Global Warming is a myth...

[jeff30997]

For the lunatics and Michael Crichton.

I live in the North(Really North) of the Province of Quebec and let

me tell you this:

Today,January 10,all my windows are open and

the fucking snow is melting.MELTING!

Over here it's just like it was Spring.

All the peoples are scratching their heads and

say that they never saw temperatures as high over here,

at this time of the year, in their life.


Recently I've read the Michael Crichton's novel "State of fear".

In that book the author do everything he can to demonstrate that

Global Warming is pure fantasy,a myth,an hysteria.Imagine that!

Most scientists agree that the Earth is warming up:


Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 29, 2006; Page A01

Now that most scientists agree human activity is causing Earth to warm, the central debate has shifted to whether climate change is progressing so rapidly that, within decades, humans may be helpless to slow or reverse the trend.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/28/AR2006012801021.html


Yet this "intellectual" is claiming in this book (and in public as well)that on the

contrary the temperatures of our planet are cooling down!

Hey!Glaciers are growing in Greenland,he says!

In this book that deeply shocked me,Crichton show cherry-picked statistics

to prove his point and mix it with an (I have to admit)interesting intrigue.

So Mr Crichton,let me ask you this:

Why are my fucking windows are wide opened on January 10 North of 50 ?

But I forgot,sorry,you're a fiction writer.

-Jeff

[provis99]

1. No kidding. My brother says he's got almost no snow in Winnipeg.

In Winter-peg! The coldest major city on Earth! And my crazy Seventh-Day Adventist uncle still says global warming is a plot cook up by evolutionist to make bible-thumpers look foolish. We're doomed...

[jeff30997]

17. Yeah...

Last month and in November we had tons of snow and it was cold but now...!!!

And I live North of Winnipeg ! Creepy!

[orleans]

2. the other day we had temps around chicago that were 65 and maybe

a bit higher

we also had a slew of tornados

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jW-BndswWuhgPAPXOK4Q6TCQsANQD8U1T55G0

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/weather/chi-weather07_webjan08,1,7393189.story?coll=chi_breaking_500

[ihavenobias]

8. It was great!

I walked the dog and thought it was spring. But the tornados in January? Very strange.

[orleans]

12. i thought it was spooky. i don't want tornado weather in january

(my dog thought it was spring too! so did the moths and earwigs because they were out, enjoying the weather as well)

[ihavenobias]

18. I agree

of course I wasn't anywhere near the Tornadoes!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x82760

[Captain Angry]

3. I was in Ottawa a couple of years ago.

It was 40 below the entire week.

I would have set a spotted owl on fire if I thought it would have made me warmer. To be serious though, the locals took me out to get a poutine, a beaver tail and a tall hot chocolate.

Back on topic, weather patterns sure are weird anymore. Some people will never ever listen to or hear anything about global warming. That's their prerogative. What I try to do is talk pollution, since I have yet to meet somebody who says that they really enjoy poor visibility, itchy eyes and shortness of breath.

No matter what side of the debate people come in on with global warming, most of them are willing to concede that pollution needs to be pulled WAY back. Which of course helps everybody.

Crichton is a hack, and I know way too many people who read that book and used it as their sole argument against Gore and anything "green." They wouldn't hear the "Isn't he a fiction writer?"

[Clintonista2]

4. I'm in ottawa right now... it's been RAINING for the past week or so

RAINING... in Ottawa... in JANUARY.

[Captain Angry]

6. How are the canals?

It's not supposed to rain in Ottawa in January. Wow that's weird.

[Clintonista2]

10. I haven't been to the rideau canal since before xmas, but it's most likely not frozen anymore

Most of the snow is melted, there's been very thick & warm fog/rain for the past week.

[jeff30997]

9. Mmmmm....

Poutine....(Not Putin!)

[Captain Angry]

13. I ate like a king during that week.

There was an awesome restaurant with the best desserts in the Holiday Inn where I stayed.

I went to the Keg for dinner one night, and of course I hit Timmy's twice a day every day.

Man I miss Canada. We end up with the wrong president here in November, and I might have to finally move up there.

[Tesha]

28. Isn't he the prime minister?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Hour_Has_22_Minutes

[jeff30997]

30. Yes He's scum.

[and-justice-for-all]

5. It is also a natural phenomenon....

But then through us into it and Global Warming happens much faster and much more dynamic. Our Industry is a contributor, period and without question. Like I told the fundi "You can not dump shit into the environment and not expect a reaction, for every action there is a reaction. If you do not believe me, drink a teaspoon of bleach every day and then tell me if your body does not react."

[Kutjara]

7. Michael Crichton is a myth.

He's alleged to be a science fiction novelist, but very little in the way of science finds it's way into his books. Largely, he grabs onto a single idea (supervirus, electrical brain stimulation, cloning, quantum wormholes, global warming), one per book, and then firmly grasps the wrong end of the stick, spinning stories so ridiculous that it's insufficient for the reader to merely suspend disbelief: he/she has to launch it into orbit.

As his career has progressed, Crichton has become more and more reactionary, until now he reads like Tom Clancy with a chip on his shoulder.

I'm convinced the real Michael Crichton died shortly after writing The Andromeda Strain, and his books have been written by Dick Cheney ever since.

[Downtown Hound]

11. There are many out there who believe Crichton uses a ghost writer

much of the time. As someone who used to be a fan of his I can say that the writing style of some of his books differs dramatically from others. And the politics of Jurassic Park are about as far removed from State of Fear as you can get. In Jurassic Park the message was essentially don't fuck with nature, you can't control it. In State of Fear it was essentially you can fuck with it all you want and there won't be any real consequences. Does that really sound like the same guy writing it?

[Kutjara]

14. That would explain a lot.

His books do indeed seem to encompass a variety of styles and political stances. To the ones you cite, let me add "Rising Sun" which was just one long "OMG! OMG! Those sneaky Japs are trying to take over America with their supertechnology, while we just sit around scratching our asses and eating Cheetos!" racist screed. It was like some xenophobe pamphlet disguised as a thriller.

[Downtown Hound]

21. Yep, and let's not forget "Disclosure"

in which the poor white business man is sexually harassed by the mean woman and no one believes him. That was a white man's lament straight out of the pages of Rush Limbaugh if I ever heard one.

My thinking is that he's got one writer working for him that wrote Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Congo, and Sphere. These novels all tend to have the same themes: a mistrust of corporations and the pursuit of the profit motive, and that the pursuit of absolute power or actually having absolute power (Sphere) inevitably leads to bad things. Remember all the chaos theory in JP? Anyone well versed enough in chaos theory would know that the effects of man's impact on the environment are likely to be far reaching and unpredictable, yet in State of Fear, he essentially throws all that out the window and says not only does he know what's going on but he has predicted the future. And relax, uncle Mike says it's going to be okay.

The other writer, the one that wrote State of Fear, Rising Sun, and Disclosure, is essentially a paranoid right winger using fiction to promote his agenda.

Here's something I found that was interesting. This is an ad for a ghostwriting service. In it the ad mentions none other than, yep, Michael Crichton as an example of somebody that made millions off of somebody else's work. Granted they are referring to ER, which, to my knowledge, Michael Crichton never actually took credit for writing, but rather "creating." How do you create something you don't invent? Anyways, it just shows that Mr. Crichton has a history of profiting off of somebody else's work and making it look like his own, even if in this case he never actually claimed to have written it.

http://www.pegr.com/ghostwritertelevisionpilot.html

[Kutjara]

24. Wow! Thanks for taking the time to post that.

It certainly looks like a credible explanation. The only other one that comes to mind is that MC has multiple personality disorder.

I'd forgotten about Disclosure, the misogynist "classic." It was very much in the same vein as "Rising Sun", except evil women took the place of evil Japanese.

Given how many novels are now openly ghostwritten (any of those with the famous author's name in huge letters and their "collaborator's" name in small letters), I suppose it's not that surprising that the practice went on behind the scenes before.

[jeff30997]

26. Hello again Kutjara San !

Can you tell me more about the ghostwriters phenomenon ?

[Kutjara]

27. Hi again Jeff!

I guess there are essentially two kinds of ghostwriting that try to disguise themselves as something else.

The first is the "collaboration" between a famous author and someone nobody's heard of. Tom Clancy was the pioneer of this kind of writing. He "creates" a book series like "Ops Center" and then gets the books written by some poor schmuck who's probably chained to a desk in some basement. Tom's name is prominently at the top of the cover. The real writer is at the bottom of the page, below the picture. James Patterson has taken to doing this, as has Arthur C. Clarke (but at least he chooses good scifi writers like Stephen Baxter and Greg Benford to do the work).

The other kind of ghostwriting is the "from beyond the grave" stuff. I think it began with Virginia Andrews. When the author of "Flowers in the Attic" died, the executors of her estate figured that a little thing like Ginny's demise shouldn't stand in the way of their gravy train. So they got a bunch of hacks to write endless sequels, and stamped the resultant books with "Authorized by the Estate of Virginia Andrews" on the cover. Frank Herbert's (Dune) son has done something similar to bloat that story beyond reason. Of course JRR Tolkien's little boy Chris is still churning out "recently discovered" manuscripts, to the point where it's unsurprising JRR died, since he clearly had no time to eat for all the writing he was doing.

on edit: I just thought of a third kind: the "celebrity" novel. This is probably the worst of all, because the poor ghostwriter doesn't get a mention, but nobody is fooled into believing that, for example, Naomi Campbell is capable of writing anything more complex than a love letter to herself. Perhaps this is a blessing, however, because what self-respecting writer would want the world to know that he or she was responsible for Paris Hilton's new novel?

[krispos42]

29. He was right on that score

Huge swaths of foreign companies own large chunks of America now because we were stupid enough to sell them to anybody with a wad of cash. Japan is a big one, but by no means the only one. 90% of our music companies are owned by foreig companies such as Sony. And our movies companies are owned in a large part by Sony as well. How about Rockerfeller Center? Japanese-owned.

The Spanish have several major US Interstates on 99-year leases. 60% or more of our nation's cement factories and mines are foreign owned. Similar stories with the steel industry, power plants, publishing, etc. Thom Hartmann occasionally reads from a website that lists all this stuff in detail but I cannot recall the URL right now. :-(

Remember out ports security scandal a couple of years ago? We got all uppity because Dubai was buying a whole shitload of our nation's seaports. Was that xenophobic, or just common sense?

We DUers spend a lot of time being upset with globalization, and for good reason. If we want to fight globalization and return our manufacturing to America, that means we have to say "No, sorry" to foreign corporations, foreign ownership, and unbalanced "free-trade" deals with foreign nations. That was the point of "Rising Sun".

Remember, it's the neocons and WTO-lovers and NAFTA-proponants and GATT-supporters that don't give a shit who owns what in America or where anything is made. And it's foreign nations that do give a shit about who owns what in their countries that limit outside ownership, and that protect their industries. That's why we have a $250 billion annual trade deficit. They're saying "No" to American products over their own domestic ones as a point of national pride.

We DUers also worry about out exploding national debt and foreign ownership of it. We worry about what happenes if China were to cash in all $900 billion of their Treasury bonds tomorrow. Well, that worry as it related to Japanese ownership of our debt in the late 1980's was also spelled out in "Rising Sun". Specifically, where Japanese corporations that owned the Treasury bonds protected their investments in America by influencing the government and economy.



I don't know how accurate MC's portrayal of Japanese culture and attitude is. Like many Americans, my knowledge of foreign attitudes and lifestyles is very limited. I've been to Canada, once, for lunch, and Mexico, once, for a winery tour. I do know that his portrayal of American attitudes in the book was accurate. And in the late 1980's when the book was written, before China and the Middle East got really involved in buying up America, and before Dubya doubled our national debt, Japan was a major player on buying up American assets. I believe at the time they were second to the Dutch.

I think "Rising Sun" was a warning to America. Once that we ignored, and is coming true in the form of Republican corporatism, the DLC, the "blue-dog" Democrats, and neo-conservatism.

[jeff30997]

22. Interesting...

I like your point of view.It wouldn't surprise me that he uses ghost writers,he's so pretentious.

He could get his fucking grocery list to be published!

[jeff30997]

23. Yep!

I like your point of view.It wouldn't surprise me that he uses ghost writers,he's so pretentious.

He could get his fucking grocery list to be published!

[jeff30997]

15. "quantum wormholes"

Yeah,Timeline was a really crappy novel.

Good story basis but the time traveling part really sucks at the scientific level.Gee!

He vaguely mentions paradoxes but archaeologists find the glasses!Impossible.

Lame,lame,lame.

His last good book was Jurasik Park IMHO.

[Kutjara]

16. I agree about JP, but even there...

...the mechanism for getting dino DNA (from mosquitos trapped in ancient amber) was known to be unworkable. I guess he'd already written that part of the book before he got the news, and couldn't be bothered to rewrite.

[jeff30997]

19. Yes but...but...

It was the 1990's and it was SF.And I loved that damed book so leave me alone ! :)

[Kutjara]

20. OK, OK. No more digs at Jurassic Park.

I liked it a lot as an adventure story, regardless of the scientific shortcomings. And it would be totally cool to have dinosaurs running around today (if possibly a little hazardous).

:hi:

[jeff30997]

25. Hehehe...

Me too.