Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park and State of Fear

The second email, which I sent Kelley Ross in December 2009, was shorter and goes unanswered, perhaps because it came from the same email I used with the first one. What really set me off was reading his home page on how the Left, in their “post-modern” worldview have drifted into a “post-Copernican” ideology. His anger may have to do with him not being published since he says: “The peer-review system of publication, while helping to maintain scholarly standards, also serves to screen out innovation and dissent and to promote doctrinal uniformity and a self-referential scholasticism — the stigmata of academia becoming a rent-seeking bureaucracy.”

When I first read his introduction, I assumed that he had meant that most Liberals had adopted the post-modern concept of cultural relativism to the point where they didn’t even believe the world being round to be a scientific fact. As crazy as that sounds, Richard Dawkins had attacked similiarly irrational beliefs in The Selfish Gene. Re-reading this now, I think he might have been writing metaphorically, insinuating that post-modernism as philosophically “post-Copernican,” but on the other hand, he continues on by claiming that the Left sees science as “an instrument of Euro-centric oppression.” The only euro-centrism I’m aware of his the fact that he believes one snowy winter in Britain disproves global warming, but taking obscure post-modern academic eccentricies and attributing them to the entire Democratic voting bloc is pretty much his bread and butter.

Letter 2: Western Academics Take Up Totalitarianism

Western academics and intellectuals have truly and heartily taken up the cause of totalitarianism, fallen from the dead hands of fascism and communism, with the same goals, through the same methods, namely, laws about speech, thought crimes, disarmament of civilians, political control of private property and private relationships, denigration of religion, political propaganda through state schools, the militarization of police, the destruction of the rule of law through discretionary powers given to executive officials and bureaucrats, the subversion of trial by jury, etc. etc. There are also new twists, like the distortion of civil rights law into a means of abolishing civil rights.

Although Anglo-American philosophy tended to worship at the feet of science, the drift of academia to the left has led to characteristically totalitarian political attacks on science itself.The “post-modern” move may even be called the “post-Copernican”move, where the “de-centering” of meaning and objectivity (giving new meaning to the word “obscurantism”), returns the “marginalized” literary critic or theorist to the Ptolemaic center of the universe, whence modern science, now demystified and unmasked as an instrument of Euro-centric oppression, had proudly thought to have dislodged an arrogant humanity. Where the arrogance has settled now is all too plain to those familiar with American academic life.

How many people on the Left do you know really believe this? Lefties believing in a “post-Copernican” world where science is a “Euro-centric” invention of oppression is not an idea that has received any amount of traction by any stretch of the imagination. This has got to be the ultimate straw-man argument, especially since you don’t even believe the science of global warming.

Question: what is science? What makes evolution science and climatology pseudo-science? Do you think every individual, whether holding a degree in science or not, gets to choose what the word means? Because if you talked to, you know, a real scientist, instead of trying to pretend you’re an expert in all fields, you would learn that global warming is accepted throughout the entire scientific community, not just a few liberal tree-hugging environmentalists. Yet your global warming web page tries to blame most of it on Al Gore. In fact, there is no credited scientific organization on the entire planet that challenges the science, not even the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, which not too long ago gave Michael Chricton their yearly award in “Journalism”!

You don’t even attempt to hide the fact that you start with the politics and work backwards from there. Your anger towards the Left is evident in the way you accuse *them*, not the scientific community(!), of “inventing something else” if it wasn’t global warming. What a totally outrageous and unethical accusation to make without any amount of proof. The financial pressure to maintain the status quo hardly needs an explanation, but do you really believe that people on the Left hate their country or the rich or whatever so much they just somehow convinced everyone except a few “true science-followers” like yourself into this Green conspiracy? The money trail from oil companies to anti-climate change astroturf organizations is clear enough for anyone with a computer to see yet there is not one financial link that can be found connecting clean energy to climate scientists. A conspiracy like this would have to be over 100 times larger than the “9/11 Truther” conspiracy with billions if not trillions of dollars needed in bribes, and yet not a single connection between the liberal politics and the climate science can be found.

Your webpage on climate change is especially lame, and this is coming from someone who thinks you have the best website ever created (in terms of sheer volume and display, not correct answers, although I applaud your work on the so-called “Fall of Rome” and the Eastern Roman Empire). Some 10 or 15 loose, incomprehensible, and extremely unscientific pages worth of content on “Unstoppable Global Warming” (one-third of which concentrates on a *science fiction author*) does not compare to the thousands upon thousands of pages of peer-reviewed research from actual scientists in countries throughout the world working on many independent lines of evidence. You might as well try to disprove evolution by writing about the volcano theories of L. Ron Hubbard on a cocktail napkin, which, come to think of it, isn’t far from how supply-side economics was invented.

I know it’s hard for an ideologue like yourself to change your mind, but I implore you to go to the library and read up on Climate Change again, only take out random books instead of starting with Ann Coulter. If it wasn’t for your politics, would you really be accusing the Left of inventing what your side calls “the greatest hoax in the history of mankind”? Can you really be on the side that says scientists, not fossil fuel industries, are deluding the entire world and at the same time say the same colluding body of scientists/climate alarmists are in epistemological disagreement with one another? Don’t you find it just a little disconcerting that the top guys fighting Climate Change science today is an English Lord with a Classics degree and a Creationist Senator who belongs to a Fundamentalist Christian mafia organization linked to the C-Street sex scandals? If you really think science can be bought so easily, then you should at least admit to being somewhat “anti-science” yourself, at least as far as the current official stance is in relation to the truth, but you should also ask why the Right can’t just buy their own climate scientists. Was it a mistake of history that the entire world body of climate science ended up on the Left despite the Left’s “post-Copernician” hatred towards their profession?

The theory that massive amounts of carbon inserted into theatmosphere causes global warming is over 100 years old. Congress waswarned about this from James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute forSpace Studies over 20 years ago. They have been proven by the hottest decade on record, the melting icecaps, the forest fires in California,the desertification of Australia, etc., etc., etc., all of which either follows or surpasses the worse-case scenerios predicted by the much-despised IPCC. Stephen Hawking, who some consider to be the smartest physicist in the world, ranks climate change along side the proliferation of nuclear weapons as one of the greatest threats to the future of the world. And once again, every accredited science organization on the planet says you are wrong and we are right. If you are going to present yourself as unbiased, you have to admit to some kind of even-handed criteria to which you would take the other side. What exactly would our side need to present to you for you to consider other alternatives to this world-wide conspiracy theory?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change

http://www.grist.org/article/series/skeptics/