Checking Crichton's footnotes

Michael Crichton has joined conservatives to deride global climate change. He is wrong.

...those seeking to counter consensus scientific conclusions on climate change--and to use published evidence to support their own views--face an uphill battle. Naomi Oreskes, a science studies scholar at the University of California, San Diego, recently analyzed more than 900 scientific articles listed with the keywords ''global climate change,'' and failed to find a single study that explicitly disagreed with the consensus view that humans are contributing to global warming. While such literature may exist, it appears minimal.

That hasn't stopped Crichton from expounding his views in recent speeches, including a talk on ''Science Policy in the 21st Century'' held late last month at the American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Institution's Joint Center for Regulatory Studies in Washington, D.C. In an appendix to ''State of Fear,'' Crichton frets about ''Why Politicized Science is Dangerous.'' But he may himself have provided a case study.