[Burninator]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

He only confirmed what I had thought and had experienced all along, long before I ever read that article written by him. Years before I ever read that article (thanks for bringing it to my attention CP) I has experienced many situations where I merely mentioned to people I had met that I was not totally convinced by the global warming argument, that it was a largely man-made phenomenon that we could have any efficacy in reversing...and the indignance that was returned to me just made my brain think that this was exactly like talking to someone who was zealously religious. Religions don't have to be theological. I really believe it's just part of the human psyche. These people just got really irrationally argumentative and started going over certain talking points again and again and then finally just getting really mad at me. I'm a pretty timid and non-argumentative guy in person, I just mentioned that I didn't totally believe it and I had people that I knew yelling at me. I watched a lot of films on climate change, read books, articles, and news stories and everything about certain aspects of it really annoy me. For many people, the whole climate change thing was very much like a secular religion in how zealously attached they were to certain ideas, even to the point of cognitive dissonance.

I can't say I have really experienced that to be honest. Most of the time global warming is brought up people that I've met already have their mind made up that man isn't causing it. Which is odd because they don't know much about it either way, and I don't know how they came to their conclusion with knowing so little. The most worked up I've seen people get is here on CP.

I care about the issue, I just don't like the way people got blindly hysterical about it (including people I knew personally). The whole movement gives me a bad taste in how politicized it became. It became in many ways (in my view), a politics of fear...and dissenting voices get drowned out, denied government funding, or silenced by peer pressure.

This one problem that I have from your side of the camp. Because it's the same claim that Intelligent Designer proponents, creationists, alternative medicine promoters and other pseudosciences make. Now to be clear I am not calling your science (or whoever) pseudoscience, but people who are doing pseudoscience do make those claims. I am much more hard nosed when it comes to this argument. The science will speak for itself. If there is good science to show, then it will get done and it will gain ground. I do not buy that their is a conspiracy or anything like that. I only care about the science. The consensus currently in the scientific community is that global warming is largely man made. So if the science is good on the other side then that consensus will change. I trust science to work.

So in the end, maybe I just enjoyed the article so much because one of my favorite authors and a very respected and intelligent guy came to the same conclusion that I did and I wasn't just crazy.

Understandable. But you know what I also found strange about Crichton was that he was quite interest in science, yet his books were very anti-science. Jurassic Park, Congo for example. Maybe his other works were different, I am only familiar with his some of stuff.