The American Association of Petroleum Geologists is presenting its annual journalism award this year to Michael Crichton, the science fiction writer whose latest book, “State of Fear,” dismisses global warming as a largely imaginary threat embraced by malignant scientists for their own ends.
“It is fiction,” conceded Larry Nation, communications director for the association. “But it has the absolute ring of truth” he told the New York Times.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which reviews the work of more than 2,000 scientists from 100 countries, we humans are overheating the planet with our burning of oil and coal.
Dr. James McCarthy, a co-chair of the 2001 IPCC, summed up the findings not only of that panel but also of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society, when he said, “There is no debate among any statured scientists working on this issue about the larger trends of what is happening to the climate.”
The sole dissenter is a figment of Michael Crichton’s fertile imagination.
