State of Fear

I recently picked up State of Fear by Michael Crichton, that one guy who wrote Jurassic Park. I’m not very far into it yet, but it’s a pretty informative book. A small introduction reminds us that characters and organizations are used fictitiously, but anything marked with a footnote is real, and the book contains an appendix citing sources for all of the footnotes. I wish all authors would do this.

As a sidenote, I was browsing around on MichaelCrichton.com and noticed an interesting speech he gave establishing that extraterrestrial aliens are responsible for global warming.

Also, in light of today’s articles about “a new study comparing 7 million real world datapoints with several computer models of global warming,” I agree with Crichton’s take on this. I’ll take a computer climate model seriously when it accurately predicts future trends for the next ten years. Twenty would be preferable.