On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal’s Andy Kessler used his Inside Views column to once again prove that the Journal’s opinion page is home to the stupidest and laziest takes around.
Kessler’s headline advises readers to “Follow Michael Crichton’s Rule,” based on a 2003 talk the famous science fiction (note “fiction” here) author gave called “Aliens Cause Global Warming.” In Crichton’s words, Kessler writes, the speech is “uneasy relationship between hard science and public policy.” Kessler then tells the reader to “relax,” because “this column isn’t about climate change.”
Except it is, and Kessler was either too lazy and ignorant to know it, or too biased to care.
Kessler explains that Crichton’s “first example was nuclear winter,” the name given to the massive amount of cooling due to smoke in the air that some believe would occur after a nuclear war. Kessler, via Crichton, claimed that “no one could take the other side of the argument” because, per a quote by famously climate-denying physicist Freeman Dyson, “who wants to be accused of being in favor of nuclear war?” And that is the crux of Crichton’s (and Kessler’s) argument- that the public bends to social pressure rather than listening to “hard science”.
But that’s simply not true. There was a raging debate about nuclear winter, something Kessler would have learned had he simply looked at nuclear winter’s Wiki page or googled “nuclear winter debate” and found, for example, this New York Times story from 1990.
In fact, it was the emerging climate science community, in particular Steven Schneider, who pushed back against this, with climate modeling that showed it’d be less severe than some, including Carl Sagan, claimed--more of a nuclear fall than winter. Hopefully Steven Schneider’s name rings a bell: he became one of the best climate science communicators before his untimely passing in 2010, and remains a target for deniers, who continue to misrepresent one of his quotes.
Kerry Emmanuel, another familiar name, also appears in the nuclear winter Wiki page. Emmanuel was quite critical of Sagan’s work on nuclear winter, and later went on to write one of the first key papers linking hurricanes and climate change.
Turns out that science fiction writer Michael Crichton didn’t quite have a handle on the actual science. And Kessler obviously didn’t do any due diligence to check and see if perhaps this fiction writer was less than factual.
But it gets worse.
Kessler concludes by pointing out that “we’re sorely missing the other side of the argument,” but as the many obvious ignorant holes in his story shows, we’re not missing anything but Crichton’s conservative-friendly fictions. Because while Kessler/Crichton claimed there was no one to stand up to superstar media darling Carl Sagan, just like there’s no one to stand up to the climate science consensus, it was in fact the climate science community that stood up to Carl Sagan!
And that’s a fact that Kessler has no excuse for not knowing, because the only link in his piece points to Crichton’s speech- which remains hosted, for some inexplicable reason, on Steven Schnieder’s Stanford website. Kessler is guilty of exactly the sort of ideologically-driven misrepresentation he attempts to foist upon the actually-correct mainstream, which in this case, was where Kessler could find a speech criticizing the consensus.
Crichton may be dead, but irony sure isn’t.
Top Climate and Clean Energy Stories:
