Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Everyone has heard of Jurassic Park. What is less well known is author Michael Crichton, who passed in 2008, was also a staunch critic of politicised science, and an articulate and effective global warming skeptic, who was just getting into his stride when he was sadly struck down at age 66 by cancer.
TWENTY YEARS ON, ALIENS STILL CAUSE GLOBAL WARMING
Over the years, the Jurassic Park creator observed, science has drifted from its foundation as an objective search for truth toward political power games
JONATHAN BARTLETT JUNE 7, 2020
In 2003, author and filmmaker Michael Crichton (1942–2008), best known for Jurassic Park, made a now-famous speech at Caltech, titled “Aliens Cause Global Warming.” The title was humorous but the content was serious. He was not addressing some strange theory of global warming; he was warning about the politicization of science.
In 2003, author and filmmaker Michael Crichton (1942–2008), best known for Jurassic Park, made a now-famous speech at Caltech, titled “Aliens Cause Global Warming.” The title was humorous but the content was serious. He was not addressing some strange theory of global warming; he was warning about the politicization of science.
Crichton (left, in 2002, courtesy Jon Chase, Harvard CC 3.0), noted that, over the years, science has drifted away from its foundation as an objective search for truth and given itself over to political power games. The first time that he witnessed that was with the famous Drake Equation, used to turn SETI speculations about space aliens into a science. The Drake equation was a series of probabilities multiplied together to estimate the probability that space aliens may exist who can communicate with us. Of course, none of the terms is known or even estimable, and they may not be expressible as probabilities. However, SETI was given a pass because it suited the scientific zeitgeist of the day. It probably helped capture public attention for science.
The same thing happened during discussions of the effects of nuclear war. Paper after paper made nonsense claims about such a war’s effects, including nuclear winter. But no one wanted to intervene, fearing that skepticism might be portrayed as a defense of nuclear war. Thus, bad science, even from top-tier journals, was reported as fact by the scientific community.
Crichton noted that some of these papers were actually part of an orchestrated media campaign:
The first announcement of nuclear winter appeared in an article by Sagan in the Sunday supplement, Parade. The very next day, a highly-publicized, high-profile conference on the long-term consequences of nuclear war was held in Washington, chaired by Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich, the most famous and media-savvy scientists of their generation. Sagan appeared on the Johnny Carson show 40 times. Ehrlich was on 25 times. Following the conference, there were press conferences, meetings with congressmen, and so on. The formal papers in Science came months later.
MICHAEL CRICHTON, “ALIENS CAUSE GLOBAL WARMING” AT CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, PASADENA, CA (JANUARY 17, 2003)
He summed it all up by saying, “This is not the way science is done, it is the way products are sold.” Painful, but true.
…
Read more: https://mindmatters.ai/2020/06/twenty-years-on-aliens-still-cause-global-warming/
The transcript of Crichton’s “Aliens Cause Global Warming” speech is available here. The Aliens speech is Crichton’s description of the chain of Noble Cause Corruption which led to the ongoing silence of the academic establishment in the face of scientifically indefensible climate alarmism.
A video of Michael Crichton in action;
Crichton was popular on university campuses, because of his talent as a speaker, his scientific credibility as a qualified scientist, the immense popularity of his works of fiction, including Jurassic Park, Westworld, The Andromeda Strain, and the blockbuster medical TV series ER, and his unyielding support for reason and the scientific method.
Crichton had always planned on becoming a writer and began his studies at Harvard College in 1960.[6] During his undergraduate study in literature, he conducted an experiment to expose a professor who he believed was giving him abnormally low marks and criticizing his literary style.[9]:4 Informing another professor of his suspicions,[10] Crichton submitted an essay by George Orwell under his own name. The paper was returned by his unwitting professor with a mark of “B−”.[11] He later said, “Now Orwell was a wonderful writer, and if a B-minus was all he could get, I thought I’d better drop English as my major.”[8] His differences with the English department led Crichton to switch his undergraduate concentration. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in biological anthropology summa cum laude in 1964[12] and was initiated into the Phi Beta Kappa Society.[12] He received a Henry Russell Shaw Traveling Fellowship from 1964 to 1965 and was a visiting lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom in 1965.[12] Crichton later enrolled at Harvard Medical School.[9][page needed] By this time, he had become exceptionally tall, by his own account, approximately 6 feet 9 inches (2.06 m) tall as of 1997.[13][14] Crichton later said “about two weeks into medical school I realized I hated it. This isn’t unusual since everyone hates medical school – even happy, practicing physicians.”[15]
Source: Wikipedia
If Crichton had lived, there is no doubt he would have continued to be a powerful voice for reason, and a fearless critic of climate alarmism and government policy based on scientifically unfounded claims.
Michael Crichton had two principle concerns concerning science and society, which led to his criticism of global warming. First, he warned against governments capturing science as a tool to cow the population into funding and submitting to politicians’ policies. Second, he thought scientists in many fields were far too certain and trusting of their knowledge and tools, especially computerized systems.
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2015/06/12/in-praise-of-michael-crichton/
Cracks me up that skeptics are happy to put their support behind a “science fiction writer,” but ignore the scientists. Kind of sums things up perfectly.
Yes, if one is the sort of person who can’t think critically, and therefore awaits one’s superiors to tell one how to think, seeing other people listening to a lower ranking person over a higher ranking one as incredibly foolish.
On the other hand, Richard Feynmann once spent an hour sitting down with a house painter testing a claim the painter made that contradicted Feynmann’s past experience. What a fool he was listening to a nobody like that!
“Cracks me up that skeptics are happy to put their support behind a “science fiction writer,” but ignore the scientists.”
Simon is alluding to “climate scientists” when he says “ignore the scientists”.
Simon, here’s the deal: Skeptics are very good at sniffing out science fiction. We read about it with Micheal Crichton’s books and movies, and we read about it when we read the UN IPCC reports purporting to establish that Human-caused Climate Change is real.
Michael Crichton calls his books science fiction and skeptics agree. The IPCC says their reports are not science fiction. Skeptics disagree. It is science fiction. The IPCC couldn’t prove that Human-caused Climate Change is real if their lives depended on doing so. They could rightly be charged with perpetrating a hoax on the people of the world. They fooled you, didn’t hey Simon. Don’t feel too bad, they have fooled millions of people. They have a pretty good story until you delve into the details. Most people don’t do much delving, which allows the IPCC to continue presenting their climate change science fiction as established facts..
Are you the one who called out Trump for stopping flights from China…ahhh got it. He was anti-science at the time 😉
Nope, said he got that right…. so you got that wrong. You see I give Trump praise when he deserves it. But I also called out his inept response to the rest of the pandemic.
Since democratic governors in a few US NE states killed the majority of Americans in the pandemic with their insane order forcing the old folks homes to take back the already sick I’m sure you have called them out on that?
Crichton was an actual scientist who wrote fiction books, instead of being an actor who played a scientist on TV, which would describe most members of the IPCC.
Crichton is worth a million of you
“Crichton was an actual scientist who wrote fiction books, instead of being an actor who played a scientist on TV, which would describe most members of the IPCC.”
Bollocks. Name scientists who are actors on the IPCC? Sheesh there is some nonsense written here.
And Crichton was in to biology not climate science. Still if he is the best you got….
Name a single so called climate scientist who has a degree in climate science.
The vast majority of them have degrees in unrelated fields. Many of them don’t even have science related degrees.
As usual, Simon will use any excuse in the book to ignore the evidence that refutes his religious beliefs.
“Name a single so called climate scientist who has a degree in climate science.
The vast majority of them have degrees in unrelated fields. Many of them don’t even have science related degrees.”
Name a leading climate scientist who does not have a degree in the field. Can’t… Thought not. More bollocks from Mark W.
So Simon: You seem to have an opinion. What’s your degree in? Please tell.
Simon, “Name a leading climate scientist who does not have a degree in the field.”
Gavin Schmidt’s Ph.D. is in applied mathematics.
Jim Hansen, Ph.D. in astrophysics.
James Annan, Ph.D. in applied mathematics.
Michael Mann, BS/MS applied mathematics and physics, Ph.D. Geology
Julia Hargreaves, Ph.D. in astrophysics
Philip Jones, MS in hydrological engineering. Ph.D. Hydrology
All leading climatologists, no climate degrees.
Thank you Pat: This information is not convenient. Simon believes because you are not a climate scientist that your post is fake news… sarc/
Pat Frank
Physics and mathematics are way more in the field than biology….
Pat Frank
And Pat… there is no such thing as a “climate degree.” But you knew that
Since democratic governors in a few US NE states ki!!ed the majority of Americans in the pandemic with their insane order forcing the old folks homes to take back the already sick I’m sure you have called them out on that?
Crichton was an actual scientist who wrote fiction books, instead of being an actor who played a scientist on TV, which would describe most members of the IPCC.
Crichton is worth a million of you
Oh sure you did after I hounded you to admit it…science 😉
Michael Crichton had a BA in Biology from Harvard and MD from Harvard Medical School. He was no slouch intellectually
Here is the best way to describe Simon:
Simon has a selectively fetish-laden appeal to authorities… but only those authorities who conform to his bias.
Neither relevant to climate science. But hey he was a sharp bloke so he must be right. Here’s the thing Mike H… there are loads of sharp blokes around so what makes him special here. Answer, although he died a long time ago and climate science has moved on light years since, he was a famous person who supported the thinking here. End of story.
“there are loads of sharp blokes around so what makes him special here.”
That people other than you have the background to understand the science and claims. What are your qualifications, other than a person who appeals to authority, and seeks confirmation bias only?
Cracks me up how alarmists declare anyone who believes as they do to be a scientist and those who don’t, aren’t.
Crichton has more science background than do any of the so called climate scientists.
As to science fiction, have you ever read any of the IPCC reports?
In my opinion climate science became science fiction when they hid the decline.
Hide the decline was exposed in the climategate emails 10 years after the deed.
But M&M exposed the Mannian tree ring fraud 6 years earlier circa 2004, almost 5 years after the hockey stick AR3 fraud. M&M exposure of the artifice was the unmasking of the on-going science fiction that started in 1995 with Ben Santer’s attribution lie insertion to SAR Chap 8. The impetus for a US government scientist to lie as an author in the IPCC report for attribution inclusion likely came from US VP Al Gore providing high level cover.
There have been so many places where the Bigger climate science fiction lie could’ve been stopped early. But most of those lies point back to a political cause centered around the election of a Democrat US President and the pack of liars they brought with them.With Clinton it was Al Gore. With Barack Obama it was John Holdren. If we get a Democrat next January, I expect the climate liar he/she brings will be Marcia McNutt. She’s been groomed for the BigLie for 5 years now.
And what was hide the decline about Eric. Do you know? Do you care? Or are you happy to keep implying it was a deceit when you know it wasn’t…
“Many commentators quoted one email in which Phil Jones said that he had used “Mike’s Nature trick” in a 1999 graph for the World Meteorological Organization “to hide the decline” in proxy temperatures derived from tree-ring analyses when measured temperatures were actually rising. This “decline” referred to the well-discussed tree-ring divergence problem, but these two phrases were taken out of context by global warming sceptics, including US Senator Jim Inhofe and former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin, as though they referred to some decline in measured global temperatures, even though they were written when temperatures were at a record high”
You are so dishonest Simon…what color is the sky in your world?
Oops your science world
Derg
Instead of just spewing insults, tell me where I am wrong? You can’t without lying because what I wrote is true. There was no deceit involve. The “hide the decline” was all above board and was to correct known issues. Skeptics like to paint a darker picture that just was not there. Do some reading.
Setting aside your “crackling of thorns under a pot” crack, S., for anyone seeking the truth about climate science, here are a few of the scientists whose analysis science realists attend to:
If you have not heard of them, search with their name in scholar.google.com (and in WUWT):
Dr. Pehr Björnbom
Dr. Robert M. Carter
Dr. John R. Christy
Dr. Susan J. Crockford
Dr. Nicholas Drapela
Mr. Freeman Dyson
Dr. Christopher Essex
Dr. William Happer
Dr. William M. Gray
Dr. Kiminori Itoh
Dr. Harold W. Lewis
Dr. Richard S. Lindzen
Dr. Jennifer Marohasy
Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr.
Dr. Murry L. Salby
Dr. S. Fred Singer
Dr. Wei-hok “Willi” Soon
Professor Jim Steele
Dr. Hendrik Tennekes
— And here is another list:
https://electroverse.net/the-list-scientists-who-publicly-disagree-with-the-current-consensus-on-climate-change/
Simon,
Before you characterize Dr. Crichton as simply a ‘Science Fiction writer” you need to know a little about the subject.
A long way back Science Fiction & Fantasy were kinda considered the same thing (eg Jules Vern & Burroughs). Then there was a bit of an evolution … science fiction became more technical (eg. Asimov), it also began to entertain ideas of social evolution as associated with the technical changes (eg. Heinline). Fantasy on the other hand went full whimsy with dragons, dwarves, wizards, and magic (Tolkien & Harry Potter).
Awards for the best are given … the Hugo & the Nebula awards are given for what are considered the apex books of the Genres. These awards lead to notoriety and potential for financial rewards in the future.
“Science Fiction” came first (sort of, not counting the oldie fairy tales), then Fantasy kind of branched off and evolved into its own genre. It kept evolving, but soon another important Genre branched off of the whimsy Fantasy Genre and strangely melded with the completely separate Horror Genre
This new Genre became very popular very fast … so fast that it reached its apex in 40 years without really being christened. Without a formal name, it is referred to informally as “Climate reports” or “Climate studies”; its current gold standard became known as IPPC. This Genre is very unique, in that reviewers don’t give awards, but incorporate their own story lines into the reviews of others and try to expand on the overall theme.
The Genre has primarily been based on developing additional themes that lead to cash rewards. Although recently, prestige awards have been created (eg ‘climate communication”).
Micheal Crichton, given his intellect and his ability to communicate well in any form, could have succeeded in in any of the above described Genres. Had he a dark side he could have easily become one of the greatest leaders of the Horror/Climate Genre. Mann & Hanson would have been his followers, they would have followed him around like a puppy; you would likely have idolized him as a saint and a prophet.
Alas, he was honest, as well as intelligent. You will have to continue with Mann as you guiding light.
I enjoyed reading your comment, DonM.
This
brought to mind a line or two from a letter written by C. S. Lewis in 1958:
I don’t think I’ll do any more Spacemanship [Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra]. Science-fiction has become too scientific and my old windjammer is no longer spaceworthy.
(Source: Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, 1950-1963, p. 921, Ed. W. Hooper (2007))
***************************************
A few more C. S. Lewis quotes re: science fiction which I like:
Dear Derrick … You are far too profound about S.F. I think. The adventure story and wonder story are perennial and anyone could have foreseen that as our own planet got too fully explored they would be pushed off it into space in order to find the unknown (and therefore plastic) which a medieval author could find in the next forest … R. Haggard in unexplored Africa and Tibet … .
(Ibid at 777)
… I got a letter from someone asking me if the Silent Planet was a true story. It’s not the first I’ve had.
(Ibid at 575)
1954 letter to science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke
Dear Clarke —
… Your Jupiter 5 is good: but … what a pity that the lost reptilian culture … is almost thrust into a corner by the little drama about a theft and a hoax. … an unutterably banal little laboratory intrigue? …
(Ibid. at 411)
1953 Letter to future wife about Clarke’s book, Childhood’s End
*** It is quite out of the range of the common space-and-time writers ***
… minor dissatisfactions … The women are all made up out of a few abstract ideas of jealousy, vanity, maternity etc. …
It is a strange comment on our age that such a book lies … wholly unnoticed by the cognoscenti, while any “realistic” drivel about some neurotic in a London flat — something that needs no real invention at all … may get seriously reviewed and mentioned in serious books … I wonder how long this tyranny will last? Twenty years ago I felt no doubt that I should live to see it all break up and great literature return … .
(Ibid. at 392)
I have just read two books by an American ‘scientifiction’ author called Ray Bradbury. Most of that genre is abysmally bad, a mere transference of ordinary gangster or pirate fiction to the sidereal stage, and a transference which does harm not good. Bigness in itself is of no imaginative value: the defence of a ‘galactic’ empire is less interesting than the defence of a little walled town like Troy. …
(Ibid. at 288)
Simon,
You claim that “skeptics … ignore the scientists.”
Absolutely not so.
I am a scientist who was questioning climate “science” back in 1992 because from the first paper i read, one by Phil Jones, I was concerned enough to write to him for more data. I did not evolve to be a sceptic because of any magical event or miraculouis conversion. I was decidedly sceptical from its beginning and remain so.
Like, how do you excuse the “science” of global warming when their main postulate was that CO2 was the control knob for global air temperatures, but this have never been shown. When your primary postulate crumbles, what hope to continue? Evidence sits in plain sight with the collective inability to calculate and demonstrate a plausible sensitivity like ECS. This is basic fail at kindergarten level, but it is fraudently disregarded now under the cry that “we have moved on”. We have not, scientifically.
It is not a problem of sceptics ignoring the scientists.
It is a problem of climate “scientists” ignoring fundamental scientific data.
Show me to be wrong. Geoff S
“I am a scientist who was questioning climate “science” back in 1992 ….
Like, how do you excuse the “science” of global warming when their main postulate was that CO2 was the control knob for global air temperatures, but this have never been shown.”
Huh… you ain’t no scientist if you think that.
chrome-extension://oemmndcbldboiebfnladdacbdfmadadm/http://static.berkeleyearth.org/pdf/annual-with-forcing.pdf
Crichton prefaced “State of Fear” with a personal note to the effect that he began working on the book expecting to write a story that supported the claims of global warming/climate change. But as he got deeper into his research, he came to the conclusion that is was all a hoax and wrote “State of Fear” as a result. At the end of the book, he appended temperature records of many cities (UHI!) that showed no warming over several decades.
And he nailed the lefty, uncompromising attitude and tactics of the movement and where it came from: the collapse of the USSR, which forced western apologists and fellow travelers of communism to find something new to hook their wagons to (and to control how others live. And the same bunch look like they’re trying to jump from global arming to white supremacy, as seen on the news today.
What did learn from Crichton?
People like stories.
And people don’t like facts.
People don’t like a fact like: We are living in an Ice Age.
Another fact, we living in an Ice Age because {and only because} we have a cold ocean.
Let’s try to make a story.
We have been doomed for million of years because we are living in an Ice Age.
We can’t do anything to get out of this Ice Age.
We are doomed to live in this Ice Age for many thousands and thousands of years.
A very long time ago, before humans as know them, existed. The world was not in an
Ice Age. The world was much warmer. The world covered with vast forests. And the ocean
was warm.
Then we got vast deserts and vast ice sheets.
The world grew colder and hotter. We got violent storms. The Earth erupted in vast volcanic zone of
toxic fumes and death stalked the land.
And still have lurking many vast super volcanoes, waiting to erupt at any time.
And still vast deserts, and sheets of glacial ice.
And space aliens have not shown up to save us.
+1000
When the Boeing 737 Max 8 scandal broke, I was reading “Airframe.” When the COVID-19 thing went down, I was reading “The Andromeda Strain.”
I’m leaving Crichton novels alone for a while.
(He didn’t write anything about meteors, did he?)
And if “Airframe” offers any real-life insight into the Boeing Max scandal, everyone in the novel thought there was some defect with the Norton jet airliner, but the problem was with — if you read Airframe, you know where I am leading with this.
Now, we have our own “State of Fear” with the pandemic and the thousands of demonstrators marching simultaneously.
What we are seeing from the radical Left and those cowtowing to their “systemic racism” narrative is “The Madness of Crowds”. As was written: People go mad in crowds, and come to their senses one at a time.
And this madness of crowds is not necessarily a permanent condition of the mind. What we are seeing more than anything is the phenonmenon of “mob emotion”.
I can testify from personal experience, that when you get in a mob of people who are highly emotional about some subject, that the people in the mob will become of one mind without a conscious decision to do so, if some events, such as a fight, triggers acition. So a lot of this violence is spontaneous and “in the moment”.
I was in a riot once. And it started out so peacefully. I lived on the North Shore of Hawaii at this time (1970) and a few friends and I would occasionally travel into Honolulu and sit outside on the lawn of the auditorium called “The Shell” (it looked like a seashell). The band played from the seashell part and the rest was open to the outside so people sitting outside (free:) could hear the music just as well as those who were inside.
So it got to where up to 1,000 or so people would show up for these events, and they featured every big act you can name (It was Honolulu, after all), and a lot of these people attending were hippies.
Well, one evening, we were sitting on the lawn (as large as a couple of football fields) along with hundreds of others people in small groups, and then all of a sudden, about half a dozen police showed up on three-wheeled motorcycles and started driving around the lawn trying to intimidate and harass the people sitting there for some reason, and one motorcyle policeman came flying acorss the grass on his bike and slid up to a screeching halt next to a couple who were sitting near us, and they had an infant with them, and this cop jumps off his motorcycle and stomps over to the couple and reaches down and just snatches a large closed paper bag the woman had sitting there and started tearing into the contents. We assume the cop thought there were drugs in the paper bag, but all that was in there were diapers for the baby.
This and other things they did incensed the crowd outside and we all kind of got to our feet together and started advancing on the motorcycle police, with a lot of yelling and screaming going on from the crowd since they thought they were being very unfairly treated.
And it got so intense that the police were backed up against an eight-foot tall chainlink fence (that surrounded the Shell), and finally police that were lined up inside the Shell opened a gate and allowed the motorcycle cops to escape.
So the crowd is still worked up and the cops leaving didn’t quell the emotion and so people grabbed hold of the chainlink fence and started pushing and pulling on it to try to pull it down, and I was standing there with all these emotions running through me. I wanted to attack. And I looked at myself in amazement, almost like an out-of-body experience, looking at my emotional self reacting without any input from me, and I was flabbergasted that I was so powerfully affected by this emotion. I never experienced anything like it, before or since.
But I wasn’t *that* out of control. I restrained myself from doing some things I felt like doing, but my poor ole buddy, who is a very peaceful, nonviolent person in normal life, got so caught up in the action that he actually leaped up on the fence and crawled over it, only to be maced by the police on the other side, and then he was thrown back over the fence.
We separtated ourselves from the crowd then, and left, but the crowd eventually tore the fence down in their anger. I think things finally settled down after a while but we weren’t there.
The Mob Mood was like being swept up in a powerful wave that was impossible to resist (the emotion part anyway) although I did manage not to be caught up in it too much.
So when you see these demonstrators, you should think that probably most of them didn’t start out with destructive tendencies (excepting the radicals who do start out with destructive tendencies), but during the course of being in the crowd, things might happen that will cause people to do things they would not ordinarily do. They get caught up in it and swept away.
Experiencing it couldn’t have been more surprising to me.
I hear that the NFL commissioner may give players permission to kneel during the National Anthem being played at football games.
This shouldn’t be done if you don’t want to continue with the State of Fear.
Colin Kaepernik hates the United States. His kneeling wasn’t to support blacks, it was to condemn the United States and the police. He says that the United States is a racist nation and that’s why he kneels.
So if the NFL commissioner and the players kneel, then they are saying that all white people are racists.
This will create a hornet’s nest of trouble for the NFL and for the United States. The NFL might as well not plan on having any fans in the stadium if they sanction calling all white people racists by kneeling during the National Anthem.
If you claim “systemic racism” is real then you are saying all white people are racists. Anyone who kneels is saying this.
I won’t be watching any football if any of the players kneel during the National Anthem. If they want to kneel at any other time, they can go right ahead, but it’s not about the flag or the founding fathers or the white race. If they kneel it should be to protest what happened to George Floyd and others like him. The American flag didn’t kill him.
Kneeling and the National Anthem do not go together. If the radicals in the NFL try to equate the two, then there is going to be a furious pushback from people who love this country.
Let’s have a dialogue about our racial problems. A real dialogue. Not the propaganda put out by the race-baiters. Let’s have a scientific examination of the race question. We want to see numbers. Some people have a completely distorted picture of the situation and that is a dangerous situation. We need to change that.
Keep in mind: White people elected Barack Obama to the presidency twice. The United States is not inherently racist. That’s the Lie being put out by Colin Kaepernik and the other race-baiting radicals on the Left.
I’ve talked to people from all over the world. I’ve traveled to many places around the world.
All of my experience has taught me that the United States is one of the least racist countries in the world.
I’m not saying that there are no racists in the United States, that’s obviously not true. However the racists that do exist come in all shapes and all colors.
At one time, some governments did provide cover for these racists. Then we as a nation learned better.
The problem now is that there are many who want government to give cover to their forms of racism.
All in the name of solving a problem that they are doing everything in their power to stoke and inflame.
Absolutely correct MarkW. Sheltered Americans would be shocked by the racism that exists in most of the rest of the world. For example, Asia. Also, I have observed that women in America enjoy far more rights, dignity, and respect, than anywhere else I know about.
From public statements, we know Dr. Crichton was diagnosed with “lymphoma” in the Spring of 2008.
Without privileged access to his personal medical records, I can only make some educated assumptions from what information was made publicly available and knowledge of lymphomas. So some reasonable guesses can be made about his illness, its progress and his ultimate death.
First, the general diagnosis of lymphoma encompasses at least 6 types of this white-blood cell cancer.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/lymphoma/symptoms-causes/syc-20352638
Diagnosed sometime in Spring 2008, his type of lymphoma was likely either non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma or Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), as both are forms that most likely affects older adults like Crichton.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/chronic-lymphocytic-leukemia/symptoms-causes/syc-20352428
There is considerable clinical overlap in differentiating non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and CLL, as they both can present as a B-cell lymphoma.
From the reporting after his death, Dr Crichton and his family felt confident he would recover after his courses of chemotherapy. But suddenly things turned worse in the Fall 2008. This sudden turn for the worse suggests Crichton’s lymphoma was actually a Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) with Richter’s Syndrome (RS).
Here is one case study in DLBCL- w/RS, which is also considered a form of CLL:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3954047/
RS is much more aggressive form of CLL/Non-hodgkin’s Lymphoma, and odds of remission are much lower. Many RS patients, the only real option for survival is a Stem Cell Transplant (SCT). Apparently Dr Crichton’s likely CLL-RS progressed very rapidly precluding such an option.
Underlying Genetics plays a role in progression of all cancers, and lymphomas in particular. But it is believed many later in life lymphomas have an environmental carcinogen exposure linkage as well. The Mayo site lists this:
Chemicals. Certain chemicals, such as those used to kill insects and weeds, may increase your risk of developing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. More research is needed to understand the possible link between pesticides and the development of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
There were a lot of “climate” people who were very happy to read of Dr. Crichton’s passing. He was formidable foe to their cause. Someone who could not be dismissed, had star power, and the public’s attention, that is, Crichton was someone who was doing an enormous amount of damage to the climate scam.
I’ll leave it there.
P.S. and “Jeffrey Epstein didn’t k1ll himself.”
Another worthwhile post, Mr. Worrall. Well done.
Two previous WUWT articles about Crichton’s insights for anyone interested:
1. 2010 WUWT post which quoted Aliens Cause Global Warming in its entirety. The 298 comments by the WUWTers contain some worthwhile insights, too.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/09/aliens-cause-global-warming-a-caltech-lecture-by-michael-crichton/
2. 2016 WUWT post about Crichton’s State of Fear
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/09/29/state-of-fear-by-michael-crichton-could-be-the-1984-of-climate-alarmism/
Thanks Janice.
🙂
Tom A,
The fault with your Honolulu story is that the mob was assembled for the purpose of listening to music and smoking pot.
The BLM mass protests assemble because people catch trains and so on to go to a gathering whose premeditated purpose is mass violence and mass lawlesness. The burning of buildings is not spontaneous, it is deliberate malice aforethought by criminals who should be given zero encouragement, zero assistance and zero escape from jail as appropriate.
You seem not to realise how dangerous our times have suddenly become, by lily-livered acts like police chiefs doing childish play acting on one knee. Insane. Geoff S
+ 50 Mr. Sherrington!
(all 50 U.S. states🙂 — no, there are not 52 or so (or 57!) as D’oh!bama believed)
I enjoyed Crichton’s takedown of the Global Warming theory, and so I read State of Fear. A really lousy book with an unbelievable plot and characters that are just movie tropes rather than real people. (In Crichton books, there is no observable difference in personality and behavior between male and female characters.)
Crichton padded out his books with fake science. Read Jurassic Park? There is a mathematician in it (named Ian Malcolm) who claims to be able calculate the collapse of the Park’s security systems using chaos theory. Come on. Or, the dinosaurs cannot reproduce because they’re all female. But, according to Crichton, since some of their genetic code is fill-in-the-gaps sequences taken from frogs, and since (and I don’t know if this is true or not) some frogs are hermaphrodites whose sexes can change in response to environmental stresses, some of the rogue dinosaurs become males and are able to breed. And velociraptors were about eighteen inches tall. Like, a lost of science fiction masquerading as real science.
But he was right about the fakery of Climate Science. I suspect that, because he was a veteran practitioner of fake science in the service of entertainment, he was offended when other practitioners of fake science got rich by scaring people with it.
The dinosaurs that are “eighteen inches tall” may be a reference to Procompsognathus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procompsognathus or simply the “compys” in Jurassic Park. According to the Wikipedia article, the fossil evidence is they grew twice as tall as that, but they were a lot smaller than the velociraptors. The compys are the demise of the scheming computer programmer working secretly for the rival company seeking to steal dinosaur embryos, played by Wayne Knight, who was already typecast as a shallow, scheming comedic character on the Seinfeld TV show. The compys are depicted as swarming their victims — the death of a “thousand cuts” rather than the one fell slash of the hindleg of a “raptor.”
The movie, I am told, depicted the velociraptors as a lot taller than what is known by science about them, perhaps to make them more menacing. That is part of the Jurassic Park story. You would think the T. Rex is the most dangerous dinosaur, and the T. Rex is dangerous alright, but the lesser dinosaurs are all dangerous in their own specialized way. Velociraptor’s compact size is deceiving with respect to its deadliness.
The philosophical message of Crichton, borrowing from more recent scientific reasoning about dinosaurs as not being the cold-blooded, sluggish, stupid lumbering brutes constituting a dead end in evolution but were quite capable creatures, and reintroducing such evolution-refined-to-be-deadly-to-prey and-enemies creatures into our world of mammals with mankind at the apex, well, read the book or watch the movie to see how that works out.
The Ian Malcolm’s use of Chaos Theory to predict the breakdown of the park, if not pseudo-science is pseudo mathematics. There is a theory to gain insight into a “couple, non-linear, chaotic system” as Crichton explains climate the Charlie Rose, but I think the Dr. Crichton was largely buzz-word enabled on this topic and his scientific expertise was elsewhere. But in Jurassic Park, you didn’t need an in depth understanding of non-linear differential equations, you just had to know that the rival company considered the dinosaurs to be that value that they would employ a scheming buffoon as the type-cast Wayne Knight character to goof things up, that and the dinosaurs not behaving like any known animal because they were not known animals until brought back into being, and the “cold-blooded, sluggish, stupid lumbering brute” model had the designers of park security underestimating them.
Dr. Crichton’s scientific expertise was informed by his medical training on the response of the human body to various insults, exposures and traumas, his novels being insults, exposures and trauma to the human body-porn starting with The Andromeda Strain and continuing throughout all of this other books. You know that someone is going to die or be badly injured in some medically novel way in each and every one of this many best-sellers.
As to his lack of a writer’s craft in depicting women characters, maybe this lack of expertise in the human condition as experience by women is reflected in his 5, brief marriages. His novel Prey about the “grey-goo silicon self-replicating nano-machine swarm” has a character exhibiting what I think is a very realistic depiction of resentment, suspicion and jealousy on the part of a male character. His novel Airframe is an attempt, shall we agree, to depict a divorced woman character as a protagonist?
As to his skepticism about Climate Change, that too may be he as a generalist offering a “big picture” scientific speculation rather than having specialist knowledge, in the manner of, say, Richard Lindzen offering specifics on why general circulation models GCM of future temperature rise are not to be trusted. But maybe you don’t have to have a specialist knowledge of a branch of differential equation theory to know why Jurassic Park is going to fail, you just have to know they hired that craven, scheming guy from Seinfeld to write the computer programs operating the security features of the park. You may not need to understand in detail what Dr. Lindzen is telling us to get a sense the Climate Science has gotten so heavily “marketed”, suggesting something isn’t right with that, either.
Paul
Neumann!!! Wasn’t killed by the compys, that was the nihilist from The Big Lebowski and was in a later movie.
Neumann!! Was killed by the critter with the expanding red neck mane that spit poison in your eyes.
Was a good movie.
Malcolm never proved anything, he just stated it was inevitable.
Golf Blum was the best thing in that movie, his best work since Into the Night.
Classic
Paul
Neumann!!! Wasn’t ki!!ed by the compys, that was the nihilist from The Big Lebowski and was in a later movie.
Neumann!! Was ki!!ed by the critter with the expanding red neck mane that spit poison in your eyes.
Was a good movie.
Malcolm never proved anything in the movie, he just stated it was inevitable?
GoldBlum was the best thing in that movie, his best work since Into the Night.
Classic
Keep forgetting to mod certain words
*Sorry for repeat
And what is this nonsense….”If Crichton had lived, there is no doubt he would have continued to be a powerful voice for reason, and a fearless critic of climate alarmism and government policy based on scientifically unfounded claims.”
He died a long time ago and so we have no way of knowing what he would have thought now. People do change their minds both ways on this issue. Look at Richard Muller.
11.5 years is so long ago /s
It is in this climate debate. A lifetime.
The metastasizing nonsense since his death would only have confirmed his totally correct scientific judgement against the anti-human lie of CACA.
“The first time that he witnessed that was with the famous Drake Equation, used to turn SETI speculations about space aliens into a science. The Drake equation was a series of probabilities multiplied together to estimate the probability that space aliens may exist who can communicate with us”
I remember a debate on this in the 90s. “This is bugger all times bugger all, times bugger all. That is bugger all cubed.”
I seem to remember more terms than that in the Drake equation (can’t be bothered to Google it), so it’s BA to an even higher power! My thoughts on why we have not found signs of intelligent life (or even life) outside of Earth is that possibly one of the terms in the Drake equation is infantesimally small, and that although there may be billions of worlds out there that could support life, the chances of it happening on any one of them are billions to one against. Long since, people have passed electric discharges through mixtures of simple compounds like methane, ammonia etc. and found basic building of life – amino-acids, purines, pyrimidines – in the resulting slime. It is also plausible to follow a chain of evolutionary development from a simple bacterium to complex organisms like mammals, however joining these two ends together has never been adequately explained (my personal favourite theory involves geothermal vents). Perhaps the generation of a minimal functioning organism from its component parts is just very extremely unlikely – perhaps we are here because we are the celestial lottery winners! This possibility does not seem to attract much favour, the conventional wisdom seems to be that life must be commonplace. I suspect the reason for this is that religion puts mankind at the centre of creation and from Galileo through Darwin and beyond science has broken with this belief, so the idea of any form of human uniqueness is resisted because it looks too ‘religious’.
“…because of his talent as a speaker,…”
Or orator. So was Hitler.
Most people listen to and are influenced by words and then act. They usually don’t understand the meaning of the words they hear, but then it’s too late.
R.I.P. Michael Crichton
A Giant among Intellectual Pygmies