Posted on 04/28/2005 10:34:36 AM PDT by cogitator
Michael Crichton has written that rarest of books, an intellectually dishonest novel. Crichton has made a fortune exploiting the public’s fears: Prey (fear of nanotechnology), Rising Sun (fear of Japanese technological supremacy), and Jurassic Park (fear of biotechnology). These books attack the hubris of those who use technology without wisdom. In Prey, he warns, “The total system we call the biosphere is so complicated that we cannot know in advance the consequences of anything that we do.” Given the author’s past, one might expect that a Crichton book on global warming would warn about the risk of catastrophic climate change—the unintended consequences of humanity’s reckless, irreversible experiment on the biosphere.
But State of Fear takes the reverse view. Crichton argues that the environmental and scientific communities have fabricated the threat. He wants readers to fear those who argue that climate change is real, caused by human technologies, and dangerous. In the novel, a mainstream environmental group plots to create extreme weather events that will cause the deaths of thousands of people in order to trick the public into accepting global warming as truth. They try to create a killer seismic tsunami timed to coincide with a conference on abrupt climate change. That’s a major mistake by Crichton: seismic tsunamis aren’t caused by global warming, as any climate scientist, even an evil one, knows.
Because the evidence for–and scientific consensus on–the human causes of climate change is now so strong, Crichton cannot make his case simply on the evidence. Instead, he must distort the facts and accuse the scientific community of bad faith in order to make his case. And he does so, repeatedly.
Crichton portrays environmentalists as uninformed, hypocritical, or simply evil. He creates a scientist-hero, John Kenner, to save the day. (For added credibility, Kenner is an MIT professor—though he sounds more like Rush Limbaugh than any MIT faculty member I’ve met.) Speaking through Kenner, Crichton makes a faulty case against the environmentalists. Kenner says, for instance, that a real NASA climatologist, James Hansen, has been discredited for overestimating the impact of global warming “by three hundred percent” during 1988 testimony in Congress. In fact, Hansen’s prediction was very close to accurate. The smear Crichton cites was created 10 years later, when global-warming skeptic Patrick Michaels misrepresented the testimony.
Crichton also strains to discredit global-warming fears by presenting them as faddish. He has one environmentalist say (incorrectly), “in the 1970s, all the climate scientists believed an ice age was coming.” Global warming did level off between 1940 and 1975. We now know that this was largely a result of dust and aerosols sent by humans into the atmosphere that temporarily overwhelmed the warming effect from greenhouse gases. In the 1970s, it was not yet clear whether the cooling effect from aerosols would be greater than the heating produced from greenhouse gases. Now we know: the heating wins. This episode, fairly explained, would give readers greater confidence in our understanding of climate science, not less.
The dissembling even leaks into the book’s bibliography, where Crichton mischaracterizes the landmark 2002 National Research Council report Abrupt Climate Change: “The text concludes that abrupt climate change might occur sometime in the future, triggered by mechanisms not yet understood.” The report actually concludes, “Abrupt climate changes were especially common when the climate system was being forced to change most rapidly. Thus, greenhouse warming...may increase the possibility of large, abrupt, and unwelcome regional or global climatic events.” State of Fear is riddled with such misinformation. For a thorough debunking, go to www.realclimate.org, a site that gives the lie to Crichton’s scurrilous claim that in climate science “open and frank discussion of the data, and of the issues, is being suppressed.” Sadly, Crichton smears the work of countless scientists who are trying to predict and prevent the unintended consequences of technological hubris.
You got the first part right but missed on the second. Crichton has not devoted his life to the study of environmental science and there were several substantiated errors cited in his book. If Crichton and Rush are wrong, by the time that becomes obvious, it will be too late to correct it. If Dr. Romm is wrong, we will have a cleaner environment and be less dependent upon forign energy sources.
Regarding your "source" of Rush, he still has not accepted the fact that sucking tobacco smoke into your body (via cigar or whatever) will pollute your body sufficiently to cause health problems and premature death. Great source.
The problem is that a great many more people will be reading Crichton's fiction than Dr. Romm's facts (biased as they may be). And too many readers of Crichton's fiction will take it as fact.
It looks like Dr. Romm is being somewhat dishonest himself. A person holding a Ph.D. in physics almost certainly knows that 1) hydrogen does not naturally occur in a free state (on Earth, anyway)--it is always covalently bonded to other atoms; 2) it takes as much energy to break a bond (to free the hydrogen) as one gains by making a bond (how the fuel cell releases energy); 3) there is never 100% conversion of energy from one form to another--IIRC, the best one could hope for would be ~90%, in an ideal system. Hydrogen fuel cells MIGHT be clean (hmm, do they contain heavy metals?), but producing the energy to produce the hydrogen won't be any cleaner than any other production of energy.
Since Dr. Romm is himself dishonest, how can I trust his truthfulness in any criticism he could make of Crichton? Or that his depiction of what Crichton wrote is accurate?
The article states that global warming regressed from the 1940's to the 1970's. The irony of politics is that those who championed the cleaning of the air in the 60's revived the process of global warming. Those very same people could have gone a long way in cutting down on power plant emissions if they didn't kill the nuclear power industry. The environmentalist need to take a good look in the mirror on who is to blame.
I agree completely. Also, Nuclear power generation has no emissions under normal operation which can not be said for any other source of power generation. Nuclear waste can be managed safely.
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