Scare Tactics

I come to this book--and my own background report--with my own perspectives and opinions on global warming and the tactics used by the mainstream media to encourage (or force?) the green revolution and a fear of global warming, but I come also with an open mind. I used to be right on back of the green revolution bandwagon when concerns first started to get really amped up, however my own extensive watch on the media and its manipulative ways has brought me to a more indifferent stance on whether global warming is truly a cause for concern. It's one of those damned if you do, damned if you don't situations, where our beliefs and ideas are strung literally on a line of uncertainties. The fact is, is that nobody can honestly claim that it is a bona fide fact that the climate will catastrophically change, nor can anyone deny that environmental changes have occurred, and that we've seen some particularly strange events as far as weather goes in the past decade. This leaves me, and surely a lot of the people in this class (and outside of this class), dangling between the two extremes. Do we do something, or do we not?

For the basis of this post, I appreciate Crichton's staunch opinions about the environmentalists who use fear in order to promote their own agendas. It reminds me a lot of other organizations, such as PETA, which I won't get into right here and now, but it is sufficed to say that there are some extremists in this group who use similarly terroristic threats upon those who don't necessarily agree with their ideas, specifically the Animal Liberation Front, who seem to care more about chickens than the people whose lives they're hurting in the process of chicken liberation.

That said, I feel like I would like to counterbalance the blatant anti-extremist environmentalist attitude in this book with something else, like Al Gore's lovely little number, An Inconvenient Truth. I feel like it's always important to keep a wide open mind when reading books like this, especially when they have the advantage of using a story rather than just facts to propagate an idea of belief.

Now, one thing that caught my eye, which I wrote down but forgot to grab the page number to, was this quote, where Dr. Kenner says, "If anything, global warming theory predicts less extreme weather." It might seem silly to gripe about this one little thing, butwhat Kenner says is not necessarily true. As I discussed with my group, and as I heard on NPR, global warming causes (obviously) warmer weather, leading to higher evaporation rates from bodies of water, causing more moisture in the atmosphere to create precipitation, probably a lot more precipitation than what we've seen. I'm no scientist, but the thing is, is that you have to get the facts straight. That's why I still only see this as a story with some scientific backing, rather than full scientific support. Crichton wishes to rally against the extremist point of view by using similarly false ideas, which to me is similar to what the extremists are doing, only on a less destructive level.