Crichton citations of the scientific literature

Here's my review of Crichton's novel. What follows is the scientific citations he provides.

Of course, I have no easy way of knowing the extent to which Crichton cherry-picked these. And perhaps the inferences he's drawn from the papers is incorrect. But those more knowledgeable than me should feel free to comment!

On cooling and ice build-up in Antarctica: 1.) in the central valleys including "serious ecosystem damage from the cold; 2.) satellite and ground system data shows slight cooling from 1979-1998; 3.) radar measurements show thickening West Antarctic ice, reversing a trend of 6000 years; 4.) peninsula warming but interior cooling with ice shelves retreating but sea ice increasing; 5.) the Earth today is cooler than it was during the last four inter-glacials; 6.) less Antarctic ice melt than the last interglacial; 7.) Antarctic sea ice increase since 1979; 8.) more sea ice; and 9.) a longer sea-ice season.


On the (im)precision of climate change models:

Crichton quotes or paraphrases global warming hawk James Hansen et. al.: "the forces that govern climate change are so poorly understood that long-term prediction is not possible".

IPCC Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, p. 744: "In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible."

IPCC Climate Change 1995: The Science of Climate Change, p. 330: "Natural climate variability on long time-scales will continue to be problematic for CO2 climate change analysis and detection."


On the heat island effect, perturbing efforts to measure land-based temperatures (something on which I have blogged previously), Crichton cites Bohm on Vienna, Chen et. al. on Shanghai, Streutker on Houston, Choi et. al. on South Korea, and McKendry in general.


On a variety of other supposed indicators of global warming: retreating African deserts, no change in glaciers, and Kilimanjaro's glacier melt probably caused by deforestation &/or a drop in atmospheric moisture. And we have no idea what's going on with speciation: "Biologists have come to recognize just how little we know about the organisms with which we share the planet Earth. In particular, attempts to determine how many species there are in total have been surprisingly fruitless." (Morjorie L. Reaka-Kudia, et. al., Biodiversity II, Understanding and Protecting our Biological Resources, Washington: National Academies Press, 1997).