Originally Posted by Philatio
I think some of his arguments - especially the stuff at the end of the book - are pretty good.
According to field climatologists, his arguments definitely
aren't pretty good - they are glaringly bad and misleading.
A good deal of what Crichton preys upon with that appendix of his seems to be the hope that most people aren't in the field of climatology or earth science and will take what he says as fact.
Particularly glaring are that Crichton seemingly doesn't know the difference between local weather and global climate and - worst of all - that he cited conservative Pat Michaels's (a Cato Institute fellow - bias sewn in) whitewashing of two separate scenarios in NASA climatologist James Hansen's climate projection graph to point out that he was "300% in error." Terrible stuff.
Crichton himself was an MD, not an earth science guy, so it could just be that he wasn't prepared himself to tackle the subject. Don't feel like you (or anyone) should trust
me in particular on this (since I'm no climatologist either), but the rebuttals to Crichton's book are stronger than the book's arguments, to be sure, and from much better informed sources:
The most comprehensive rebuttal by real climatologists:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=74
A glaciologist's rebuttal:
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1690659
James Hansen's direct rebuttal to Crichton:
http://columbia.edu/~jeh1/hansen_re-crichton.pdf
Anyway, back on topic with my three good books this month:
'David Copperfield' by Charles Dickens (still reading at present, but it seems to contain within its pages every known human behavioral archetype)
'Smoking in Bed: Conversations with Bruce Robinson' by Bruce Robinson and Alistair Owen
'Asimov's New Guide to Science' by Isaac Asimov