the science of the ficiton

I looked at the RealClimate blog, reading their post called “Michael Chriton's State of Confusion.” One thing I found immediately interesting was that the tag line for the site is “climate science from climate scientists.” Now I myself fall on the global warming exists side of the whole debate, and I knew just from the title of the article that the writers would be giving Chriton a little negative criticism, but in the interest of fairness, I tried to keep a keen eye for cues on where these writers would be coming from, and how their biases would show through. So with that in mind, I thought the tag line was pretty revealing. This site would be giving me science from people who knew what they were talking about, but not only that, Chriton is instantly placed in the non-scientist group. That's fair, he's not a climate scientist, but it seemed relevant that the writers of the blog definitely wanted their readers to read the post with that in mind.

Going from there, the post itself starts by saying that it doesn't normally discuss “out-and-out fiction” like Chriton's novel. This too is very telling because not only does it reinforce that State of Fear is not a credible source of information, it legitimates the site further. It suggests that the kinds of things these writers are used to discussing are straight academic works, purely facts, but that they are departing from their typical briefly because Chriton's book has made an impact. In some ways, the comment legitimates this work of plain “fiction” because the writers deem it worth the same amount of attention as actual science, but I don't think that's what the intention of that comment was.

The rest of the article continues on the same trend. There are quite a few snarky comments about the fast-paced, action adventure nature of the book mixed in amongst straight facts. They tell us where Chriton lead us wrong, then they tell us what the better interpretation of those particular facts should be. They start in on the science by saying that it's for the “actors and lawyers” out there, but what they're really saying is, just like Chriton's characters, we the readers of this blog most likely have no idea what the science really is, and since Chriton doesn't inform us, they will. We are the ignorant, they the enlightened. I can't really disagree with this, I truly know nothing about the many seeming complexities of what determines whether or not global warming is something we should worry about, but the way they present the information is still interesting. Do I know anything about the topic? No. But they imply throughout the post that Chriton does not know the right questions to ask of the science, which we wouldn't know when reading the book because we are not scientists, but the writers of the blog DO know the right questions. The problem of course is that, I have no idea if THEY are right either, because, again, not a scientist. I'm more inclined to trust the authors of the site though, because they do a good job of convincing me that they are about the facts, unlike Chriton, who's about “car chases, shoot-outs, cannibalistic rites and assorted derring-do.”