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Science Fiction
NRO ^ | December 21, 2004 | Iain Murray

Posted on 12/21/2004 8:30:42 AM PST by neverdem

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Science Fiction
Michael Crichton takes a novel approach to global-warming alarmism.

By Iain Murray

Michael Crichton's new blockbuster novel, State of Fear, begins with sex, violence, and oceanography. It's that sort of book all the way through, mixing the usual adventure novel clichés of beautiful young heroes, indestructible secret agents, and a plot to kill millions alongside hard science, including graphs, footnotes, and words like "aminostratigraphy." As such, the book is half a rip-roaring roller coaster of a read (as Edmund Blackadder would put it) and half didactic tract. It is a testament to Crichton's skill as a novelist that he pulls it off. This is definitely one for the Christmas list.

The adventure centers on a conspiracy to accentuate natural disasters in order to keep the developed world in the state of fear of the title. One particular environmental charity stands to benefit most from this state, and the main plot device is the dawning realization by an idealistic young lawyer named Peter Evans that the cause he believed in for so long is rotten to the core. His Virgil as he wanders through hell to achieve salvation is an almost superhuman character, John Kenner, who is a strange blend of academic physicist, Jack Ryan, James Bond, and, erm, John Graham, real-life director of the Office of Management and Budget (I said it was strange — in a former job, Graham was director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, and Kenner directs a similar organization at MIT).

Together, and with the help of the usual beautiful-but-tough woman and a tech-savvy Gurkha, they are placed in danger in the wilds of Antarctica, a state park in Arizona, and in a cannibal-infested jungle in the Solomon Islands. They face blizzards, bullets, lightning, poisonous octopuses and insufferable Hollywood celebrities. There is no peril so great that Evans and his friends do not face it. Their adventures unfold at a breakneck pace that keeps you turning the page, and it is in the brief downtimes between these escapades that Crichton expounds his scientific case.

This didacticism is directed primarily at global-warming alarmism, which Crichton thinks is overblown (he goes over the case in an appendix). Yet Crichton does not, as some have alleged, criticize the science underlying global-warming alarmism. In fact, he argues from it; as well he should — science is what it is. Instead, it is the use to which the science is put that Crichton argues against most forcefully. The science, by itself, does not argue that the world must take certain actions now. Science can never be prescriptive. All it can do is raise issues for the world's attention. It is politics and economics that then decide what to do about them. People who argue that the science says we must do something are being disingenuous about their true motives. If those people are also scientists, then they are abusing science. This is a tremendously important point.

If there is one scientific exercise Crichton does criticize, it is the use of global-climate models. These models are the basis of the alarming estimates of future temperature rise, yet at their very base they are only partly scientific. Models are a hybrid of science and economics. If science says that a rise in atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations will have certain effects on climate, then it can tell us nothing about the future until economic projections of energy use are fed into it. A scientific model without good economic input is useless, and we have been aware for quite some time that the economic scenarios used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are seriously deficient. It is a shame that Crichton makes one of his few factual slips when he says that NASA's James Hansen overestimated future emissions when he brought the global-warming issue to the world's attention before Congress in 1988. In fact, Hansen had a range of scenarios, and actual emissions have followed the lower trajectory quite well (and Hansen has updated his projections, now estimating a very small temperature rise by 2050 of around 0.5°C.) Crichton would have done better to take aim at the IPCC here.

Yet, more widely, the novel raises stinging criticisms of the way the environmental movement conducts itself. Its mutual infatuation with Hollywood, its preoccupation with litigation, and, above all, its preoccupation with obtaining more money so as to continue its privileged existence are all writ large in the text. One of the chief villains, a lawyer turned green-group director, regularly rages about the difficulties he has fundraising. His main problem, he rants, is that global warming is not the immediate threat that pollution was in the 70s. It is therefore harder to get people to give money to combat it, something that can be solved if people come to believe that the climate is changing now. These are, of course, tactics the real-life environmental movement has embraced, arguing, for instance, that the recent hurricane season was exacerbated by global warming rather than being sheer bad luck. During one of his rants, that character also, delightfully, called my organization, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, "Neanderthals." This was tremendously gratifying.

In the conclusion of the novel (which seems as if it is ready for a sequel — there are a surprising number of loose ends not tied up), Crichton has a former alarmist conclude that there are serious things wrong with the environmental movement:

Face the facts, all these environmental organizations are thirty, forty, fifty years old. They have big buildings, big obligations, big staffs. They may trade on their youthful dreams, but the truth is, they're now part of the establishment. And the establishment works to preserve the status quo. It just does.

(Interestingly, these comments echo those made by some committed alarmists recently in an essay entitled, The Death of Environmentalism.) If Jefferson was right about continual revolution being a good thing, then the environmental movement would do well to take heed.

He also has some very interesting suggestions for getting politics out of science by making the researchers more distant from their funders, to the point of blinding them to the source. As Crichton implies, this would strengthen the science against accusations that it is done to benefit the funders, whether they be industry, government, or activist group. This is something that requires serious attention from science itself.

Doubtless much of this scholarly discussion will be removed when the inevitable movie is made, but the exhilarating plot should still make it a success (and it will be streets ahead of the scientifically bereft turkey The Day After Tomorrow).

Me, I'm waiting for the video game.

Iain Murray is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, where he specializes in the debate over climate change and the use and abuse of science in the political process.

 

     


 

 
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/murray200412210839.asp
     



TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; Editorial; Foreign Affairs; Government; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections; US: District of Columbia
KEYWORDS: bookreview; climatechange; crichton; globalwarming; michaelcrichton; stateoffear

1 posted on 12/21/2004 8:30:43 AM PST by neverdem
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To: sheltonmac
I guess not that Iain Murray.

Dan
(c;

2 posted on 12/21/2004 8:31:44 AM PST by BibChr ("...behold, they have rejected the word of the LORD, so what wisdom is in them?" [Jer. 8:9])
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To: neverdem

Almost picked this up at BAM last night, now I wish I had. Another Christmas present to me!


3 posted on 12/21/2004 8:47:28 AM PST by Rummyfan
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To: neverdem
Below is the review I posted on a thread a few days ago, and FWIW am posting again. I strongly recommend the book but I think Mr. Murray is a little overheated. See point 2) below.

Earlier Review:
I just finished the book last night and for what its worth, here are my thoughts.

1) It's a very interesting and enjoyable book, but it's a horrible novel. A lot of the most interesting scenes are things I either knew or had fantasized myself (that's not as weird as it sounds). For instance, every time I see Martin Sheen or Oliver Stone preening about some issue, I picture him getting his comeuppance in some perfectly appropriate way. There are scenes like that in the book. And the analysis of the data, the fisking of the green talking points, is all very interesting. But if you follow the issue or Michael Chrichton's speeches, it's not really new. That leaves the story itself, which is frankly not nearly as taut as it ought to be. And its ending is exciting, but there is no scene that resolves the issues and relationships between the characters; there is no scene that affords finality.

That is unfortunate, because the problems it has as a novel might turn people off the book, and thus prevent people from reading all the great debunking of environmentalists and their celebrity backers.

2) Reading the book, I came to the realization that we conservatives are the obsessive ex-grilfriend of American culture. Every time we get the least recognition from the culture at large, we invest the recognition with importance far beyond its actual significance, as though it meant we'd finally get our boyfriend back and we could call and tell mom she was all wrong about him. But in fact, the gesture is not significant.

Why do we do that to ourselves? Every once and a while something like this book comes out and we start thinking "Finally! American culture is normal again!" But it always ends the same; in a few weeks people will be gawking at some art movie about epileptic lesbians, giving it twice the coverage as "State of Fear" and 10 times the positive feedback. Maybe it's just me that feels that way, but it seems that we are inordinately hopeful based on relatively small victories, like a mainstream thriller in which environmentalists are treated as the rats they really are. It's nice to see, but it will fade, and the culture will return to its natural state of contempt for anything to the right of Jesse Jackson.

(Rereading that, I have to admit that this year has been better than most -- the Passion, National Treasure (which has the decency to treat the Founders as great heroes of history and man, even if it is all fiction), the new Tom Wolfe book, State of Fear). But no, I won't get my hopes up only to have my heart broken again!

3) Virtually everything anyone can say against the book in terms of the science is debunked by the book itself. I haven't read the review yet, but I bet I can find passages in the book that directly challenge the reviewer (that the reviewer most likely ignores). It's an incredibly thorough book, and that's good and bad. It's good, because it builds confidence that Mr. Chrichton knows what he is talking about, but bad because it means that most of the book reads like a deposition transcript.

In fact, that's probably the best thing about the book. If you've ever wanted to get some environmental activist / talking head into the dock and give him a good interrogation, then this book is for you. But that doesn't make it a good novel.

4) There's a scene near the end that conservatives will especially appreciate. It's more than just anti-green, it's really anti-left, and it does a good job of explaining the social forces that so irritate us. I sometimes think we conservatives mean to shoot but don't no how to aim, that complain about one thing but really are angry about something else, or at least something much larger than we realize. It's worth getting the book just to read it.

I strongly recommend the book, but as I said those conservatives that follow the issue probably won't be surprised by anything. That said, there are some very exciting scenes and, for those of us who ever wanted to see a left-winger get his comeuppance, there's a scene near the end that's worth the price of the book in itself.
4 posted on 12/21/2004 9:34:40 AM PST by mckreck
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To: mckreck
Good review.

I finished it last week, and I would still recommend it...if nothing else, as a breath of fresh air in a liberal, environmental wacko world.

My main gripe is that the Kenner character--while used primarily to push the truth--ends up being way too longwinded to appeal to most people. He is the character that takes Crichton's extensive list of footnotes and references and puts it into words. However, as interesting as the facts are to some of us, most people will find them dull and uninteresting, and be turned off by the character's rants. Once a screenwriter gets hold of this project, the Kenner character will cease to exist as we have seen him.

5 posted on 12/21/2004 11:55:15 AM PST by Fredgoblu
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To: mckreck
"2) Reading the book, I came to the realization that we conservatives are the obsessive ex-grilfriend of American culture. Every time we get the least recognition from the culture at large, we invest the recognition with importance far beyond its actual significance, as though it meant we'd finally get our boyfriend back and we could call and tell mom she was all wrong about him. But in fact, the gesture is not significant."

Great analogy.

6 posted on 12/21/2004 1:29:57 PM PST by patton (Changing culture is like moving a cemetary. You don't get much help from the residents.)
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To: neverdem

bttt


7 posted on 12/21/2004 3:16:26 PM PST by swilhelm73 (Dowd wrote that Kerry was defeated by a "jihad" of Christians...Finally – a jihad liberals oppose!)
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