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babagrr
05-20-2006, 06:57 PM
Publisher = HarperCollins
Please see end of document for contact info.

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Refference = A BRF file on my PC
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There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

MARK TWAIN

Within any important issue, there are always aspects no one wishes to discuss.

GEORGE ORWELL
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This is a novel written by Michael Crichton and from what I've read, not exactly a conspiracy theory.

It would be nice however, to brush everything that we don't know about or that we don't understand off as conspiracy theories.

That would conveniently suit ourselves and our conscience.

I mean: We were taught during the apartheid era that the black people's struggle was only a conspiracy theory and that indeed Mohammed (PBUH) was infiltrating our moral value system and that druggs and the decay of society was all thanks to Muslim terrorists.

Anyway, I'd like to know if anyone else knows something substancial about the Vanutu issue.

And please, don't give me the google.com, yahoo or whatever search portal's results.
Below is the introduction to the book. Enjoy.

Comments please:

Begin quote.
In late 2003, at the Sustainable Earth Summit conference in Johannesburg, the Pacific island nation of Vanutu announced that it was preparing a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency of the United States over global warming. Vanutu stood only a few feet above sea level, and the island's eight thousand inhabitants were in danger of having to evacuate their country because of rising sea levels caused by global warming. The United States, the largest economy in the world, was also the largest emitter of carbon dioxide and therefore the largest contributor to global warming.
The National Environmental Resource Fund, an American activist group, announced that it would join forces with Vanutu in the lawsuit, which was expected to be filed in the summer of 2004. It was rumored that wealthy philanthropist George Morton, who frequently backed environmental causes, would personally finance the suit, expected to cost more than $8 million. Since the suit would ultimately be heard by the sympathetic Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, the litigation was awaited with some anticipation.
But the lawsuit was never filed.
No official explanation for the failure to file has ever been given either by Vanutu or NERF. Even after the sudden disappearance of George Morton, an inexplicable lack of interest by the media has left the circumstances surrounding this lawsuit unexamined. Not until the end of 2004 did several former NERF board members begin to speak publicly about what had happened within that organization. Further revelations by Morton's staff, as well as by former members of the Los Angeles law firm of Hassle and Black, have added further detail to the story.
Thus it is now clear what happened to the progress of the Vanutu litigation between May and October of 2004, and why so many people died in remote parts of the world as a result.

MC
Los Angeles, 2004

End quote
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Begin quote
I believe that as we come to the end of this litany, some of you may be saying, well what is the big deal, really. So we made a few mistakes. So a few scientists have overstated their cases and have egg on their faces. So what.
Well, I'll tell you.
In recent years, much has been said about the post-modernist claims that science is just another form of raw power, tricked out in special claims for truth-seeking and objectivity that really have no basis in fact. Science, we are told, is no better than any other undertaking. These ideas anger many scientists, and they anger me. But recent events have made me wonder if they are correct. We can take as an example the scientific reception accorded a Danish statistician, Bjorn Lomborg, who wrote a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist.
The scientific community responded in a way that can only be described as disgraceful. In professional literature, it was complained he had no standing because he was not an earth scientist. His publisher, Cambridge University Press, was attacked with cries that the editor should be fired, and that all right-thinking scientists should shun the press. The past president of the American Associate for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) wondered aloud how Cambridge could have ever "published a book that so clearly could never have passed peer review. (But of course the manuscript did pass peer review by three earth scientists on both sides of the Atlantic, and all recommended publication.) But what are scientists doing attacking a press? Is this the new McCarthyism"coming from scientists?
Worst of all was the behavior of the Scientific American, which seemed intent on proving the post-modernist point that science was all about power, not facts. The Scientific American attacked Lomborg for eleven pages, yet only came up with nine factual errors despite their assertion that the book was "rife with careless mistakes. It was a poor display featuring vicious ad hominem attacks, even comparing him to a Holocaust denier. The issue was captioned: "Science defends itself against The Skeptical Environmentalist. Really. I wasn't aware that "science had to defend itself. Is this what we have come to?
When Lomborg asked for space to rebut his critics, he was given only a page and a half. When he said it wasn't enough, he put the critics' essays on his web page and answered them in detail. Scientific American threatened copyright infringement and made him take the pages down.
Further attacks since have made it clear what is going on. Lomborg is charged with heresy. That's why none of his critics needs to substantiate their attacks in any detail. That's why the facts don't matter. That's why they can attack him in the most vicious personal terms. He's a heretic.
Of course, any scientist can be charged as Galileo was charged. I just never thought I'd see the Scientific American in the role of mother church.
Is this what science has become? I hope not. But it is what it will become, unless there is a concerted effort by leading scientists to aggressively separate science from policy. The late Philip Handler, former president of the National Academy of Sciences, said that "Scientists best serve public policy by living within the ethics of science, not those of politics. If the scientific community will not unfrock the charlatans, the public will not discern the difference"science and the nation will suffer. Personally, I don't worry about the nation. But I do worry about science.
Thank you very much.
End quote
****


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