Posted on 12/08/2004 10:37:10 AM PST by Grendel9
Crichton, Heston: YOU CAN'T DESTROY EARTH December 7, 2004
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Speaking of all this, on the Today Show today, Matt Lauer interviewed Michael Crichton. Michael Crichton wrote Jurassic Park. Michael Crichton, in fact, has in the intro to a book he wrote about life and how it cannot be destroyed -- Charlton Heston called this program and read that. It's in our archives somewhere. We probably could be able to dig that out, but we'll do that later. Michael Crichton was on with Matt Lauer and he's got a new book out called State of Fear, and it's a novel, but it's based around global warming, and Crichton, he's just like all of us. He hears all this stuff and he gets affected by all this talk about how humans are creating this destruction in the environment and the atmosphere, and he wanted to investigate, and he did and he wrote a book about it. And Lauer's question to Michael Crichton was, "Your latest novel, State of Fear, about global warming and terrorists using the environment as a weapon. How did you come up with the idea for this?"
CRICHTON: In this case, it's a story where my interests in a topic worked backwards and lead me to try and write a book about it. I, at a certain point, became curious about what exactly the situation was with global warming, and so I went and started looking at the actual data, you know, being sort of a simple-minded outside person, "If it's getting warmer, what is the temperature record?" And it didn't take me very long to get not only skeptical about it, but more and more the feeling I didn't understand.
LAUER: As skeptical -- and let me just do this briefly you -- were in the mainstream for awhile thinking basically this was a manmade problem; we're burning fossil fuel; the environment is heating up -- and now in the book what you ask readers to consider is perhaps that that's bunk.
CRICHTON: Could be, yeah.
RUSH: (Laughing.) Could be. Could be. Yeah, it is bunk. It is total bunk. You know, all you have to do, folks -- I got an e-mail today (I should have printed this out) from one of my subscribers at RushLimbaugh.com. He's a geologist, and he was telling me about an ice age that occurred 300 million years ago, in the Paleozoic Era, and a simple question: "If we had an ice age back then and the polar ice caps descended and covered much of what's the United States now and other parts of the northern hemisphere, what did humans have to do with it? What did humans have to do with it?" And I was in Sedona, Arizona not long ago, and it was fascinating historical geological experience for me, because I look at all these mountains and I've never asked anybody. I don't remember much from school about this, because, frankly, when I was in school on this subject I didn't have any interest in it so I didn't pay much attention. I was doodling and thinking about what I was going to do when I got out of school.
So I asked the guide, "Where do these mountains come from? What are these mountains?" and he said, "Well, all this was a long time ago underwater and you can see the sediment piled on top. We know this was all underwater and the oceans receded, and this is what was left. Now, the Rocky Mountains were created by continental plates colliding, and, bam! Something had to give, and the Rockies were created," and I said, "Well, what did people do when this was happening?" "They probably didn't notice it. It happened over millions of years. It's not like the Rocky Mountains were created overnight and if your house was sitting there it's destroyed. It took millions of years for these mountains to pop up because of continental shift," and I said, "Well..." and I knew what the answer to this was, and don't laugh at me on this, but I wanted to ask it anyway. I said, "Well, what stopped all this from happening?"
"Well, it hasn't," he said. "You ever heard of the San Andreas Fault? We're waiting there. The continents are constantly shifting. In our lifetimes we'll never see it," and I said, "Oh, do you mean to tell me that we're not causing all of this?" and this guy kind of looked at me. He didn't know who I was, and he looked at me, "Why would you ask that?" I said, "Well, you know, we've got a bunch of wackos out there that claim that humans are destroying all this, and I'm looking at this and I don't know what we would do to create it. If somebody said, 'Rush, go make a mountain tomorrow,' I wouldn't know what the hell to do. By the same token if they said, 'Rush go destroy a mountain tomorrow.' Short of a nuclear bomb I wouldn't know what to do." He said, "Well, you couldn't and you can't stop what's happening." Bam! Thank you, sir! Exclamation point. It's all such a bunch of hocus-pocus. I'm not saying, folks, that you go ahead and throw the wrapper from your Monster Burger from Hardee's out on the street and pollute things, but it's not going to cause global warming. We'll be back after this -- and screw the red milkweed at the same time.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay, we found this Charlton Heston piece. You people will remember this, some of you. Some of you will not. I forget what year. I think this is 1995 when we first aired this. On February 3rd of 1995 Charlton Heston called the program and wanted to read from Michael Crichton's prologue of Jurassic Park, and this is what it sounds like.
HESTON: You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away -- all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time.
It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. Might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. You think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine.
When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. Hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.
RUSH: Charlton Heston on this program from 1995 in February, and that's from Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park. He called here and wanted to read that. It was in the midst of some, you know, massively insane, absurd, radical environmental argument at the time.
END TRANSCRIPT
"Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There's been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. "
So Heston's not a Creationist!
Heston/Rush BUMP
All Things Considered, December 7, 2004
In his new novel about a global-warming information conspiracy, Michael Crichton gives us a 600-page "page-burner" bolstered by footnotes, charts and graphs. Reviewer Alan Cheuse reviews State of Fear.
Link to review : here
Not necessarily. There are "old-earth" as well as "new-earth" creationists.
That's okay. There is enough disagreement between the scientists expert in the field of climate change to be skeptical.
Experts huh?
There is as much "science" to dispell the notion - that's NOTION - of global warming as there is "science" - computer models - proving global warming.
Welcome to Free Republic.
It is interesting that you respond with the appeal-to-authority fallacy, because it is exactly the approach that Michael Crichton himself criticized as profoundly anti-scientific in this very provocative speech at Cal Tech, which I think you would profit from reading.
Here is one of the most thought-provoking passages:
Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.
He then goes on to note several notorious cases in which scientific consensus turned out to be profoundly wrong once better experimental tests were devised, and argues that the theory of man-made global warming has yet to be subject to rigorous tests consistent with the scientific method as it is historically understood, no matter what its advocates say.
I've read wear scientist can carbon date things and past living things back only 6000 years. Anything longer than that is a estimate.
I read the novel
yesterday. The only thing
I liked was reading
the constant trashing
of the global warming nuts.
But, other than that,
the entire damn book
is effing lawyers talking
to effing lawyers!
There's a sort of "plot"
(a Clive Cussler throw-away)
and there's a weird scene
where Martin Sheen [!] gets
eaten alive by tribe folk,
but the mass of text
is lawyers talking
to lawyers, and, in the end,
the lawyer who has
the hippest degree
intimidates the bad guys
and the good guys win.
Crichton has a substantial science background. He is also a level-headed person. At the same time he doesn't have to defend his science credentials in order to make a living writing. A Jules Verne approach.
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
Michael Crichton and Charlton Heston happen to be right. There are so many "scientists" who have sold out every shred of credibility for federal grant money, political correctness and peer acceptance that they are the ones you should be deriding.
Oooh! Can we ZOT him now? Can we? Can we?
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