“Aliens Cause Global Warming,” a lecture by Michael Crichton

A more recent story concerning the resignation of a famous climate scientist, Lennart Bengtsson, former director of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, from a controversial lobby group due to what Crichton calls "consensus science": http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/climate-scientists...

"The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science"

Our science is very very limited, if you didn't figure out this until now you don't really understand what science is, there are some answers that you will never find if you reduce it to take it to the lab for tests and repeat it until you are sure it's true.

Some things are just educated guesses, drake equation is just statistics, that is the closest thing we have regarding the probability of life in the universe, the scientific answer to the question is only a limited robot sent to a near planet and some water discoveries on europa hoping that one day a robot will also find life in that water.

And all that crap only to get to the point to say that climate change is fake, earth climate is complex and with the same analogy strict science is too limited to get a true/false answer, all we have is an educated guess and that doesn't look good.

So what do you want to do, wait for science to reach the level that understands earth climate completely and can model it on a supercomputer and get a true/false answer? maybe that will happen in a 100 years but what if the educated guess is right, what then? keep burning fossil oil, pollute the oceans, alter the biosphere in ways we don't fully understand because we don't have a clear answer that these changes make a significant impact on the climate/biosphere?

Even if we don't have a true/false answer to climate change I think is obvious that our way of getting energy and dumping waste is very dirty and damaging and given enough time we will be able to see some visible changes before science will be able to provide that definitive answer but probably will be too late.

I don't know anything about global warming research to comment about the conclusion of the text, but I can say something about what is certainly a religious belief infecting those who respect science, and are then led to respect "science": nutrition. The truth is that we know very little about human nutrition, especially in healthy individuals. When John Ioannidis demonstrated that most published medical research is false (wholly or partially), he singled out nutrition and gene-association as two especially problematic fields. Yet, the reason many believe that reading some papers and changing their diets to include more or less protein -- or more or less fiber, or more or less fat -- has an effect on their health is pure religion and magical thinking. This magical thinking stems from a possibly innate (and certainly ingrained) belief that "our body is a temple", or that "we are what we eat", which is a particular manifestation of the more general psychological desire in what Jonathan Haidt calls "purity". This psychological need is combined with the false[1] seemingly-scientific belief that our bodies accumulate damage over time.

The scientific truth is that (other than obviously pathological cases of eating poison, or living on just fries for a year) we simply don't know what food is good for us, and certainly not in what quantity. It's actually worse: we don't even know if diet (again, non pathological) has any effect on health. It is absolutely possible (and even likely), that our bodies are certainly capable of retaining good and disposing of bad nutrients, as long as our diet is somewhere within a very large "normal" range.

But nutrition is another of these scientific religions of our times, which infects actual scientists, too, and affects their research (like various papers linking diet to disease through a correlation with cholesterol -- an unproven pathogen).

[1]: http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/your-body-w...

Michael Chrighton was a well-known climate crank.

What is this article even doing here?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Criticism_of_C...

https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=michael+crichton+cl...

"Just as we have established a tradition of double-blinded research to determine drug efficacy, we must institute double-blinded research in other policy areas as well."

Okay - let's build another earth on the other side of the Sun, we can carry on burning fossil fuels and they can say use solar and molten salt batteries! Michael Crichton is a well known science fiction author; you can take his disbelief in global warming with a grain of salt.

The question I have is who are this breed of 'climate scientists?' Who becomes a climate scientist? Why did they choose climate scientist and not some other science? What was their work before global warming became a hot topic? Do they do any work that has been useful, outside backing up the AGW hypothesis? When did they learn to build computer models? Have their computer modelling skills proved useful in any other areas? What do other scientists think of climate science? Is climate science their main thing or are they more generalist scientists who happen to be publishing climate research? And how much of the published research is actually meta-publishing, based either on data collected elsewhere or conclusions generated elsewhere?