Global Gloom

When did Michael Crichton jump the shark and become a propagandist for right-wing causes? (Yeah, I know it wasn't yesterday.)

In some of the most disturbing chapters, Lomborg recounts what leading climate figures have said about anyone who questions the orthodoxy, thus demonstrating the illiberal, antidemocratic tone of the current debate. Lomborg himself takes the larger view, explaining in detail why the tone of hysteria is inappropriate to addressing the problems we face.

I'm so glad people like Dr. Crichton and Bjørn Lomborg are here to help save me from the forces of illiberality, and the enemies of democracy.

I claim zero expertise on global warming, though today’s Science Saturday gives what seems to be a balanced discussion. Note the hysteria as the Evil MSM representative frames the journalistic state of affairs.

I haven't read the book. If Crichton was interested in engaing in the actual debate, he would have pitched his review differently, aiming his rhetoric at skeptics rather than ideological true-believers. As it is there's nothing here compelling enough to persuade somebody like me to read it.

The straw men whom Crichton and the "skeptics" he helps to enable take aim at have almost nothing to do with the actual debate that takes place in the public sphere, which, like every other public debate, suffers from cartoonish characterizations and exaggeration at the mass media level. When the so-called skeptics engage, only the basest, dumbest aspects of the pro- side of the debate are depicted with any accuracy. The rest, e.g. Gore's movie, is depicted with sneers and condescension, and almost never discussed on the merits. I've seen An Inconvenient Truth, and it's a polemic, unabashedly - there's nothing wrong with that. It build its case rationally, and makes points that are available for debate.

Krauthammer Reverts to Type

The New Republic seems not to have understood how the Kuwait “detail” undermines everything.

I initially wrote the following as a comment on Bloggingheads.tv.

"Beauchamp might be a liar." This is a provable assertion. It is not equivalent to "Beauchamp is a liar," or to "Everything Beauchamp says is true," neither of which is supportable. After weeks of beating this topic to death, nothing anybody has said changes the truth value of any of those assertions. And yet the attacks on Beauchamp - and TNR, do a simple search with just the terms TNR and Beauchamp and see how many hits you get that lead directly to slams on TNR, (we're ignoring the fact that that attacks on Foer are prima facie attacks on TNR) - have asserted and continue to assert that the truth of what he says has been incontrovertibly settled.

Those who are invested in proving his veracity, or lack of same, have not made their case. Simple assertions, rumors, innuendo, bad feelings, suppositions, extrapolations, or yelling really loudly do not constitute a case.

As I've said elsewhere, I have no opinion about the truth of his claims. I do have an opinion about whether assertions about the truth of his claims are true.

And that's the bloody point. Just because something "seems" false doesn't make it so. He's presented his case. TNR say they've vetted it. The Army says the opposite. He definitely got at least one detail, the importance of which can be argued from now until kingdom come, wrong. That summarizes just about everything substantive here.