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I read this Crichton speech. While I see his point,
I have to severely disagree with his interpretation of what are carefully
selected snapshots of environmental and other views. He even answers his
own objections to the Y2K situation. Like many problems of this type, dire
warnings, often couched in overdramatised language, ARE NECESSARY to get
people moving. The fact that Y2K caused minimal disruption is because of
the warnings and the consequential efforts to rewrite and adapt programmes and
computers. Like many "deniers" he seems to be using a post facto analysis to say
that because nothing much happened, the original warnings were baseless
scare mongering. This type of thinking is highly dangerous because such
people often go on to apply such hindsight to current "dire warnings" and draw
the conclusion that they will prove to be just as inconsequential, therefore no
effort should be made to address the problem because past experience
shows that these problems solve themselves or are not problems at all in
the first place. Madness - utter illogical madness!
Crichton mentions the 70's fears
of global cooling and human created ice age but tricks us into thinking that we
are reading an excerpt from current climate fears. The fears then were that
particles, smoke and soot/acid from combustion would block off
sunlight at high altitude and cause an accelerating cooling of Earth leading to
a new ice age. I shared those fears at that time. The theory of greenhouse gas
warming had yet to appear or was not widespread. This gibe had been slung
at environmentalists before along the lines of " now in the 90's you are
warning about global warming - in the 70's you were scare mongering about global
cooling - make up your minds!" The truth is that then, as now, environmentalists
were quoting the best scientific knowledge of the time and informing the general
public, who had a right to know - not just the "elite" of scientists and policy
makers. Ironically, the very soot/acid particles etc that we were warning
about then have been proved to genuinely have a cooling effect that has
mitigated the effects of increasing levels of greenhouse gases and thus
have masked the underlying global warming. We weren't wrong, we were
terribly right - people have the power to royally screw up their planetary
environment if they don't listen to warnings, take heed and take action to avoid
the imminent threats and precautionary action to avoid the long term
threats...
Nick Palmer
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