A useful reminder about AGW (anthropic global warming)

Global Warming Joseph L. Shaefer
Dr. Michael Crichton ...was a scientist by training, by which I mean he was both curious about the world around him and empirical in his observations about it...I submit that curiosity and empiricism are under-rated; loudness and loutishness are over-rated.
The Wall Street Journal reprinted parts of a lecture Dr. Crichton gave in 2003. I have excerpted a couple paragraphs of that Journal article below. It’s important to note that Dr. Crichton never claimed that global warming is not an issue -- merely that more research is needed before we draw definitive and arrogant conclusions that we can control the variables contributing to climate change.
I share Dr. Crichton’s skepticism. Skepticism is a necessary precursor to empiricism. Dr. Crichton: I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had... Let's be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world… To an outsider, the most significant innovation in the global warming controversy is the overt reliance that is being placed on models… As if they were themselves a reality. And indeed they are, when we are projecting forward. There can be no observational data about the year 2100. There are only model runs...
Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? ...Has everybody lost their minds?”
Clearly, a lot of people have. I was on the ground in the midst of Saddam Hussein’s temper tantrum at the conclusion of the First Gulf War, when he set ablaze all of Kuwait’s oil fields he could get a torch to. (“If I can’t have them, no one can.”) At the time, Eco-fringies declared this the last nail in the world’s coffin; that the carbon released from such a massive catastrophe would throw us all into (choose one) a global icebox or a global inferno. Media personality Carl Sagan predicted those oil fires would produce a nuclear winter, a "year without a summer," and would whither crops around the world. It didn’t happen. Man’s puny efforts to match the earthquake every 20 seconds, the hurricane every few days, or the billowing sulfurous gases of a major volcanic eruption that Nature produces on this active and capricious planet of ours were as flimsy as gossamer.
To people who say they “know” that climate change will be catastrophic and who “know” that reducing one variable, man’s output of carbon, is primarily responsible for this upcoming catastrophe, and say they “know” what the world will look like in 50 years if we don’t spend all our resources to change this horrid and fearsome outcome, I say: they’re full of hooey.
They can’t even predict what their teenager will look like in 12 months...a single teenager is a complex organism. Sort of like an entire planet’s ecosystem we don’t have the faintest beginnings of understanding…