Michael Crichton Blog

The Claim in an argument is its thesis, it states the point that is to be made by the argumentor. The claim is followed by Support, or evidence provide to prove the claim. Evidence is any specific information related to the claim, it is what the support is comprised of. Finally the Explanation is when you take all of the information that you have stated and you relate it to the claim, give reasons why the evidence is significant to what you are trying to say. The article by Crichton was to me, something i had believed to some extent for awhile, although it goes further as i believe a lot of science has become a religion. I believe he is incorrect on some of his statements though, like his one about global warming as it is clear that the ice caps are definitely receding, and i have a hard time believing smoke be it second hand or not is not going to harm you, and i dont know that pesticides such as DDT are good for the environment as anything with the purpose of killing on a large scale is going to have some negative effects even if they aren’t directly hurting people. Crichton has a very frustrated tone it seemed to me, he was talking about how newspapers and magazines weren’t covering the truth about a lot of the topics. He is trying to get the readers to question their beliefs in regards to environmentalism, so they dont do ridiculous things that have no benefit. Crichton’s main claim is that environmentalism is a religion, he even compared its beliefs to those of christianity, he made some supporting claims too, such as the claim that DDT was eliminated while it had no negative consequences and in doing such as all major religions do, environmentalism killed a grandios amount of people. Crichton supports his claim with an abundant amount of reasoning using mainly things that have not been proven true, such as DDT and Global warming, while downsizing mans impact on the earth such as stating that the ground covered by urbanization is only 5%, and he said that the sahara desert was shrinking not growing, and conversely the polar ice caps were growing not shrinking. He also claimed that the decline in population growth was evidence that doomsday predictions often correct themselves and as such the environmental issue may take the same path. I believe that his evidence is spotty at times, such as the claim that the decent in population growth is evidence for his claim, as the rate of growth is circumstantial as right now events such as the last boom was due to WWII and as such another crazy event could spark more growth, countries like China have also limited the number of children a family can have which does a great deal to slow growth when 1/3 of the worlds population resides in china. Global warming is also almost definitely a real threat, the ice caps are definitely shrinking and polar species mainly the polar bears are suffering from this. He chose to not cite his sources as they are easy to look up and it would just take up a lot of space, not citing his sources has undoubtedly hurt his claims in my mind, you cant state second hand smoke has no negative effects and not provide proof to this. Crichton made a strong case about environmentalism being a religion however many of his other claims were false or at least questionable and as such the readers may want to question their individual beliefs but i believe they are on a better course than Crichton is with his claims.