Michael Crichton, ficton author turned crackpot

Those of you reading this who a) happen to be geologists and b) are a member of AGU (the American Geophysical Union) may have seen a small article in the Sep 5th issue of EOS, the weeky newspaper of geophysics published by AGU.

This article, by UMass Amherst Professor Julie Brigham-Grette, is entitled "Petroleum Geologists‘ Award to Novelist Crichton Is Inappropriate." A very understated title about the American Association for Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) 2006 Journalism Award given to Crichton for his novels State of Fear and Jurassic Park. Jurassic Park you are probably familiar with, but State of Fear is a fictional account that basically asserts that global warming is not only not occurring but is actually a scientific hoax. To quote from the article:

State of Fear is mostly a blend of Scooby-Doo and The Lone Ranger, an extended chase scene in which a small team led by an intrepid government agent foils a plot of evil environmentalists to engineer artificial ‘natural’ disasters in order to promote their cause. Crichton drives the action with the contention that global warming is a hoax. He essentially accuses the entire community of researchers involved in climate change, including those of us in AMQUA, of shading our findings on global warming in order to obtain the government grants that support our research. In a work of fiction, this would be fine—Crichton is free to spin his tale as he pleases. But it really does stretch the imagination to argue that scientists, a disorganized and argumentative lot, somehow were able to orchestrate a vast conspiracy of fraud without blowing the whistle on each other.

Well, "so what?" you might ask. So Crichton wrote a ficton book in which environmentalists are bad guys? What the big deal? The big deal is that people take this fictional account seriously. Crichton was actually called to testify on a Senate Environment and Public Work Committee as an expert in global warming! Yikes. (I'm not sure if this was before or after the AAPG gave him the journalism award.)

Giving Crichton a journalism award for State of Fear is like giving Henry Kissinger a Nobel peace prize. Ooops, that happened too.

Bad Geology

One of the blogs I appreciate the most on the internet is Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog. Well, today is the first installment of "Bad Geology". Today's example comes to us via Boing Boing, a tech / pop culture site. The picture given at left shows something labeled an "artesian aquifer" at depth. First of all, an aquifer is not an underground swimming pool. Most underground water is actually stored in the pore spaces between grains of rock (think wet sand). Artesian, by the way, means that you don't have to pump to get the water out. Often aquifers are floored by impermeable layers, sometimes called "aquitards" in hydrology. But parhaps in today's litigious society, any use of a word with "tard" in it isn't the wisest advertising choice. Anyway, aquifers often have an impermeable layer below them that allows rainwater filtering through the system to collect in the aquifer (such an aquifer is also known as a perched aquifer). But one has to ask why the impermeabe rock layer is shown surrounding the aquifer? How did the water get in there to begin with?

Final grade: F+ (the plus is for using nice colors).