most environmentalists are religious airheads, just like Christians, and (2) most people, including most members of the Commonwealth Club, are dumber than Michael Crichton.
The way he made those points was easy. He made scores of unsubstantiated claims. If he had followed his own advice and used science scrupulously to make his points he would have had problems.
For example, the one issue he discusses at length is DDT. He argues that its banning is one example of environmental-religious blindness in that it did not harm animals. But the only"evidence" he gives for this is asserting that it was falsely labeled a carcinogen. That may or may not have been true, I don't know the regulatory history/ But I do know the studies that indicated DDT caused harm concluded that it did so by impairing reproduction, not by causing cancer.
I might not be writing this if he had given even one authority to show that it did not hurt animals. That would have been consistent with his call for a scientific environmentalism. But he doesn't.
Someone reading this might reasonably say,"But in a speech, does he have time to do that? Maybe there is a good study out there that refutes clearly the previous findings on DDT."
Maybe there is. And if any readers know of one I will be happy to post information on it here. I do believe in using science honestly, even when it reveals that I have been wrong.
For the moment, however, Crichton's own words will do for a response. This long excerpt will show his real attitude toward scientific debate and for giving sources. (It will also document my comment about his ego).
I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing. I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology-like nuclear fusion-was necessary, otherwise nothing could be done and in the meantime all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong.I can, with a lot of time, give you the factual basis for these views, and I can cite the appropriate journal articles not in whacko magazines, but in the most prestigeous [sic] science journals, such as Science and Nature. But such references probably won't impact more than a handful of you, because the beliefs of a religion are not dependant [sic] on facts, but rather are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.
He does have time. He knows it. He chooses not to because he does not respect his audience. He says so himself.
So why have some pretty intelligent people latched onto this speech? I think it's the same reason Coulter and Moore are popular. They pick targets that their audiences hate and caricature them. Crichton chooses those environmentalists who tend to have an Eden-like view of nature, caricatures them, and then implicitly connects them with everybody concerned about the environment, except for himself or course.
Some readers I think saw the caricature, liked it, and didn't look carefully at what followed. It's a mistake I've made.
The sad thing here is that Crichton's a smart man and a rich man. If he truly wants to support good environmental science, he can do much good. But if this is any indication, good science is the last thing on his mind.
PS Here's the link to Science. Crichton is right that it is good. Put Global Warming and CO2 into the internal search engine and ask yourself if he's read it lately.
An article from Wired News, "Will Global Warming Cool Europe" reminded me of one of the many reasons that Europeans take global warming far more seriously than we do.
Read the article, but the gist is that if warming continues, Europe will move toward the tropical. Then, as the ice cap continues to melt the cold water released will deflect the path of the Gulf Stream to the south. When this happens, the temperatures in Europe will plummet to well below their current climate.
However, while the US leadership for the last decade has been abominable on this issue (and gets worse daily), this article gives too free a pass to European leaders.
Consider the outcome of the recent steel subsidies controversy. When countries are willing to go to the mat with the US on economic issues, they sometimes get their way, or at least a better compromise.
Yes, the WTO made that much easier here, but the same principle still applies. It would be a better world if the US government, and the American people, accepted that Global Warming is serious. But, if other countries started treating it as a life-and-death matter--or even as seriously as they did the price of steel--then it would a lot more likely that Americans would learn.
However, as I am sure contemporary politics will occasionally provoke me to postings better left imagined, I ask your forgiveness in advance.
To begin, I'm going to ignore the interpretation of history. Instead I am going to quote part of a poem that has long haunted me. If it is not about history, is certainly about memory and time. (I would post the whole poem, if I did not want to begin life here with a copyright suit from Ecco Press.)
The poem is by Czeslaw Milosz, it’s from the collection, Bells in Winter (1974), and it’s called “Encounter.”
I dedicate it to any person drawn to look back in the past, over his life, or her life, or the life of others.
The poem begins with a memory of travel in a wagon through the woods at dawn. Somehow you know that it is drawn by an animal. It’s a cold dawn. A hare darts out . . .
“One of us pointed to it with his hand.
That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive.
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.
Oh my lover, where are they, where are they going
The flash of hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.
Just after the Christmas, one of the students in that class sent me a NT Times op-ed piece by David Brooks called "The National Creed.
Brook's description of the fluidity of American Christianity and the implications for our culture echoes many of Hatch's themes (though Brooks may be more optimistic). He also sheds light on something that I have been thinking about for several years, which is the two-way interaction between conservative Christianity and the larger culture.
Since the article is going to shift to pay archive status soon, I will copy here the last section, which provides a lot of food for thought.
The third effect of our dominant religious style is that we have trouble sustaining culture wars. For some European intellectuals, and even some of our own commentators, the Scopes trial never ended. For them, the forces of enlightened progress are always battling against the rigid, Bible-thumping forces of religion, whether represented by William Jennings Bryan or Jerry Falwell.But that's a cartoon version of reality. In fact, real-life belief, especially these days, is mobile, elusive and flexible. Falwell doesn't represent evangelicals today. The old culture war organizations like the Moral Majority or the Christian Coalition are either dead or husks of their former selves.
As the sociologist Alan Wolfe demonstrates in his book,"The Transformation of American Religion," evangelical churches are part of mainstream American culture, not dissenters from it.
So we have this paradox. These days political parties grow more orthodox, while religions grow more fluid. In the political sphere, there is conflict and rigid partisanship. In the religious sphere, there is mobility, ecumenical understanding and blurry boundaries.
If George Bush and Howard Dean met each other on a political platform, they would fight and feud. If they met in a Bible study group and talked about their eternal souls, they'd probably embrace.
Unlike the previous speech that I railed about a couple of weeks ago, Crichton does give some interesting facts on science and public policy, particularly concerning second-hand smoke.
However in other ways, it is as dishonest as that first speech. The worst statement was this one:
"There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period."
To put it simply, he is on, if not over, the ragged edge of lying. But he is very subtle at it. He's doing it this way: he's conflating the idea"a consensus of scientists in a field indicates that the best science concludes that a=b" with the idea"a consensus of scientists proves that a=b."
The latter is indeed false; the former is not. A consensus generally does indicate the best science. But he wants the reader or listener to confuse the second statement with the first and then agree with him that citing a consensus indicates a weakness in an argument.
Why? Apparently because he wants to discredit the use of current environmental science in public policy. He creates a situation in which anyone who cites a scientific consensus as evidence in support of an environmental policy is discredited while anyone who cites a lone figure in opposition to the same policy is treated with respect.
The really sad thing is that at the end of this speech he makes an interesting suggestion about how to do better science on public policy issues. It is one worth considering.
But given the context it is hard not to wonder if this is another slight-of-hand like the one I dissected above.
The quotes from some of the Mars Society sound like liberal-nightmare-fantasy stuff. For example:
These comments were amplified by panelist Lowell Wood, an architect of Reagan-era"Star Wars" space-based weapons plans. Wood stated confidently that terraforming Mars will happen in the 21st century."It is the manifest destiny of the human race!" he declared and went on to boast,"In this country we are the builders of new worlds. In this country we took a raw wilderness and turned it into the shining city on the hill of our world."In contrast, Grinspoon’s careful support for the expansion of life to Mars (assuming none—or at least no advanced form—is there already) is a reminder that there really can be an idealism in expansion to the stars.
Of course if terrorists and orange alerts go with us, we may have to wear space suits with plumbing for the entire trip.
Of all the “Orange” security precautions, the “hall pass to bathroom” strikes me as the most asinine and inconvenient. (If you have not heard of this, check this article from the Guardian on bathroom breaks and flights from Australia)
It is one thing to do this if you actually get notice that a terrorist is on board, but to do it as policy seems an efficient way to create real hostility against the US and build disdain for logical U.S. security actions by associating them idiocies like this.
No recent administration has been entirely innocent of this, but this is a far more systematic effort. (One must give the Bush administration credit for finding really dedicated ideologues and apparatchniks). I am not quite as concerned as the writer is about its effect on international science. I do fear that it might damage American research, particularly in some biological fields.
We really need a lot more independent science--that is science not dependent solely on the government, corporations, or advocacy groups. Interestingly, Michael Crichton, who I have criticized for his highly politicized comments on environmental science, did suggest an interesting mechanism for reducing the political impact on research money. I'm not sure that his idea would work, but given the extremes to which the Bush administration is going (and the extreme backlash that might also do harm the next time a Democrat is elected), we need to consider new options.
His essay—which centers on a commemorative statue for a man who is both a founder of El Paso and a killer of natives—got me to thinking about the Confederate flag and my own internal conflict concerning it.
When I grew up in Texas I was taught to honor the Confederate flag. It was almost on a par with the U.S. flag and the state flag. (Whenever you pass through Texas, just look at the number of Lone Stars flying.)
I did not think of the flags this coherently, but as a kid all three signified different tableaus of the same courage. The Alamo, a Confederate charge, Normandy. They were all in some way a part of the same world of military honor; so each flag symbolized that common honor.
Even when I went to college (Fall 1970) and became far more aware of the Civil Rights movement, my respect for the flag continued. But that attitude ran into new challenges. The anti-war movement stuck question marks on most of my adolescent military visions. Also I had friends who disliked the flag viscerally, who saw in each one a redneck bigot’s vision of America. I chose not to argue, largely because I thought they might be right. By then I knew much more about slavery. Still my heart did not quite agree.
It was only in 1988, when I started my Ph.D. work at South Carolina that I really began to think my friends were right. The USC is adjacent to the state capital, and proudly atop the capital, the Confederate flag flew.
There was no romanticizing that context. The flag went up there early in the Civil Rights movement: a way of saying no to the North, no to Blacks, and yes to oppression and the antebellum heritage. Of course, time had passed between then and my arrival. The racial realities in 1988 South Carolina were far better—though hardly untroubled—than the situation when the flag was first unfurled there. Still it was there, and it was wrong that it was there.
That sense of wrongness only increased as my doctoral studies taught me far, far more about slavery, about the New South and Jim Crow, and about the truly bleak southern landscape of much of the 20th century. No flag with that sort of history should fly over a seat of government of a state in which so many descendants of the enslaved and the oppressed still dwell.
So, I had finished my conversion and flag was now anathema to me in any public place, right?
Not quite. There’s still a bit of a spark in my heart for it. In part that’s just a bit of childhood that I can’t or won’t let go. In part it may be something else, a reluctance to give up something that I long associated with things that are good: honor and the willingness to value some things more than life.
Is it possible to celebrate the good in something bad, without celebrating the bad? Sure. Can that be done with the Confederacy and its flag? Someday, perhaps, but not now, when the legacy of slavery and the century of struggle over freedom is well within living memory (if not still going on). The misuse of the love of that flag by individuals and groups truly dedicated to hate confirms that.
But when I see people who are not using it for hate’s sake, who see in it what I once saw (and still glimpse), I feel a bit of kinship, right or wrong.
(It occurs to me that State of the Union addresses are as close as Americans get to those multi-hour Politburo performances. Let’s hear it for the free world!)
But where was the Space Program? A friend told me that there was no mention of the final frontier. I got a transcript, searched it, and he was right! One week from the announcement of the next great expansion of the Final Frontier, and the trip is over.
This gives lots of ammo to those critics who saw the Mars Project as a way to kill off NASA. They could be right. Killing NASA would fit with the neo-con desire to move weapons into space. That’s harder to do when civilians are floating around up there.
(To be fair, the neo-cons have had help. A lot of the momentum within the military for expanding space forces developed during the Clinton Administration.)
So we kill Hubble, hand the Space Station to the Europeans like a landlord leasing an apartment to students, (“Sure heat is included, and the windows hardly leak”) and leave most of our space activities deep in a black budget somewhere. No dreams, except dreams of power.
Postscript: It looks like Bush is going to increase the budget . It is still odd, though, his not mentioning it. Any thoughts?
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