Authority, as seen in this article, is based on one's expertise in the field. They shrug Crichton off and say that anyone can look into climate literature and find out more about global warming, but it takes a climate expert to see the reality of "the full complexity of the climate system". In other words, Crichton is an idiot who found some data that he didn't understand and ran with it.
This idea of authority is taken further in the next point when they list 4 different very impressive-sounding groups of experts that all agree on the same exact thing. If all of these experts have looked at all this data multiple times and all came up with the exact same conclusion out of the myriads of possibilities out there, how can you doubt that its true? Its The National Academy of Sciences and The American Geophysical Union against some random guy who can write entertaining fiction. Who are you going to believe?
The rest of the article goes on with a similar trend, taking all the massive claims that Crichton makes and turning them into a simple mistake w using facts and expert opinion to explain the reality. All this is done in a relaxed manner while subtly reducing Crichton's authority by referring to all of his claims as being made by "characters" and not people. This automatically reduces anything that Crichton says to fiction and heightens the authority of the scientists.
That's definitely what I noticed from the article I read as well. Those who disagree with the science that Chriton supports in the novel like to insist that the book is only his opinion, and emphasize the fact that he has no authority to discuss such issues. He should leave it to scientists. But government officials who make policies that will effect what the country does about global warming will just be interpreting science, the same way Chriton does, and arguably, Chriton is just as intelligent as the avergae politician. So can scientists really say anything about the unqualified person interpreting science they don't wholly understand? Not to mention, the avergae voter and citizen who, through their opinions, will influence how much politicians are willing to do about global warming, certainly is not a scientist, and may even be less adept at interpreting the science than Chriton. So maybe the fact that Chriton isn't a scientist and is presenting the information (with arguably no more bias than a scientist) in an interesting way isn't a bad thing.
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