State of Fear

I have a post in mind that I would like to write about, however, the thoughts are not quite sorted out in my head yet…so in lieu of the aforementioned post, I decided to pay respect to a wonderfully talented writer who passed away on November 4th: Michael Crichton. I had only in the past couple of years discovered his writings, and they are amazing!!! So, in honor of his life, I am reposting my review of his book, State of Fear (which I highly recommend)…enjoy, and keep Mr. Crichton’s family in your prayers.

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Michael Crichton is of course well know for his techno-thrillers “The Andromeda Strain” and Jurassic Park”, plus several other novels and non-fiction works, and you might even be a fan of his show ER…But “State of Fear” is a little bit different.

State of Fear is a book with an agenda, even though in its final words, the author denies having one. Its premise is that everything we are told about global warming is either grossly inaccurate, highly debatable or just plain made up!

Its hero – or rather most omnipresent in the cast of characters – is Peter Evans, a young attorney in a firm dealing with multimillionare philanthropist and major environmental charity of which he is the principal benefactor.

One of their most celebrated causes is the lawsuit being brought by the Pacific island nation of Vanatu, one of the world’s lowest-lying territories, against the United States for its contribution to the global warming that will cause sea levels to rise and submerge them.

This is a case that Crichton says was actually announced in the real world (at the 2002 Sustainable Earth Summit in Johannesburg) but never filed. The reason, he postulates, is what the team of lawyers working on it in his “work of fiction” find out: that there is no evidence whatsoever.

Not just NO evidence that the US is primarily to blame, but no real evidence of any measurable rise in sea levels. In fact, the more the lawyers look into it, the more they find the whole received body of opinion is based on questionable deductions and predictions.

What the environmental lobby really needs in order to win not just this case, but he whole body of public opinion is “proof”, or at least the sort of proof that generates headlines: Major “natural” catastrophes related to sudden climate change. Like say…an iceberg the size of Texas splitting away from the Antarctic ice shelf, flash floods in the tinder dry southwestern US or a giant tsunami originating in the Pacific, but swamping California on the day of their major conference.

The scientific evidence is well presented with numerous graphs and references, but more can be said. The climate has never been constant — always either warming or cooling on all time scales (year-to year, decadal, millennial, and over millions of years) -independent of any human influence. While the observed pre-1940 warming is real and mostly natural (a recovery from the preceding Little Ice Age that terminated around 1850), the cooling from 1940 to 1975 is certainly not a greenhouse effect. The warming data reported during the past 25 years from surface stations (almost all of them on land) are likely contaminated by urban effects; we don’t see such warming in the atmospheric record of weather balloons or from weather satellites that cover the whole globe (including the 70% of oceans) on a regular basis. The most we can assign to human greenhouse effects would lead to a temperature rise by 2100 of a measly 0.8 degrees C. [The so-called scientific consensus claims that if climate is currently warming at 0.08 degC per decade, then temperatures will "increase between 4 degrees F and 10 degrees F by the end of this century" -- with all sorts of dire consequences. This remarkable demonstration of poor arithmetic assumes further that all of the current increase is due to human influences rather than natural ones -- and also ignores the fact that greenhouse theory predicts a less-than-proportional temperature increase with increasing carbon dioxide. My own considered estimate for 2100 is about one degree F --- based not on climate models but on the observational evidence.]

There is much more evidence backing up Crichtons message, not only is the current warming well below even the lowest limits given by the IPCC, but the IPCC claim in its 2001 report that the 20th century was the warmest in 1000 years has turned out to be complete fiction – based on mishandled data and faulty methodolgy. Hmmm…

So what could be more natural than for an extremist ecological group — an extrapolation of the more militant elements in organizations such as Greenpeace — to lend a hand? With high technology — acquired with misappropriated funds — from missiles and Ethernet cables to sonic cavitators used in mining, they set out to cause mayhem with the forces of nature. Attempts to prevent this by Evans, an intellectual polymath Rambo with top-level government security agency links, and a few attractive and resourceful females — for the movie roles of course — lead them into perilous Antarctic crevasses, forest fires and eventually the dinner table of resurgent Solomon Islands cannibals.

At one time or another Evans nearly loses his toes to frostbite and faces death by poisoning from the bite of a tiny Australian octopus, deliberately applied in his own living room. Ripping yarns, indeed, but a sermon is never far away, albeit cleverly interspersed among the action.

In the books of his fellow phenomenon Tom Clancy the real hero — the reason most fans buy the books — is the military hardware, all those bad boy toys with incomprehensible acronyms and the similarly designated organizations and command structures that possess them.

In Crichton’s books, the real hero is hard science. From The Andromeda Strain on he has been at his best when weaving his action stories around a framework of believable scientific fact. How many people do not believe we will one day — soon? — clone dinosaurs from their blood sucked by mosquitoes trapped in amber? In this book his research appears formidable, indeed, backed up by copious footnote references and appendices (over 20 pages). He paints a convincing picture of a large part of humanity callous to real global problems and arrogant in the assumption of our influence on a planet that in reality has always been in permanent, often violent, flux.

State of Fear is the state Crichton believes the government likes to keep us in so that we may be more easily governed. Remember that most everything Crichton writes gets made into a movie…and as we all know…Hollywood doesn’t lie…