Michael Crichton received a "journalism" award this year for his book "State of Fear." Why would a novelist win a journalism award for a work of fiction? Well, the plot of "State of Fear" embodies Crichton's opinion that global warming is bullshit, and the presenter of the award is the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. From the New York Times:
"It is fiction," conceded Larry Nation, communications director for the association. "But it has the absolute ring of truth."
That is not the way leading climate scientists see it. When the book was published in 2004, climate experts condemned it as dangerously divorced from reality. Most of these scientists believe human activity, chiefly the burning of fossil fuels, is changing the atmosphere's chemistry in ways that threaten unpredictable, potentially damaging effects.
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."
Link (Thanks, Jason Tester!)
