State of Fear
By Michael Crichton
(Avon, 692 pages, $7.99 paper)
Okay, now that this unique wake up call on global warming (the
biggest fraud since Y2K and the designated hitter) is in paperback
at $7.99, there’s no longer and excuse not to buy it and read
it.
Michael Crichton, a sound science guy and a writer of popular
but hokey thrillers, has committed a public service. State of
Fear is not literature. It’s not even very good as a thriller.
As in Crichton’s previous novels the characters are thin and the
action situations not believable, even by the looser standards of
the thriller. But unlike the empty calories of Crichton’s previous
harmless entertainments (my one-sentence review of Jurassic
Park: “It’s about dinosaurs”), this preposterous pudding has a
theme.
State of Fear is a political tract and morality play
more than a novel. But it’s worth the time even if discriminating
fiction readers can expect to be put off by the dopier aspects of
the plot and to cringe at the long passages of speechifying
disguised as dialogue — passages that sound like re-runs of
West Wing (a.k.a. “Left Wing”) except that the arguments
make sense.
The message is that global warming is a hoax of Piltdown
proportions brought to us by hysterical Chicken Little
environmental groups, by careerist “scientists” prepared to produce
the answers their patrons want in order to keep the grants and the
publications coming, by gullible and scientifically illiterate
journalists who wouldn’t know the scientific method from the rhythm
method, by limousine liberals and preposterously rich Gulfstream
enviro-wackos (Hollywood branch) trying to pump meaning into their
otherwise pointless lives, and by politicians desperate to find
threats to appear to save their constituents from (or to at least
get some good moral posing out of) in return for votes.
Folks with their eyes even halfway on the ball already know that
global warming is quackery gone to town and belongs on the
dumb-idea ash-heap with previous enviro-alarums — see Alar, DDT,
acid rain, asbestos, African killer bees, holes in the ozone layer,
et al. — all whooped up as threats to life as we know it and all,
in due course, proven to be either totally harmless or of not much
account.
Some particulars: The temperature of the Earth and its
atmosphere has been going up and down for millennia and there’s not
the first bit of convincing evidence that the slight increase in
temperature during this century is anything but the normal
variation; the slight increase in temperature this century has not
varied along with the constant increase in greenhouse gasses (the
supposed cause of destructive man-caused climate changes) — in
fact temperatures actually went down from about 1940 into the
seventies; computers models relied on by scientists to predict
future global temperatures have been wrong in the predications they
have made for the last decade-plus, vastly overestimating actual
global temperatures; if greenhouse gasses were not allowing the
Earth’s heat to escape then we would expect the atmosphere to be
warming faster than the surface of the Earth — it isn’t.
There’s more, but these easily available facts — woven into
Crichton’s story — should be enough to demonstrate that
scientifically the global warming threat has about as much support
as an 11-year-old in a training bra.
WHAT CRICHTON GIVES US in State of Fear — which is what
the intellectual aluminum-siding salesmen flogging global warming
want us to be in — is drama and narrative and dialogue which help
us to better understand, in a way beyond that of straight analysis,
how a transparent fraud like global warming can become something
that millions believe in without ever giving any real thought
to.
The hero of State of Fear is John Kenner, an MIT
professor who is a cross between James Bond, Indiana Jones, and
Jonas Salk. His mission is no less than to save the world from the
actions of a radical environmental group called the National
Environmental Resource Fund (no, the members aren’t referred to as
NERF balls, but they should be) that plans to — and has the
resources and capabilities to — create a series of wildly
destructive environmental catastrophes, including an Asian tsunami,
all of which will be blamed on global warming.
This race between the forces of good and evil takes place in
exotic locals across the globe — Antarctica, Paris, Tokyo, the
Arizona desert, and New Guinea, to name a few — in the usual
breathless, action-packed, in-the-nick-of-time style of the
traditional thriller, only with scientific sermonettes along the
way (complete with un-thriller-like graphs and scientific
citations). But readers can speed through the parts where the good
guys are being chased by cannibals and crocodiles in New Guinea or
running from lightning showers and flash floods in the desert
Southwest. This stuff is about as credible as pro wrestling, and
perhaps even less interesting.
What’s important in State of Fear is the science and
the take on how environmental groups operate to sell Americans on
really bad ideas. These scenes are far more realistic and
convincing than the chases.
There’s the evil Nick Drake, head of NERF working his charm on
scientists, trying to convince them they can no longer afford this
lofty and old-fashioned notion that they are to pursue the truth
regardless of where it leads. They must, because the stakes are so
high, become part of the environmental rescue team. There’s the
idealistic lawyer, Peter Evans, an intelligent and “well informed”
man who requires mountains of evidence to be convinced that what
“everyone knows” about global warming is not true. Crichton shows
how Big Environment is just another part of the political and
cultural establishment and is as manipulative as anyone else in
town.
With any luck, thousands of thriller readers who pick up “Fear”
with nothing on their minds but entertainment will stay the course
and have their minds fortified against one of the frauds of the
ages. Crichton is certainly qualified to do the science required
for this public education. He’s a 1965 graduate of Harvard Medical
School — though he makes too much writing thrillers and
screenplays to practice medicine — and he’s done extensive
scientific background work for his previous dozen or so
science-based thrillers.
Don’t wait for the movie to come out on this one, though. It’s
far too un-PC to ever be made. It has given reviewers with
establishment leftie organs the vapors. The NYT review,
for example, huffs with words like “shrill,” “preposterous,”
“right-wing,” “ham-handed,” “screed,” and such like. Any book that
sets the NYT this much on a boil is probably worth a few
hours of reading time. And that’s all the 600-plus pages of
State of Fear will require — if readers
take my advice and buzz through the silly crocodile parts.
