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Gregg Easterbrook, an acerbic student of eco-pessimism, offers a "Law of Doomsaying": Predict catastrophe no later than 10 years hence but no sooner than five years away -- soon enough to terrify, but far enough off that people will forget if you are wrong. Because Crichton remembers yesterday's discarded certitudes, millions of his readers will be wholesomely skeptical of today's.
-- George F. Will for The Washington Post
Mr. Will uses his column space today to sing the praises of Michael Crichton's new novel, State of Fear. It is apparently about global warming and how activists manipulate issues and data for their causes, and most interestingly, Mr. Crichton's angle is to depict the environmentalists as the bad guys who try to use fear to have their way, creating a bogey man of global warming.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Monk is among the vast array of progressives who see global warming as a dark and ominous symptom of corrupt corporate domination. Although one finds Crichton's prose style to be hardly more than functional, Monk is tempted to give this novel a read, in the interest of taking a better look at the other side through a more reader-friendly medium. It promises to be an interesting book.
___ ___ ___
In today's segmented America, Michael Crichton's new novel, "State of Fear," might seem to be reading just for red states. Granted, a character resembling Martin Sheen -- Crichton's character is a prototypical Hollywood liberal who plays the president in a television series -- meets an appropriately grisly fate. But blue states, too -- no, especially -- need Crichton's fable about the ecology of public opinion.
"State of Fear," with a first printing of 1.5 million copies, resembles Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" -- about 6 million copies sold since 1957 -- as a political broadside woven into an entertaining story. But whereas Rand had only an idea -- a good one (capitalism is splendid), but only one -- Crichton has information. "State of Fear" is the world's first page turner that people will want to read in one gulp (a long gulp: 600 pages, counting appendices) even though it has lots of real scientific graphs, and footnotes citing journals such as Progress in Physical Geography and Transactions -- American Geophysical Union.
Crichton's subject is today's fear that global warming will cause catastrophic climate change, a belief now so conventional that it seems to require no supporting data. Crichton's subject is also how conventional wisdom is manufactured in a credulous and media-drenched society.
Various factions have interests -- monetary, political, even emotional -- in cultivating fears. The fears invariably seem to require more government subservience to environmentalists and more government supervision of our lives.
Crichton's villains are environmental hysterics who are innocent of information but overflowing with certitudes and moral vanity. His heroes resemble Navy SEALs tenured at MIT, foiling the villains with guns and graphs.
The villains are frustrated because the data do not prove that global warming is causing rising sea levels and other catastrophes. So they concoct high-tech schemes to manufacture catastrophes they can ascribe to global warming -- flash floods in the American West, the calving of an Antarctic iceberg 100 miles across, and a tsunami that would roar at 500 mph across the Pacific and smash California's coast on the last day of a Los Angeles conference on abrupt climate change.
The theory of global warming -- Crichton says warming has amounted to just half a degree Celsius in 100 years -- is that "greenhouse gases," particularly carbon dioxide, trap heat on Earth, causing . . . well, no one knows what, or when. Crichton's heroic skeptics delight in noting such things as the decline of global temperatures from 1940 to 1970. And that since 1970, glaciers in Iceland have been advancing. And that Antarctica is getting colder and its ice is getting thicker.
Last week Fiona Harvey, the Financial Times' environmental correspondent, fresh from yet another international confabulation on climate change, wrote that while Earth's cloud cover "is thought" to have increased recently, no one knows whether this is good or bad. Is the heat-trapping by the clouds' water vapor greater or less than the sun's heat reflected back off the clouds into space?
Climate-change forecasts, Harvey writes, are like financial forecasts but involve a vastly more complex array of variables. The climate forecasts, based on computer models analyzing the past, tell us that we do not know how much warming is occurring, whether it is a transitory episode or how much warming is dangerous -- or perhaps beneficial.
One of the good guys in "State of Fear" cites Montaigne's axiom: "Nothing is so firmly believed as that which least is known." Which is why 30 years ago the fashionable panic was about global cooling. The New York Times (Aug. 14, 1975) reported "many signs" that "Earth may be heading for another ice age." Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned about "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation." "Continued rapid cooling of the Earth" (Global Ecology, 1971) could herald "a full-blown 10,000-year ice age" (Science, March 1, 1975). The Christian Science Monitor reported (Aug. 27, 1974) that Nebraska's armadillos were retreating south from the cooling.
Last week The Post reported that global warming has caused a decline in Alaska's porcupine caribou herd and has lured the golden orange prothonotary warbler back from southern wintering grounds to Richmond a day earlier for nearly two decades. Or since global cooling stopped. Maybe.
Gregg Easterbrook, an acerbic student of eco-pessimism, offers a "Law of Doomsaying": Predict catastrophe no later than 10 years hence but no sooner than five years away -- soon enough to terrify, but far enough off that people will forget if you are wrong. Because Crichton remembers yesterday's discarded certitudes, millions of his readers will be wholesomely skeptical of today's.
-- George F. Will, "Global Warming? Hot Air"
***********
(December 24, 2004)
And here is a contrary review. Monk wanted to do some more checking before getting the book, and now he is disinclined to have a go at it.
...........
The odious villains in Michael Crichton's new thriller, the folks (as President Bush might put it) who kill, maim and terrorize, aren't members of Al Qaeda or any other jihadi movement. They aren't Bondian bad guys like Goldfinger, Dr. No or Scaramanga. They aren't drug lords or gang members or associates of Tony Soprano.
No, the evil ones in ''State of Fear'' are tree-hugging environmentalists, believers in global warming, proponents of the Kyoto Protocol. Their surveillance operatives drive politically correct, hybrid Priuses; their hit men use an exotic, poisonous Australian octopus as their weapon of choice. Their unwitting (and sometimes, witting) allies are -- natch! -- the liberal media, trial lawyers, Hollywood celebrities, mainstream environmental groups (like the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society) and other blue-state apparatchiks.
This might all be very amusing as a ''Saturday Night Live'' sketch, but Mr. Crichton doesn't seem to have amusement on his mind. This thriller comes equipped with footnotes, charts, an authorial manifesto and two appendixes (''Why Politicized Science Is Dangerous'' and ''Sources of Data for Graphs'').
The novel itself reads like a shrill, preposterous right-wing answer to this year's shrill, preposterous but campily entertaining global warming disaster movie ''The Day After Tomorrow.'' In that special effects extravaganza, global warming (its dangers ignored by a Dick Cheneyesque vice president) is the enemy, leading to deadly climate changes and disturbances in the weather that leave New York flooded and frozen, and Los Angeles beset by swarms of killer tornadoes.
In Mr. Crichton's ham-handed novel, the dangers of global warming are nothing but a lot of hype: scare scenarios, promoted by shameless environmentalists eager to use bad science to raise money and draw attention to their cause. For that matter, the ludicrous plot revolves around efforts by radical members of an environmental group called NERF (National Environmental Resource Fund) to surreptitiously trigger a series of natural disasters including a supersize hurricane and a giant tsunami that would hit California with 60-foot waves; these disasters would be timed to coincide with the group's big media conference, thereby awakening the public to the dangers of climate change wrought by global warming.
As in earlier Crichton books, the characters in this novel practically come with Post-it notes on their foreheads indicating whether they are good guys or bad guys. The radical leaders of the environmentalists -- including the head of NERF, Nicholas Drake, an ascetic Ralph Nader type -- are ruthless control freaks (in another novel, they might well have been greedy corporate tycoons or power-mad politicians). Their followers are a bunch of self-righteous bubble-headed Gulfstream liberals, Hollywood types who drive sport utility vehicles while preaching the virtues of gasoline conservation. One tree-hugger, who will meet a particularly horrifying fate, shares the résumé of the real-life actor and activist Martin Sheen: he is best known for having played the president of the United States in a once-popular television show.
As for Mr. Crichton's good guys -- the people trying to thwart the nefarious NERF plot to wreak natural destruction in the name of saving the planet -- they are led by a brainy former M.I.T. professor named John Kenner, who, it's suggested, knows everything about everything. Kenner is accompanied on his global peregrinations by a ''Jurassic Park''-like crew of handsome young people, who prove adept at surviving all manner of perils, from frostbite in Antarctica to death by multiple lightning strikes to captivity by cannibals in the South Pacific. People say standard-issue thriller things like ''Time is short, Sarah. Very short.'' That is, when they aren't dropping scientific terms like ''cavitation units'' and ''propagation time.''
One subplot in ''State of Fear'' involves the disappearance or death of a wealthy contributor to NERF; another, a proposed lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency to be filed by a small Pacific island nation. Half movie treatment, half ideological screed, ''State of Fear'' careers between action set pieces (the requisite car chases, shootouts and narrow escapes from grisly ends) and talky disquisitions full of technical language and cherry-picked facts meant to hammer home the author's points. And Mr. Crichton does indeed have a message, as an afterword titled ''Author's Message'' attests. Among his stated beliefs: ''I suspect the people of 2100 will be much richer than we are, consume more energy, have a smaller global population and enjoy more wilderness than we have today. I don't think we have to worry about them.'' And: ''I blame environmental organizations every bit as much as developers and strip miners'' for current failures in wilderness management.
In an appendix, he goes on to draw parallels between global warming theories and the notorious theory of eugenics floated a century ago: ''I am not arguing that global warming is the same as eugenics. But the similarities are not superficial. And I do claim that open and frank discussion of the data, and of the issues, is being suppressed.''Given these dogmatic assertions and his lumbering efforts to make the novel's story line illustrate these theories, it seems disingenuous in the extreme of Mr. Crichton to claim: ''Everybody has an agenda. Except me.'' Of course, he could simply be trying (like some of the characters in the novel) to drum up publicity for himself by being provocative and contrarian.
After all, it's hard to imagine people buying this sorry excuse for a thriller on its storytelling merits alone.
-- Michiko Kakutani for The NY Times
Gregg Easterbrook, an acerbic student of eco-pessimism, offers a "Law of Doomsaying": Predict catastrophe no later than 10 years hence but no sooner than five years away -- soon enough to terrify, but far enough off that people will forget if you are wrong. Because Crichton remembers yesterday's discarded certitudes, millions of his readers will be wholesomely skeptical of today's.
-- George F. Will for The Washington Post
Mr. Will uses his column space today to sing the praises of Michael Crichton's new novel, State of Fear. It is apparently about global warming and how activists manipulate issues and data for their causes, and most interestingly, Mr. Crichton's angle is to depict the environmentalists as the bad guys who try to use fear to have their way, creating a bogey man of global warming.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Monk is among the vast array of progressives who see global warming as a dark and ominous symptom of corrupt corporate domination. Although one finds Crichton's prose style to be hardly more than functional, Monk is tempted to give this novel a read, in the interest of taking a better look at the other side through a more reader-friendly medium. It promises to be an interesting book.
___ ___ ___
In today's segmented America, Michael Crichton's new novel, "State of Fear," might seem to be reading just for red states. Granted, a character resembling Martin Sheen -- Crichton's character is a prototypical Hollywood liberal who plays the president in a television series -- meets an appropriately grisly fate. But blue states, too -- no, especially -- need Crichton's fable about the ecology of public opinion.
"State of Fear," with a first printing of 1.5 million copies, resembles Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" -- about 6 million copies sold since 1957 -- as a political broadside woven into an entertaining story. But whereas Rand had only an idea -- a good one (capitalism is splendid), but only one -- Crichton has information. "State of Fear" is the world's first page turner that people will want to read in one gulp (a long gulp: 600 pages, counting appendices) even though it has lots of real scientific graphs, and footnotes citing journals such as Progress in Physical Geography and Transactions -- American Geophysical Union.
Crichton's subject is today's fear that global warming will cause catastrophic climate change, a belief now so conventional that it seems to require no supporting data. Crichton's subject is also how conventional wisdom is manufactured in a credulous and media-drenched society.
Various factions have interests -- monetary, political, even emotional -- in cultivating fears. The fears invariably seem to require more government subservience to environmentalists and more government supervision of our lives.
Crichton's villains are environmental hysterics who are innocent of information but overflowing with certitudes and moral vanity. His heroes resemble Navy SEALs tenured at MIT, foiling the villains with guns and graphs.
The villains are frustrated because the data do not prove that global warming is causing rising sea levels and other catastrophes. So they concoct high-tech schemes to manufacture catastrophes they can ascribe to global warming -- flash floods in the American West, the calving of an Antarctic iceberg 100 miles across, and a tsunami that would roar at 500 mph across the Pacific and smash California's coast on the last day of a Los Angeles conference on abrupt climate change.
The theory of global warming -- Crichton says warming has amounted to just half a degree Celsius in 100 years -- is that "greenhouse gases," particularly carbon dioxide, trap heat on Earth, causing . . . well, no one knows what, or when. Crichton's heroic skeptics delight in noting such things as the decline of global temperatures from 1940 to 1970. And that since 1970, glaciers in Iceland have been advancing. And that Antarctica is getting colder and its ice is getting thicker.
Last week Fiona Harvey, the Financial Times' environmental correspondent, fresh from yet another international confabulation on climate change, wrote that while Earth's cloud cover "is thought" to have increased recently, no one knows whether this is good or bad. Is the heat-trapping by the clouds' water vapor greater or less than the sun's heat reflected back off the clouds into space?
Climate-change forecasts, Harvey writes, are like financial forecasts but involve a vastly more complex array of variables. The climate forecasts, based on computer models analyzing the past, tell us that we do not know how much warming is occurring, whether it is a transitory episode or how much warming is dangerous -- or perhaps beneficial.
One of the good guys in "State of Fear" cites Montaigne's axiom: "Nothing is so firmly believed as that which least is known." Which is why 30 years ago the fashionable panic was about global cooling. The New York Times (Aug. 14, 1975) reported "many signs" that "Earth may be heading for another ice age." Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned about "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation." "Continued rapid cooling of the Earth" (Global Ecology, 1971) could herald "a full-blown 10,000-year ice age" (Science, March 1, 1975). The Christian Science Monitor reported (Aug. 27, 1974) that Nebraska's armadillos were retreating south from the cooling.
Last week The Post reported that global warming has caused a decline in Alaska's porcupine caribou herd and has lured the golden orange prothonotary warbler back from southern wintering grounds to Richmond a day earlier for nearly two decades. Or since global cooling stopped. Maybe.
Gregg Easterbrook, an acerbic student of eco-pessimism, offers a "Law of Doomsaying": Predict catastrophe no later than 10 years hence but no sooner than five years away -- soon enough to terrify, but far enough off that people will forget if you are wrong. Because Crichton remembers yesterday's discarded certitudes, millions of his readers will be wholesomely skeptical of today's.
-- George F. Will, "Global Warming? Hot Air"
***********
(December 24, 2004)
And here is a contrary review. Monk wanted to do some more checking before getting the book, and now he is disinclined to have a go at it.
...........
The odious villains in Michael Crichton's new thriller, the folks (as President Bush might put it) who kill, maim and terrorize, aren't members of Al Qaeda or any other jihadi movement. They aren't Bondian bad guys like Goldfinger, Dr. No or Scaramanga. They aren't drug lords or gang members or associates of Tony Soprano.
No, the evil ones in ''State of Fear'' are tree-hugging environmentalists, believers in global warming, proponents of the Kyoto Protocol. Their surveillance operatives drive politically correct, hybrid Priuses; their hit men use an exotic, poisonous Australian octopus as their weapon of choice. Their unwitting (and sometimes, witting) allies are -- natch! -- the liberal media, trial lawyers, Hollywood celebrities, mainstream environmental groups (like the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society) and other blue-state apparatchiks.
This might all be very amusing as a ''Saturday Night Live'' sketch, but Mr. Crichton doesn't seem to have amusement on his mind. This thriller comes equipped with footnotes, charts, an authorial manifesto and two appendixes (''Why Politicized Science Is Dangerous'' and ''Sources of Data for Graphs'').
The novel itself reads like a shrill, preposterous right-wing answer to this year's shrill, preposterous but campily entertaining global warming disaster movie ''The Day After Tomorrow.'' In that special effects extravaganza, global warming (its dangers ignored by a Dick Cheneyesque vice president) is the enemy, leading to deadly climate changes and disturbances in the weather that leave New York flooded and frozen, and Los Angeles beset by swarms of killer tornadoes.
In Mr. Crichton's ham-handed novel, the dangers of global warming are nothing but a lot of hype: scare scenarios, promoted by shameless environmentalists eager to use bad science to raise money and draw attention to their cause. For that matter, the ludicrous plot revolves around efforts by radical members of an environmental group called NERF (National Environmental Resource Fund) to surreptitiously trigger a series of natural disasters including a supersize hurricane and a giant tsunami that would hit California with 60-foot waves; these disasters would be timed to coincide with the group's big media conference, thereby awakening the public to the dangers of climate change wrought by global warming.
As in earlier Crichton books, the characters in this novel practically come with Post-it notes on their foreheads indicating whether they are good guys or bad guys. The radical leaders of the environmentalists -- including the head of NERF, Nicholas Drake, an ascetic Ralph Nader type -- are ruthless control freaks (in another novel, they might well have been greedy corporate tycoons or power-mad politicians). Their followers are a bunch of self-righteous bubble-headed Gulfstream liberals, Hollywood types who drive sport utility vehicles while preaching the virtues of gasoline conservation. One tree-hugger, who will meet a particularly horrifying fate, shares the résumé of the real-life actor and activist Martin Sheen: he is best known for having played the president of the United States in a once-popular television show.
As for Mr. Crichton's good guys -- the people trying to thwart the nefarious NERF plot to wreak natural destruction in the name of saving the planet -- they are led by a brainy former M.I.T. professor named John Kenner, who, it's suggested, knows everything about everything. Kenner is accompanied on his global peregrinations by a ''Jurassic Park''-like crew of handsome young people, who prove adept at surviving all manner of perils, from frostbite in Antarctica to death by multiple lightning strikes to captivity by cannibals in the South Pacific. People say standard-issue thriller things like ''Time is short, Sarah. Very short.'' That is, when they aren't dropping scientific terms like ''cavitation units'' and ''propagation time.''
One subplot in ''State of Fear'' involves the disappearance or death of a wealthy contributor to NERF; another, a proposed lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency to be filed by a small Pacific island nation. Half movie treatment, half ideological screed, ''State of Fear'' careers between action set pieces (the requisite car chases, shootouts and narrow escapes from grisly ends) and talky disquisitions full of technical language and cherry-picked facts meant to hammer home the author's points. And Mr. Crichton does indeed have a message, as an afterword titled ''Author's Message'' attests. Among his stated beliefs: ''I suspect the people of 2100 will be much richer than we are, consume more energy, have a smaller global population and enjoy more wilderness than we have today. I don't think we have to worry about them.'' And: ''I blame environmental organizations every bit as much as developers and strip miners'' for current failures in wilderness management.
In an appendix, he goes on to draw parallels between global warming theories and the notorious theory of eugenics floated a century ago: ''I am not arguing that global warming is the same as eugenics. But the similarities are not superficial. And I do claim that open and frank discussion of the data, and of the issues, is being suppressed.''Given these dogmatic assertions and his lumbering efforts to make the novel's story line illustrate these theories, it seems disingenuous in the extreme of Mr. Crichton to claim: ''Everybody has an agenda. Except me.'' Of course, he could simply be trying (like some of the characters in the novel) to drum up publicity for himself by being provocative and contrarian.
After all, it's hard to imagine people buying this sorry excuse for a thriller on its storytelling merits alone.
-- Michiko Kakutani for The NY Times
