Michael Crichton picks a fight with environmentalists

[Lawrence of Arabia]

ok, i read the book. heres what i think.

the story was boring and bland. nothing new. i think he just wanted to have a story line in there to kinda keep it interestin, but his main point of the book was to have this one character (Kenner) argue with evironmentalists at different stages of the book.

i'll tell you what, kenner's arguments are very very convincing. there are graphs in this book, and the person he argues with brings up and answers every single point i woulda brought up and asked if i was the one trying to disprove kenner's statement (including fudging the numbers)

the book was very well researched. now do i no longer believe in global warming? i still do, but not as firmly as before, and i am open to suggestions from the other side.

his part on why DDT and CFCs are good didnt work for me

[GePap]

2001 a Space Odessy is hard SF for the most part (with fantastic elements at the end).

But again, Crichton is so 1990's.

[DinoDoc]

Would you recommend getting it, LoA? The only Crichton works I've read were Jurassic Park, Lost World, & Prey if that helps.

[GePap]

Andromeda Strain is by far his best book.

Congo and Sphere are both OK but nowhere near Jurrasic Park nor Andromeda Strain.

The Great Train Robbery was good too.

[DinoDoc]

Never read Andromeda Strain. The movie killed any possibility of reading the Sphere for me.

[chequita guevara]

The Andromeda Strain was quite good, but I felt let down by the resolution.

[DinoDoc]

What did O2 kill it?

[GePap]

No. I won't give it away. Of course, the 1974 Movie, which is very faithful to the book, gives you the ending.

The movie was pretty good.

Sphere the book is better than sphere the movie.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by GePap
No. I won't give it away.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

Would you recommend getting it, LoA? The only Crichton works I've read were Jurassic Park, Lost World, & Prey if that helps.

yes, i would definitly recommend it. two s up. i dont think you ever have had to read any crichton novels before to enjoy this one, as long as you keep an open mind about i. if you want a good story, i wouldnt recommend it, as it seems like its just a filler. but if you want to learn about global warming and the environment, then its a great read.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

also, hes got this neat section in the back about what his exact point of view is.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by The Mad Monk
Tell me about it.

Dragon's Egg is an excellent but relatively unknown sci-fi novel. The author is Robert Forward, a physicsist. As TLC said there is a lot of science in it, with some fantastic imgination blended in.

I highly recommend you read it. The sequel, Star Quake, is pretty good in itself but not as good as the first one. I haven't read the last book in the trilogy, Flight of the Dragonfly.

[Mr. Harley]

Been off for a couple of weeks due to drug interactions and stage 2 hypertension - and the factual basis of off-topic goes to Hades in a hand basket.

First - Theodore Roosevelt was involved in conservation, NOT environmentalism. They are only partially congruent, and modern environmentalism has some substantial disagreements with the original premises of the conservation movement. That could be a topic for multiple threads.

Second - Michael Crichton as a hard SF writer. Even more bull crap. I read the Andromeda Strain many years ago, as a High School student taking college courses due to our school not being large enough for many AP classes. I wanted to see if the medical science was quite as bad as the movie. It was. At that time I had completed biology courses through Vertebrate Zoology, Anatomy and Physiology, and Microbiology. He showed an utter lack of knowledge of vertebrate physiology, blood chemistry, veterinary medicine, how infectious diseases work, plus how organisms metabolize energy. It had about as much hard science as Star Trek. The original Star Trek.

The points about the survivability of dinosaur DNA say it all. Not only is it impossible for it to have survived intact, due to a variety of reasons, they never would have used frog DNA as a basic template if they were trying to truly replicate dinosaurs. The would either use some primitive birds or some member of the crocodile family, if at all possible. If you want to argue about my second point, fine. Even if I’m wrong, he still has based his entire book on something we know is physically impossible. If it requires suspension of disbelief, we are into the realm of science fantasy, not hard SF.

Some would argue they would use amphibian eggs due to the ease of use. That's silly. If they already understood DNA well enough to pull off what they are doing, they will not need to use amphibian eggs. Plus, given the level of expense they would probably try to get it as close as possible. Yes, you can come up with a series of rationales for using the amphibian DNA, but your working on a Pearl Harbor scenario (if it hadn't actually happened, people would claim you had an unbelievable series of coincidences). Not quite at the limit of suspension of disbelief, but really, really pushing it. They’ve already spent billions, and are trying to create a dinosaur. They’d use the closest relatives.

By the way, UR has identified one of the handful of true hard SF authors currently writing, i.e. Robert Forward. Also in that roll call of honor are Greg Bear, David Brin, and Vernor Vinge. Crichton is a fool who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.

Thirdly, scientific consensus. The commentary about consensus and politics was right on the mark. Consensus is less important than orthodoxy. Consensus may, and often does, represent the orthodox, or prevailing published opinion about a topic in science. Sometimes this may be backed by facts, but a distressingly large amount of the time it is not, especially in the softer sciences like economics and psychology.

One example was that evolution occurred gradually. Then numerous examples in the fossil record, plus various other studies, led to the theory of punctuated equilibrium. This controversy by the way is what many creationists use when they point out that evolution is a “theory”, by which they mean opinion versus the best explanation for the facts that we are aware of. Scientific Orthodoxy is, at it’s best, supposed to be a consensus (see, I can use that dirty word) of the community that supplies that best explanation, and at it’s worst is the opinion of the those controlling the access to academia.

Fourth, global warming. It IS happening. Glaciers are melting at unprecedented rates for what is probably human history. This is admittedly a very short time reference geologic history, but it's changes like this than can initiate an extinction event, and create rapid evolution, i.e. punctuated equilibrium.

Why it is happening is open to huge amounts of interpretation. No models that I am familiar with (I am not a specialist in the field, so I am not going to know about the cutting edge info) succeed in working backwards as far back as the 1950’s. The same issues mentioned about weather forecasting apply here with a vengeance, i.e. chaos theory. What’s even worse is that we don’t even know all the inputs, even before we try to predict the results.

However, that does not mean that human effects could not critically affect the planet. There was an excellent article several years ago about how they have discovered that the Gulf Stream (major Atlantic Ocean current that keeps much of the Eastern Coastal United States and Northwestern Europe warm) could be subject to catastrophic, sudden shifts. It may follow a “straw that broke the camel’s back” scenario, which means that if humans have contributed to a .005 change to global warming per year now for over half a century, there could be a vicious bill to pay.

Conversely, there is also excellent evidence that this is primarily due to changes in the Sun itself, and that our influence is minimal. Essentially, we don’t know and we don’t have the data. The biggest push right now should be, IMHO, in massively funding various geophysical endeavors, i.e. ocean sediment cores, ice cores, improved satellites, massive parallel processor supercomputers, etc. to GET the data.

The comments about pollution are also quite germane. For example, in the 1990’s many people thought it was global warming killing off the coral reefs. Now it is being discovered that much of that damage is actually due to bacteria in sewage and run-off, including bacteria derived from cat feces, of all things. Don’t laugh, often extinctions occur because of many small cumulative insults that exceed a species ability to adapt, until the final one “causes” the extinction.

Ground water in New England is now contaminated by the waste from things like tanneries from colonial times. Think about it. Safe, potable water may have been the single biggest contributor to increased human life spans in the twentieth century. It may, along with air quality, become the single biggest determinant to whether you live to be sixty, or ninety years old in the future, even exceeding lifestyle. The point I assume that was being made is that just because the current “sky is falling” fad is global warming, that there may be other, more endemic problems that may constitute a higher long term risk. Problems addressed by the environmental, and for that matter, the conservationist movements. Since Crichton and contempt for global warming, and thus by association the entire environmental movement, has been bandied about it, it was germane and on topic.

Conclusions? Do we have the worst global warming in RECORDED human history. Yes. Are we directly influencing it. Yes. Is our contribution significant? We don’t know. Are there other problems, possibly more significant caused by modern human population levels, lack of concern for the long-term considerations, etc. (i.e. like desertification)? Possibly. Do we need more data? Yes, yes, and YES.

[Jon Miller]

I actually think that water contamination is a huge deal

I think that global warming is meaningless in comparison to it, and that global warming harms by taking away emphasis from what is truly important

Jon Miller

[Ted Striker]

Originally posted by shawnmmcc

First - Theodore Roosevelt was involved in conservation, NOT environmentalism. They are only partially congruent, and modern environmentalism has some substantial disagreements with the original premises of the conservation movement. That could be a topic for multiple threads.

Semantics

Teddy started it all

Before then everything looked like a damn gravel quarry with railroad tracks and soot in the air

London Fog, etc.