RealPolitik

A new group blog featuring climate experts has debuted recently. Like monitoring average global temperature over the coming years, having a daily record of climate issues should help interested parties discern policy trends. I hope that RealClimate heats up in a good way.

Old codger Professor Emeritus Phillip Stott apparently hasn't vented his spleen yet on this turn of events. Busying himself devouring Michael Crichton's fictional screed against global warming, State of Fear, it will take some time for him to come down off his cloud. My curiosity piqued, this, from an Amazon.com review: "Basically, it's about a young lawyer working for an environmental philantropist. Things get rough when the lawyer discovers that his client had discovered some unscrupulous things about the nature of one of his beloved environment charities. Once our hero discovers that the charity is a front for the eco-terrorism group ELF, his life is in jeopardy."

This book is pure fiction, PERIOD. But it is good for Crichton to reveal his John Stosselesque, pro-business agenda and biases to his reading public. Those who grew up on the fantasy-based, hi tech Crichton of old will not likely have positive feedback on this book if they can even get through it. He has clearly taken the mantel of being the new prophet of neocon doom and hate mongering. And it isn't that I don't think he doesn't believe his right-wing contrarian posing. The problem is that he very much so does believe it, and thus this piece of political fantasy is a hectoring diatribe akin to a graduate seminar that lasts 30 minutes passed the scheduled end of the class period. His 25 point "message" about climate change, or global warming, as he misnames the phenomenon, at the end of the book is something that could have easily come from the corporate-funded Cato Institute, Frank Luntz or from the PR experts at Exxon Mobil. Of course, to get to his "message", one might actually have to slog through the 600 page tirade that gives junk science like "the greenhouse effect will actual benefit humanity" a bad name. A quick programming note, tonight's meeting of the greening earth society will be preempted by the newly reformed flat earth society.

Fact vs. Fiction. It's a matter of physics.