Michael Crichton, 1942-2008
Earlier this week, Michael Crichton died. (I tried linking to his website the day it happened, but it was getting overwhelmed with traffic.)
I know the people at RealClimate can’t stand him, but Michael Crichton was a very knowledgeable guy, in addition to writing some cool stories. Here is a talk he gave about global warming skepticism back in 2005. If you start getting bored in the middle, skip to the part near the end where he talks about Teddy Roosevelt. It’s a simple point, yet very powerful.
Yes yes, the professional climate scientists can come back with a response to everything Crichton brings up. Well what can I say? I still think he is basically right and they are basically wrong, just like Mises was basically right even though Paul Samuelson could’ve given all sorts of clever econometric demonstrations of the efficacy of Keynesianism in the 1950s.
Let me put it this way: If it really were the case that the “consensus” was dead wrong, this is what it would look like. It’s not as if a bunch of PhDs would be running around saying 2+2=5. No, they would come up with all sorts of clever reasons for why Contrary Pieces of Evidence #1, 2, 3…230 were all wrong, and that it really did make sense to spend trillions of dollars over the next few years to cool the planet a few degrees 150 years from now.
