'aye, I didn't follow Crichton's back and forth on the issue enough to discern whether he was a willing or unwilling tool of corporate politics but it probably wouldn't take too much digging to verify.

Certainly the arguments Crichton supplied were co-opted by big biz and their representatives to justify denial and non-action on the global-warming/climate-change front.

It's not surprising. The supporting arguments looked strong but weren't very good.

Even the argument against "consensus science" was a horrid example of the same linguistics fragging that leads to laypeople arguing that  "a scientific theory is only a theory".

(when it's the precise opposite -Ed)

In the same way, he falsely implies "scientific consensus" is some sort of unresearched polling of scientists, for their uninformed opinion.  Some sort of vote.

When what it really means is that scientists -who are working in the field of research- have come to a preliminary conclusion based on the weight of the available evidence.

And that conclusion has independently been arrived at, based on independent research, by the majority of scientists studying in the fields numerous research areas.

It's not quite the same thing as a hands-up poll of the unresearched uninformed's "opinion", as Crichton implies.

The arguments are precisely the sort of arguments the corporate world would lift for their own purposes, at surface level it sounds good to anyone who doesn't know how these things are really done, and it's utterly wrong.

Also, somewhat ironically, Big Biz and their political and gen-pop supporters were _actually_ the ones to apply Crichton's pseudo-scientific polling technique.  Only they couldn't find many that would agree with them.  So they cheated.

They were the ones that would attempt to poll-quote "scientists" most of whom wound up as either not scientists in the field, not acredited scientists at all (and sometimes people that didn't even exist -Ed) in an attempt to use those faux-scientific claims as evidence that global warming _wasn't_ happening.

All in an attempt to present the fabricated illusion that there was an equal and opposite "scientific-consensus" on climate-change.

/BEGIN Aside/

Fox loves to do a variation on that too. And I've seen CNN do it. They present a split screen with 2 people for an issue, 2 against.  What's wrong with that? I'm glad you asked. (we thought you might be - Ed) *cough* imo that's fine for public opinion, but for science, that is grossly misleading. When an issue _isn't_ evenly supported by the science, imo they should not be allowed to present an even balance of representatives on screen, because it creates a FALSE misrepresentation to the public.

That's my view anyway.

/END Aside/

Anyway, back to pseudo-scientifc polling.

BigBiz and their reps have since been busted for that, as

fake anti-global warming "research" papers have been caught, 

lists of faked anti-global-warming scientists have been published and then retracted when it was revealed the list was bogus and put together by corporate friends

and real scientists have said "get me off your anti-global warming list!"

(and that's not including some global-warming skeptic sites that create lists that contain real scientists, who just so happen to have been dead for quite some time - Ed)

But whether or not it was Crichton's intent to supply the corporate world with a blue-print (if an ultimately ineffective one - Ed) I don't know.

I think most of the arguments in Crichton's 2003 article are a load of misleading bunk.

It can look like he was trying to support the right wing corporate sponsored anti-global warming campaign, but I give him the benefit of the doubt that what he may have been trying to do, was call for more due-diligence and in the process, big biz saw an opportunity to co-opt his arguments for their own agenda.

The Avante Guardian. ---- Einstein's Hair^2 //Approved.