[olesma]

Don't let the title throw you. Michael Crichton recently made a speech titled Aliens cause global warming.

It's long - but one heck of a speech. His argument is solid - and he presents it in a way that is really effective as well.

If you have a spare 10 minutes for the read, I highly recommend it.

I'm not a big Crichton fan - I don't like his style of literature very well, but the man seems to have a good head on his shoulders.

There are a couple of other speech transcripts on the same site that I also strongly recommend you read:

Remarks to the Commonwealth club is particularly good. Anyone on this forum would be able to identify with it. Wait till you get to the middle when he talks about the nature of the natural world. I was particularly amused by his analogy of environmentalism as a religion. Key quote:

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Why speculate? is also a real doozy. Key quote:

You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well.... You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

All three cover some similar ground from slightly different perspectives. Best reading I've had in months.

Go forth and read.