National Observer Home > No. 64 - Autumn 2005 > Articles
Michael Crichton on "Global Warming"
John Stone
Occasionally I am asked to write book
reviews (most recently, of Dr. Paul
Strangio’s biography of the late Dr.
Jim Cairns, Keeper of the Faith).1 Less
frequently I may submit for publication
an article reviewing some book
which has caught my attention, and
which I have thought sufficiently important
to be worth drawing to the attention
of a wider audience. Books in
that rare category have invariably
been serious non-fiction works of one
kind or another, such as William
Coleman’s and Alf Hagger’s excellent
book, Exasperating Calculators.2 I
cannot however recall when I last
chose to review a work of fiction.
State of Fear,3 by Michael Crichton,
is in fact much more than a work of
fiction. Larded throughout the 567
pages of the novel proper (there are
another 36 pages I shall come to later)
are several serious messages which
reverberate with me so strongly that I
think it worth drawing to the attention
of National Observer readers.
I should say that I am not a particular
fan of Crichton’s. I do not read
much science fiction, although I would
readily acknowledge that at its best
(for example, John Wyndham’s The
Day of the Triffids) it can be enthralling.
Viewed purely as a literary stylist,
Crichton would not, in my respectful
judgment, score highly (unlike
John Wyndham). His real strength lies
in his capacity to combine the characteristics
of a fast-paced, action-packed
thriller (the sort of thing you pick up
at the airport bookshop to engage your
attention, but not your mind, on a long
overseas flight) with a strong command
of real scientific knowledge of
the kind required for his books.
It was that combination of qualities
which, years ago, sustained me in
reading an earlier Crichton work, The
Andromeda Strain (1969), a science
fiction novel about a new and deadly
biological agent threatening the world
with a latter day Black Death. And although
I have neither read the book
nor viewed the subsequent movie, it
was no doubt that combination of
qualities which endowed Crichton’s
best-known work, Jurassic Park, with
its best-seller status and subsequent
enormous box office success.
As that latter reference may indicate,
Crichton has become a hugely
successful author and, at the age of 62,
doubtless a very rich man. Beginning
life with a Harvard degree in anthropology,
he then graduated from
Harvard Medical School, and was
about to take up a doctoral fellowship
at the Salk Institute for Biological Science
when the best-seller success of
The Andromeda Strain led him, at the
age of 27, to focus on a career as a
writer, and a writer of science fiction
in particular. I mention these facts not
merely to illustrate his admirable versatility,
but also to suggest that his scientific
training equips him to address
scientific and technological issues going
well beyond the competence of
most members of the literati.
A prefatory note to State of Fear
says that it “is a work of fiction . . .
Characters, corporations, institutions,
and organisations . . . are the products
of the author’s imagination or, if
real, are used fictitiously without any
attempt to describe their actual conduct”.
This disclaimer, and particularly
that part of it I have italicised,
would seem to have been particularly
necessary (even in the United States,
where the defamation laws are much
less hostile to free speech than in Australia)
given the harshness of
Crichton’s condemnations of some
U.S. individuals and institutions who
are, apparently, readily recognisable.
The plot, and some of the principal
characters, may perhaps be best described
as falling within the James
Bond category. That is, on any cool
post-reading analysis they are (like
much science fiction) far-fetched, but
the pace of the story and the ease of
reading combine to engender a sufficient
suspension of disbelief to get
over that hurdle while actually reading.
In other words, like all good airport
bookshop thrillers, once embarked
upon it is hard to put down.
Ranged on one side are the villains,
chief among them the National Environmental
Resource Fund (N.E.R.F.).
(This, it seems, is a thinly disguised
stand-in for a real-life U.S. institution,
the Natural Resources Defense Council,
which within days of the novel appearing
published an ad hominem review
consigning it to perdition for all
right-minded people.) N.E.R.F. promotes
itself, and the personal fortunes
of its chief operatives, through unprincipled
but technically skilful manipulation
of an ever-willing-to-be-credulous-
where-good-environmentalcauses-
are-concerned media. And through its links with the much more
violently sinister Environmental Liberation
Front, it seeks to initiate a series
of climatic or other environmentally-
related events (a massive hurricane
in the West Indies; an enormous
flash flood in Arizona; breaking off a
massive iceberg from the Ross Ice
Shelf in Antarctica).
The last such
event involves triggering a huge tsunami
off the Solomons whose wave,
racing across the Pacific, will be timed
to strike the shores of California just
as N.E.R.F.’s latest huge conference on
“abrupt climate change”, directed to
whipping up more media hysteria
about the damage Man is doing to
Planet Earth, is winding up in Los
Angeles.
The objectives of all this manipulation,
of course, are money and power.
Both objectives drive the actions of the
lawyers, politicians and media magnates
who combine to give N.E.R.F.
and its allies their clout in the world.
After all, the more laws there are to
stop people doing things (always, you
understand, in the name of a good
cause — think, for example, in Victoria,
of those anti-racial hatred laws),
the more fees there will be for lawyers.
The more power and patronage there
will also be for politicians, and the
more commercial opportunities there
will be for those industrialists who are
quickest to supply the latest fad (for
example, motor vehicle companies
moving to supply the market created
in California by ludicrous laws seeking
to phase out petrol-driven motor
vehicles in that State). And the more
fear can be created in the world, the
more the media will thrive. Nothing,
after all, sells more newspapers, or
provides more gripping elevision
footage, than a really good natural disaster,
as the recent Indian Ocean tsunami
(right on cue for Crichton’s
novel, as it happened) has amply demonstrated.
No wonder, then, that media
magnates need more of them.
Ranged against these villains are the
good guys who, you will not be surprised
to learn, do ultimately prevail.
Much more interesting, however, than
those James Bond-like characters are
the two people who, beginning as what
Lenin called “useful idiots” (wellmeaning
people such as, in his case,
Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who can be
persuaded to support the most malign
causes so long as they are dressed up
in sufficiently do-gooding descriptions),
evolve into much better informed
and harder-headed characters
who move, as a consequence, from siding
with the villains to siding with the
goodies.
The first of these, George Morton,
is a rich Californian philanthropist
who, having been taken in by the
N.E.R.F. spielsters, has initially been
persuaded to finance a $10 million
lawsuit which N.E.R.F. is proposing to
mount on behalf of the nation (sic) of
Vanutu (read, in reality, the equally
risible nation (sic) of Tuvalu). The suit
is to be brought against the government
of the United States, “the world’s
greatest polluter” and hence (you guessed it) the country chiefly responsible
for the prospective “inevitable”
submergence of tiny Vanutu beneath
what the global warming hysterics
claim will be the rising sea levels of the
South Pacific. (The fact that the “pollution”
referred to is principally nothing
more than carbon dioxide, the basic
“food” for all plant life, continues
to escape the notice of most journalists
referring to the topic.)
The trouble
is that, in the novel as in real life,
the research team of oceanographers
and others whom N.E.R.F.’s lawyers
are employing to assemble the factual
basis for their case cannot actually find
any convincing evidence which would
do so.
The reaction of the top N.E.R.F. executives
to this unfortunate confrontation
with reality is two-fold: first,
keep it dark, and particularly do not
tell George Morton; and second, get
the latter signed up as soon as possible
to a legally binding deed whereby
he assigns the $10 million to N.E.R.F.
for the law suit, with a contingency
clause that “in the unlikely event” that
the action against the United States
does not proceed, N.E.R.F. may still
retain the money and apply it to
equally good (sic) environmental
causes of its own choosing (including
the high salaries and other perks of its
senior executives). Unfortunately,
George, who did not become rich by
being totally stupid, becomes aware of
N.E.R.F.’s designs to exploit him, and
sets out to foil them.
Peter Evans, the second convert on
the road to a more sceptical Damascus,
is a lawyer employed by the firm
having N.E.R.F. as one of its best-paying
clients.
Starting out with all the
non-scientifically-informed opinions
about environmental causes which so
generally prevail these days among
people who have been subjected to a
university course in the so-called humanities
(and increasingly, in the soft
“sciences” also), he gradually comes to
see that he has been comprehensively
duped. His move across the spectrum
of belief, from bleeding heart environmentalist
patsy to much better informed
and much more sceptical
thinker for himself, is the central feature
of the book.
So why is all this good, clean but not
seriously memorable fun worth recommending
to all National Observer
readers? One reason is because, even
among those relatively well-informed
people, there may be some (though I
am sure not many) who, like Peter
Evans initially, take seriously all the
blather they read these days about global
warming and many other prominent
“environmental” causes, and for
whom State of Fear would therefore
constitute a quick, enjoyable and entirely
easy course in appropriate scepticism.
In recent weeks in particular, with
the coming into force of the much
trumpeted Kyoto Protocol on global
warming, which the Howard Government
has refused to ratify, we have
been subjected to a veritable barrage
of lies, half truths and assertions from the national and international environmental
lobbies on that matter. For
example, on 12 February 2005 The
Age, which used to describe itself as
Australia’s quality newspaper, published
a passionate and almost
laughably inaccurate diatribe headlined
Wake up. This is Serious, in
which it declaimed on the coming environmental
Armageddon, and on the
wickedness of the Howard Government
in refusing to acknowledge it
(formally at any rate) by ratifying this
international treaty.4
I say “formally at any rate” because
it is not altogether clear in this area
whether the Howard Government
does actually refuse to acknowledge
the scientific fraud which, basically,
underlies the threats of the global
warming doomsayers. While the government
has, to its considerable
credit, refused to ratify the treaty, its
previous Minister for the Environment,
Dr. David Kemp, was thoroughly
snowed on the subject by his
Department, while his rather new successor,
Senator Ian Campbell, has
been at least equally equivocal on the
topic. Returning recently, for example,
from the latest international environmental
gabfest in Buenos Aires, he
delivered himself of some very strange
statements indeed. (Now if only that
gathering could have been struck by
the kind of towering tsunami which
those State of Fear villains hoped to
generate, think how much saner a
world we would now all be living in!)
That prefatory note from which, in
part, I quoted earlier goes on to say:
“However, references to real people,
institutions, and organisations that
are documented in footnotes are accurate.
Footnotes are real.”
Now it would be an understatement
to say that when embarking upon a
novel (particularly one of the airport
bookshop variety), one does not expect
to encounter footnotes. Nevertheless,
in State of Fear, footnotes there
are (42 of them by my quick count).
Most are provided to back up statements
by one or other of the goodies
during the process of re-educating
(more precisely, educating for the first
time) Peter Evans. Some of them relate
to the 40 graphs which also, again
unexpectedly, find a place in
Crichton’s text, such as the one showing
temperature readings from the
weather station at Punta Arenas in
southern Chile (the closest city to Antarctica
in the world) over the period
1888-2004, during which time average
temperature has fallen by approximately
0.6 degrees Celsius.
How can this be? Is not the ice in
steadily melting? Well no, actually.
“One relatively small area, called the
Antarctic Peninsula, is melting and
calving huge icebergs. That is what gets reported each year. But the continent
as a whole is getting colder, and
the ice is getting thicker.” And since
Antarctica accounts for 90 per cent of
all the ice in the world (all those glaciers
whose frightening melting we
keep reading about account for less
than 6 per cent), that puts rather a different
complexion on all those horror
stories about rising sea levels and the
like. Indeed, if this keeps on, The New
York Times (among others), which
these days carries on about global
warming but which, as recently as
August 1975 was publishing articles
pointing to the possibility that “Earth
may be heading for another Ice Age”,
may prove to have been right the first
time.
Both footnotes and graphs are
drawn from serious professional studies
by reputable scientists. I say “reputable”
scientists to distinguish them
from those “scientists” who, to a
greater or less degree, have been prepared
to sell their professional reputations
for the admittedly attractive
messes not of pottage but of the
United Nations international conference
circuit, and the research grants
which tend to come in its train. What,
to note one particularly notorious example,
can one make of a man, Sir
David King, Chief Scientific Adviser to
Her Majesty’s United Kingdom Government,
who has opined that global
warming represents a greater threat to
the future of our world today than international
terrorism?5
State of Fear, then, is not merely a
good airport bookshop thriller, but
also — and indeed more importantly
— a tract conveying some serious messages
for our media-driven times. To
render the themes of that tract even
clearer, Crichton includes, as five of
those additional thirty-six pages to
which I referred earlier, an Author’s
Message so that the reader may know
“where, exactly, the author stands on
these issues”. Space precludes its reproduction,
but a few points from it
may illustrate his broad conclusions:
• “We know astonishingly little
about every aspect of the environment . . .”
• “Atmospheric carbon dioxide is
increasing, and human activity is the
probable cause”. [This, I may interpolate,
is probably the only statement
about which the global warming zealots
and their critics agree; and even
then, note that penultimate word “probable”. The question of whether
an increasing level of carbon dioxide
poses any threat whatsoever to mankind
is of course an entirely separate
matter.]
• “We are also in the midst of a natural
warming trend that began about
1850, as we emerged from a 400 year
cold spell . . .”
• “Nobody knows how much of the
present warming trend might be a
natural phenomenon.”
• “We have not the foggiest notion
how to preserve what we term ‘wilderness’
. . .”
• “I am certain there is too much
certainty in the world”.
Let me note a good example of the
kind of thing Crichton is getting at.
Among the many reference orks
cited in the 21-page bibliography is
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962),
one of the most influential books to
have been published in the 20th Century,
and one which perfectly illustrates
his point about the dangers of
pursuing seemingly good environmental
causes without thinking
through the costs (in the broadest
sense of that term) of doing so. In retrospect,
it is now possible to say quite
unequivocally that Carson’s book has
been responsible for killing more people
than Mein Kampf. It is true that,
unlike Adolf Hitler, Carson did not set
out to kill people. Nevertheless, the
road to the malarial Hell which was
paved with her doubtless good intentions
in demanding the banning of the
use of D.D.T. (previously widely and
effectively used for control of the malarial
mosquito) has been just as
deadly for the two million people –
more than half of them children —
who these days die from malaria each
year in her name.
So far throughout this article I have
used the term “global warming” when
referring to the United ations-driven
operation which, in Rio de Janeiro in
1992, resulted in the promulgation of =
the United Nations International
Framework Convention on Climate
Change, under whose auspices the
Kyoto Protocol was then initiated in
1996. But as one of N.E.R.F.’s chief
executives remarks, “the trouble with
global warming is that nobody believes
in it”. “That’s the advantage”, he
says, “of shifting to abrupt climate
change . . . Whatever kind of weather
occurs, it always confirms your
message.”Sure enough, while one still
sees references to “global warming”,
the environmentalists have indeed
now shifted for the most part to speaking
of “climate change” or “abrupt climate
change”. This allows them to
more effectively propagate the myth
that almost any climatic event these
days, whether tornadoes in Florida or
droughts in Australia, results from
man-made changes to Earth’s atmosphere.
This is despite the fact that scientific
study after scientific study has
shown that there has been no change
in the statistical frequency with which
such events are occurring.
As readers will be well aware, Australia (along with the Great Satan, the
United States) has been harshly criticised
from many quarters, not least
our media, for its refusal to ratify the
Kyoto Protocol. So far has this become
that even the Business Council of Australia,
the body comprising our most
prominent corporate chief executives,
has been unable to determine a position
on the matter, thus lending renewed
force to Lenin’s adage that capitalists
are generally so venal that they
would sell you the rope with which you
proposed to hang them.
Let me now note that my own views
on the Kyoto Protocol nonsense have
been coloured by two personal experiences.
In 1973, as Deputy Secretary (Economic)
of the Commonwealth Treasury,
I participated in writing, and was
responsible for final editing, of a
Treasury document entitled Economic
Growth: Is it Worth Having?6 Among
other things, that document set out to
examine the intellectual credentials of
an earlier environmental movement
then sweeping all before it, financed
by some of the world’s most prominent
and richest industrialists (such as
the then heads of Volkswagen and
Fiat) in a grouping known as the Club
of Rome, and backed up by ostensibly
impressive “studies” employing what
were also then claimed to be the most
sophisticated computer models.
Sound familiar?
Based on all this prestigious activity
by (self-proclaimed) high-minded
people, it was claimed that: 7
“the rations on ‘spaceship Earth’
will soon be running low and that
only urgent and drastic action can
avert ecological catastrophe. Internationally,
the most widely-publicised
of such predictions have been
those contained in The Limits to
Growth, a study sponsored by the
Club of Rome and conducted by a
team at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology which was published
in March 1972. This concluded that
there was an urgent need to bring
about a deliberate, controlled end to
growth; the Executive Committee of
the Club of Rome commented that
‘only the conviction that there is no
other avenue to survival can liberate
the moral, intellectual, and creative
forces required to initiate this
unprecedented human undertaking’.”
It is a matter of historical record
that the scare campaign mounted by
the Club of Rome did not prevail.
Looking back, it is nevertheless instructive
to consider the confident predictions
of Limits to Growth that, if
world economic growth were to be
maintained at then existing rates (we
have, since then, grown faster), Earth’s mineral resources would be exhausted
within a few decades (roughly, by
now). As the Treasury’s critique
pointed out at the time, and as has
been shown over the intervening
years, this was nonsense. So far from
becoming exhausted, by 2002 the real
since 1972, the most conclusive possible
proof that supplies of those minerals
had continued to outstrip demand
for them. Even today, at a time
when a new economic giant, China,
and another less advanced but potentially
equally important one, India, are
emerging and placing heavy additional
demands upon supplies of raw
materials, the nonsense remains just
as nonsensical in anything but the
short-to-medium-term.
The reasons
for that were cogently set out in that
Treasury Economic Paper thirty years
ago, and remain equally valid today.
We would be unwise, however, to
assume that it was solely the power of
intellectual argument, such as that
mounted in that Treasury paper,
which prevailed over the Club of
Rome’s scare-mongering. It may also
have been that the latter simply got
their timing wrong. After all, in 1973
the world was locked in the Cold War
between the two super-powers and
their allies. There was, so to speak,
quite enough fear in the world already
to meet the needs of those (like
Crichton’s N.E.R.F. and the world’s
media) for whom fear is the key to
power and pelf.
However that may be, the second of
those two personal experiences referred
to above came in 1990-91 when,
after returning to Melbourne following
my brief sojourn in Queensland
(and the Senate) I was again employed
as a Senior Fellow at the Institute of
Public Affairs. My first task there was
to produce a survey publication covering
various environmental topics.
Duly published in 1991, it addressed,
among other issues, the then growing
clamour about “global warming”.8
It was my first serious encounter
with that topic. The much publicised
first (1990) report of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, a
United Nations body comprising U.N.
bureaucrats and selected scientists
working under their control, had just
appeared. Its alarmist suggestions
(subsequently hardened, in its 1995
and 2000 reports, to actual predictions)
that the world was facing a
steady, and inevitably catastrophic, increase
in atmospheric temperatures,
were all the rage in our media. My reaction,
after reading all I could on the
subject, was at that time one of scepticism
but not one of absolute rejection.
It was, I said, a fascinating intellectual
hypothesis, but it was, at that
time, no more than an hypothesis.
Like all scientific hypotheses, it would need to be exposed to wide-ranging
criticism from other scientists and
tested against experimental data.
Since that time I have maintained
an interest in the global warming
topic. The result is that, the more I
have seen of it, the more sceptical (at
first) and dismissive (today) I have
become. So although the environmental
issues in State of Fear are by no
means confined to global warming, on
that issue at least I found myself already
wholly in sympathy with
Crichton.
As one whose first venture into
academia was an Honours degree in
Mathematical Physics, I have always
retained an interest in scientific debates
even though it is over fifty years
since I last laboured in that vineyard.
The feature therefore of the global
warming controversy which I have
long considered most important is
well summed up in the final component
of those thirty-six additional
pages of Crichton’s book, namely his
Appendix entitled Why Politicized Science
is so Dangerous. He is right. It
is: and for that Appendix alone, State
of Fear is worth reading.
1. Economic Record, June, 2004.
2. “Rational Thought on Rationalism”, in The Australian Financial Review, 16 May,
2001.
3. Harper Collins, London, 2004. Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, 603 pages,
$26.95.
4. This effusion from The Age was the subject of a merciless analysis in The Herald-
Sun by Andrew Bolt, Age of No Reason, 18 February 2005.
5. At the conclusion of a seminar in Moscow arranged by the Russian Academy of
Sciences last July, the then Chief Economic Adviser to President Putin, Andrei
Illarionov, was scathing in his description of the behaviour and general deportment
of the British delegation led by King. Based on that seminar, Illarionov concluded
that: “Basically, none of the assertions made in the Kyoto Protocol and the ‘scientific’
theory on which the Kyoto Protocol is based have been borne out by actual data.” See
the transcript (The Federal News Service, 9 July 2004) of the Press Conference on
the results of the Climate Change and Kyoto Protocol Seminar, Moscow, 8 July 2004.6. Treasury Economic Paper No. 2, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra,
June, 1973.
6. Treasury Economic Paper No. 2, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra,
June, 1973.
7. Ibid., page 2.
8. The Environment in Perspective: Selected Articles with a Commentary by John
Stone, Institute of Public Affairs, Melbourne, 1991.
National Observer No. 64 - Autumn 2005
