No, I do not take Crichton's word for it, I take the word of the plethora of articles and peer reviewed studies he cites, many of which are directly contradictory to the predictions of global warming advocates. He shows how their predictions have failed to accurately predict the weather a year or two in the future, yet we are to believe them when they predict it centuries in advance. He also points out that while the West Antarctic Peninsula is melting, the core of the continent is actually getting colder and freezing, by about 0.7 C I believe, so much so that the continent taken as a whole is freezing. This is when many models predict that Antarctic warming should be of a greater magnitude than that of other areas. He also points out that the world has only been warming since 1970, and was cooling from 1940 to 1975, yet throughout both periods CO2 was rising. Environmentalists say that during that time particulate pollution blocked the suns rays and cooled the Earth, and that with the passage of the Clean Air Act in the 1970's and the removal of the pollution, warming started. Does it seem likely that one country was producing that much smog and that after 1970 we were producing that much less?
The most interesting point was what was called the Urban Heat Island effect. Cities are much hotter than farmland, which is hotter than pastures etc. Throughout this century, many of the temperature stations have had cities expand around them or had cities move closer to them. To account for this, a certain amount is deducted from the raw temperature data. The way that amount is calculated is based on the population of the urban area. Not size, energy use, industry, etc. In cities like Vienna, Austria which has had a roughly constant population of 2 million people throughout this century, this downward adjustment has been constant while the doubling of the cities size and the exponential growth of energy usage there have gone unaccounted for. If a proper adjustment were made, it would show much less warming, or perhaps no warming at all.
On a different note, one can read history and see this all the time. In the 1800's Thomas Malthus predicted that the industrial revolution would destroy mankind, in the 1960's new computer models predicted that we would run out of most metals and other raw materials in a few decades, in the 1970's people worried about a new ice age due to cooling. After 200 years of "doom is just around the corner predictions" I don't understand why people still fall for this stuff.
