Flipping point

Some call global warming the greatest threat facing modern humanity. Others say it's simply a false threat constructed by media hype, anti-capitalist whackos and a disgruntled Al Gore.

Leave it to the world-renowned, Altadena-based Skeptics Society to try and get to the bottom of things, and the organization did just that in a day-long, star-powered conference on Saturday at Caltech's Beckman Auditorium.

Highlighted by nighttime speeches by longtime ABC journalist and "20/20" host John Stossel and the king of techno-thriller novels, Michael Crichton, the Skeptics' annual conference explored "The Environmental Wars: The Science Behind the Politics" and offered a full day of analysis and advice that laid out the horrors of global warming while still harboring hope that humans can still make a difference in fighting it.

With Gore's new documentary on the subject, "An Inconvenient Truth," currently burning up the nation's box office (it ranked ninth last weekend while playing on just 77 screens nationwide), the conference came at the perfect time. The very purpose of the Skeptics is to place science above hype and dig out and reveal the scientific truths behind controversial issues ranging from evolution to UFOs. As Skeptics executive director and conference host Michael Shermer noted, that film provided him a "flipping point" in which his own doubts turned into belief that the world faces a legitimate threat.

"I saw Al Gore give the speech he presents in the movie live, and it was powerful. It was the single finest summation of the evidence for global warming I have ever heard," said Shermer in an exclusive backstage interview at the conference. "The amount of evidence he presents and the extent to which he explains it is just too much to deny, and it's time to stop being skeptical and start acting on it."

Stossel and Crichton drew much of the event's attention, not only because of their star power but because they have drawn widespread attention for their contrarian stances on the issue of global warming: Stossel believes that warming is occurring but doubting the extent human responsibility, and Crichton believes that the very idea of global warming is a false construct of the media and anti-corporate forces.

"I don't claim to be an expert on global warming, but I've seen at least 94 hysterical media alarms about Y2K, NutraSweet, SARS, anthrax and the bird flu come and go on other issues, and so I'm skeptical of some of the global warming predictions," Stossel said in a phone interview from Atlanta, where he had stopped as part of his national tour for his new book, "Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity."

"The media ignore the skeptics and hype the alarmists, because there's a media bias towards the idea that man is evil, capitalism is evil and we would be better off if we went back to primitive times.

"There's a lot of pointless posturing, like celebrities showing up at the Oscars in their hybrid cars as if they're holy and the people who can't afford them are bad citizens," Stossel continued. "Global warming fever will build into near-hysteria and the press and politicians will move us towards wasting tens of billions of dollars on a Manhattan Project like they did with synthetic fuels which they later abandoned developing. And I'm afraid we'll have freedom-killing rules, like limits on driving and mowing your lawn. The genius of this country lies in individual liberty and we're voluntarily giving it up bit by bit."

Crichton was even more effusive during his talk, singling out one of the dirtiest scientific secrets of California — eugenics research — and pointing out that even when scientists establish a consensus on an issue like global warming, the very roots of their ideas can still be destructive.

"To say there is no debate on an issue is a danger sign. It means some people have been shouted down and are afraid to say anything, and since the fear was over the future and computer simulations of what might happen, that wasn't good enough for me," said Crichton, who drew controversy in 2005 for his novel "State of Fear," which posited that global warming is largely false hype.

"There was also a scientific consensus on eugenics which turned out to be a phony pseudoscience after it was widely supported. California sterilized thousands of people because they weren't 'good enough' for society, and if scientists could be that wrong once, it can happen again, and we need to be aware of it."

Even as the rest of the day featured an array of scientists, who are normally stereotyped as dispassionate observers, the conference proved to have its own internal fireworks. For instance, pioneering aeronautics engineer Paul MacCready — selected by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century — wasted no time in pointing out his long-running intellectual feud with Crichton.

"Anything that Michael Crichton talks about I'd do well to take the other side. He doesn't believe in global climate change while ice caps are melting and the temperature is 5 degrees Centigrade warmer now in the Arctic than it was 100 years ago," said MacCready in an interview after his similarly themed onstage talk. "The temperature increases have gone up a lot in the last 20 years. In the Arctic, temperatures are increasing and winter is decreasing in length. There really is serious stuff happening and if you take Michael Crichton on one side and the scientific community on the other, I'd go with the 99 percent of the scientific community. There's always 1 percent that won't go with anything."

MacCready also harbored one of the most pessimistic views of the day, saying that human overpopulation has caused problems that will take decades or even centuries to correct. But he did point out a stark means of limiting the damage.

"Of course we have choices — in emitting and how much we want to emit. We have to reduce carbon emissions by 60 percent and even then the Earth would reach higher temps for several centuries," said MacCready. "We will have some climate change, and some won't be too much of a problem for society to adjust to. The timescales involved here are very long, and that makes the political process difficult because it's not designed to deal with hundreds of years."

In the end, the speakers agreed that the solutions to global warming don't have to be oppressively expensive. More importantly, they require a real will and effort by the world's political and entrepreneurial leaders to acknowledge there is a problem to deal with and to look beyond their individual nations' interests to share the battle with the whole world.

"We all have to live here, whether we're from a rich nation or a poor one, and we can fight this problem and have a better world if we all look to help all of humankind," said Gregory Benford, a UC-Irvine physics professor and author of more than 30 books. "We can relieve the tensions and pressures of the world by making every nation and person productive and happier. If you show true concern for those peoples, they can focus their attention away from basic survival to addressing these bigger issues.”