Aliens Cause Global Warming and Other Wisdom from Michael Crichton

I had found this speech in PDF format several months ago, and after my last posting decided to look it up and link to it. And I found a couple of other gems to go along with it. All of these are a little long, but they are well worth reading.

The first is entitled "Aliens Cause Global Warming" and discusses the underpinnings of the pseudoscience of anthropogenic global warming.

The second is called "The Case for Skepticism on Global Warming". This goes into a little more detail about some of the problems with the so-called data on which the whole idea of global warming is based. His discussion of the statistical tweaking needed to create the 'hockey stick' graph that we've all grown to hate from Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" is not (as far as I can tell) original to Mr. Crichton, as I have previous seen this same criticism made elsewhere by the head of the American Statistical Association.

The last speech is "Complexity Theory and Environmental Management", which isn't about global warming per se, but does reference it obliquely. It raises some interesting concepts to consider if mankind is going to wade into trying to "manage" the climate of this world when we only have the glimmer of an inkling of a grasp of the edges of what actually drives the climate. (This is beside the point that all 7 billion of us together are too puny to really affect the climate.)

And speaking of Al Gore's ridiculous movie, if you haven't watched it, then don't! Or at least try to do it in a way that keeps money from going to this poor deluded soul. I saw it on Showtime, and I must admit that I was surprised to see certain scenes included in this serious tome on how we are ruining the planet. You know the scenes -- the ones with Al Gore campaigning for president, talking about the death of his sister and the accident that occurred to his son, and finally culminating in the scenes of him losing the election (and yes, the news media's recount of every vote in Florida still showed he lost). I wasn't initially sure what all these scenes had to do with global warming, but then it finally dawned on me -- the inconvenient truth isn't that we're melting the icecaps; it's that Al Gore really did lose in 2000.