Global Warming Controversy
In 2006 the AAPG was criticized for selecting Michael Crichton for their Journalism Award "for his recent science-based thriller State of Fear", in which Crichton exposed his skeptical view of global warming, and for Jurassic Park. Daniel P. Schrag, a geochemist who directs the Harvard University Center for the Environment, called the award "a total embarrassment" that he said "reflects the politics of the oil industry and a lack of professionalism" on the association's part. The award has since been renamed the "Geosciences in the Media" Award.
The criticism drew attention to the AAPG's 1999 position statement formally rejecting the likelihood of human influence on recent climate. The Council of the American Quaternary Association wrote in a criticism of the award that the "AAPG stands alone among scientific societies in its denial of human-induced effects on global warming."
As recently as March 2007, articles in the newsletter of the AAPG Division of Professional Affairs stated that "the data does not support human activity as the cause of global warming" and characterize the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports as "wildly distorted and politicized."
Read more about this topic: American Association Of Petroleum Geologists
Famous quotes containing the words global, warming and/or controversy:
“As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.”
—Eric J. Hobsbawm (b. 1917)
“Under that wide hearth
a nest of rattlers,
they’ll knot a hundred together,
had wintered and were coming awake.
The warming rock
flushed them out early.”
—Robert Morgan (b. 1944)
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)