Michael Crichton: Aliens Cause Global Warming
by Michael Crichton Jun 3, 2008 in Pulled From The Vault Reading Time: 25 mins read
Presented at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA – A historical approach detailing how over the last thirty years scientists have begun to intermingle scientific and political claims.
My topic today sounds humorous but unfortunately, I am serious. I am going to argue that extraterrestrials lie behind global warming. Or to speak more precisely, I will argue that a belief in extraterrestrials has paved the way, in a progression of steps, to a belief in global warming. Charting this progression of belief will be my task today.
Let me say at once that I have no desire to discourage anyone from believing in either extraterrestrials or global warming. That would be quite impossible to do. Rather, I want to discuss the history of several widely-publicized beliefs and point to what I consider an emerging crisis in the whole enterprise of science—namely the increasingly uneasy relationship between hard science and public policy.
I have a special interest in this because of my own upbringing. I was born in the midst of World War II and passed my formative years at the height of the Cold War. In school drills, I dutifully crawled under my desk in preparation for a nuclear attack.
It was a time of widespread fear and uncertainty, but even as a child, I believed that science represented the best and greatest hope for mankind. Even to a child, the contrast was clear between the world of politics—a world of hate and danger, of irrational beliefs and fears, of mass manipulation and disgraceful blots on human history.
https://climatechangedispatch.com/from-the-vault-aliens-cause-global-warming/
