This is a follow-up to "Michael Crichton-- victim of a conspiracy" my post here yesterday morning. Link to that post
Background: Michael Crichton, MD, Harvard Med School, wrote intelligent, well-researched thrillers that questioned the soundness of the settled wisdom. His books included NEXT, querying the risks of the nanotech industry; PREY, genetic engineering; and STATE OF FEAR, which took a look at what he elsewhere termed in effect "the Global Warming Religion."
That post looked into two aspects:
1. The news items and posts that have been circulating about whether cancer can be used as a weapon. One train of thought proposes that the supposed cluster of cancers involving dictators, particularly Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, may indicate that in some ways individuals can be deliberately infused with cancer cells. It's not at all clear whether that can be done. I got into it because at least a couple of posts I saw suggested that something like that may have been done to Michael Crichton, author of several speculative thrillers, all best-sellers ,that questioned the safety and ethics of some new technologies, who died apparently unexpectedly of cancer in 2008.
2. As a long-time reader of Michael Crichton's speculative science thrillers, as well as his articles on related scientific topics, it struck me that if Crichton were alive now, he might be thinking of a thriller along the lines of, "A cabal of big bucks industries and complicit bureaucracies team up to silence a best-selling speculative science thriller author before he can attack any more of their sacred cash cows."
I wrote that yesterday morning. Synchronicitously, yesterday evening, I came on this article from the London Independent: Michael Mann: The climate scientist who the defiers have in their sights
Why do I find that synchronicitous? ("Synchronicity" -- term popularized by Jung, suggesting appearance of a "meaningtul coincidence".)
Why? Because the gist of the article is to the effect that Professor Michael Mann, a major proponent of the Global Warming (a/k/a Climate Change) movement, and the "Hockey Stick" graph is the victim of --- not cancer --- but a ". . . brutal campaign orchestrated by the fossil-fuel industry and senior politicans . . . "
Sounds not unlike the kind of story I suggested would be a natural for Michael Crichton--- shadowy cabal of industry and government creating paranoid atmosphere to silence "the truth".
Except I doubt that Michael Crichton would model his protagonist on Michael Mann, as Crichton, in his STATE OF FEAR, analyzed and attacked the Hockey Stick visual that Mann proposed.
A bit of further background: Bear in mind that twice in the past couple of years, massive files of emails between Dr. Mann and other scientists were hacked and released to the media, and the revelations in those communications triggered many questions about the reliability, accuracy and validity of the pro-Global Warming group of scientists.
Sorry, this isn't the place for background on those hacked emails, nor on the Hockey Stick graph. Crichton's STATE OF FEAR is a good place to start on the Hockey Stick (and, coincidentally, on the role of the media). For the story of those emails, I suggest you begin with the Independent article (cited above), then Google from there.