The green 'State of Fear'

Published February 3, 2005

Michael Crichton is a high-tech, science-savvy Renaissance man in the 21st century. He has sold more than a hundred million books, which have been translated into 30 languages. Twelve became high-grossing movies. Children everywhere have "Jurassic Park" nightmares.

His books are so popular in China that when the calcified remains of a species of dinosaur was discovered there, the Chinese named it Bienosaurus crichtoni in his honor. In 1992, People magazine named him one of the "Fifty Most Beautiful People." Now a new kind of fame brings Mr. Crichton to Washington to speak to policy wonks. He's promoting his new book, "State of Fear," which zoomed to the top of the bestseller lists, but he doesn't come to Washington to talk about the novel.

Not long ago his speech, "Science Policy in the 21st Century," was sponsored by two think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, and it's about what he thinks about environmentalists in general, and climate change in particular. He has a lot of thoughts about the way science influences public policy.

He minces no words. What passes for science by so-called experts in the debate over "global warming," he says, influences policy that is based on faulty data and ideological considerations. This does considerably more damage than good.

Ideology drives the scientists who get the grants to conduct research; the government agency that gives grants is driven by politics. In the novel, a page-turning action thriller, major characters, including a scientist...

Great book. Crichton has done a great job of exposing the envirowackos as
(1) leaders of environmental groups who are chiefly interested in fund raising and see the use of fraudulent "global warming" scare stories as standard fund raising propaganda;
(2) ignorant and gullible Hollywood types/liberal arts grads who fall for this crap and support it;
(3) ignorant reporters and editors in the press who uncritically publish the environmentalists propaganda as if it were fact; and
(4) unscrupulous climate scientists who see the environmentalist hysteria as a great way of getting government grants.

One of the main problems, and reasons that things like global warming get accepted uncritically as established fact, is that science education in our country is woefully inept. People have no clue what good scientific practice is, and they are not taught to think critically, or to question. Too many just accept what they're told, and if enough scientific jargon is thrown in, they're so impressed by it that they are completely unable to perceive how they are being hoodwinked.

i agree that education in our country needs an upgrade but let me ask a question of all of you that are so certain global warming is "junk science," how you can be so confident?

i bet nobody in this forum has actually studied the scientific literature (at best some of you picked up lomberg's book after learning that it would reinforce the answer you wanted)

scientists aren't perfect but most of you should admit that you have no clue.

Let me first point out that I am a scientist, doctorate level. True, my field is biochemistry and molecular biology, and not atmospheric science, but that still leaves me with a good scientific background from which I can judge the issue of "global warming." I don't spend a lot of time reading the "global warming" literature; if the article is not in Science, I probably won't see it (I have so many articles to read pertaining to my own research that I hardly have time to read anything else).

Science is not exact, and consensus is rare. My first published article was a refutation of a big-name scientist's work. We disagree and argue, and people delight in trying to find alternate explanations for every observation. In the "global warming" scare, where are the dissenting voices? They exist, the media just doesn't cover them (the media always goes for the shrill hysterics, not the calm rationality). A petition somewhere on the internet has (last I heard) 60,000 scientists who have signed it, expressing their doubts as to the validity of the global warming hypothesis. Some of them are Nobel prize winners.

Now, about the facts of "global warming." If you look at temperature records going back for hundreds of years, you learn that there have always been periods of warming and cooling. Why, then, is this particular period of warming (if it is, in fact warming) attributed to man-made factors, when the claim is not made for past periods of warming? Furthermore, the carbon dioxide levels always increase AFTER the warming, lagging by decades, a century, or more. IF CO2 is, in fact, a cause of global warming, wouldn't those CO2 increases following the temp. rises in the past have resulted in upwards temperature spirals, like adding fuel to a fire? Lastly, our methods of measuring temperature have changed. The apparent average global temperature is different depending on how the measurement is taken. Yes, there are charts that show all of a half a degree of increase in the last century. But it's debatable whether it is real (due to differences in the way temperatures were measured) and, if it is, what it means.

Science reporting in the MSM is abysmally inaccurate on just about every subject they report. Why should the MSM be any different where global climate is concerned?

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