688 State of Fear--it's fiction, or is it?
"Michael Crichton is well known for his techno-thrillers The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park, plus more than a dozen other novels and non-fiction works. State of Fear (HarperCollins, 603 pages, $27.95) is a little different. While constructed as a novel, it is also a guide to environmental issues and their advocates, principally the problem of climate change. It carries a message about global warming and will certainly have an important impact on the ongoing policy debate."The message is, global warming isn’t happening.
“The scientific evidence is well presented, with numerous graphs and references, but more can be said. The climate has never been constant -- always either warming or cooling on all time scales (year-to-year, decadal, millennial, and over millions of years) -- independent of any human influence. While the observed pre-1940 warming is real and mostly natural (a recovery from the preceding Little Ice Age that terminated around 1850), the cooling from 1940 to 1975 is certainly not a greenhouse effect. The warming data reported during the past twenty-five years from surface stations (almost all of them on land) are likely contaminated by urban heat effects; we don't see such warming in the atmospheric record of weather balloons or from weather satellites that cover the whole globe on a regular basis (including the 70% covered by oceans). At most, human greenhouse effects would lead to a temperature rise by 2100 of a measly 0.8 degrees C.”
Review and comments here.
Opinion Journal: "State of Fear is, in a sense, the novelization of a speech that Mr. Crichton delivered in September 2003 at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club. He argued there that environmentalism is essentially a religion, a belief-system based on faith, not fact. To make this point, the novel weaves real scientific data and all too real political machinations into the twists and turns of its gripping story."
To no one's surprise, WaPo does not provide a positive review, instead picks at nits: "As for the footnotes and other impedimenta, now and then the author wields them arrestingly. He assembles graphs of temperature trends to show that while big U.S. cities have been getting warmer over the past seven decades, smaller ones -- Albany, N.Y.; Charleston, S.C.; and Boulder, Colo. -- have either stayed the same or cooled off some. This should be no surprise, we are told, considering that big cities are heat traps." Read it here.
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3 comments:
Norma, Norma, Norma
What am I ever going to do with you? Just keep reading and becoming vexed, I guess. :)
True to stereotype, librarians like to read and wear sensible shoes. Some even shush people who favor the Patriot Act. However, a lump of librarians (i.e. gaggle of geese, herd of sheep, etc.) will usually lean heavily to the left, so maybe this book will have difficulty making it to the shelf of the local public library.
The length of time peeps have been studying and measuring this stuff is nothing compared to the length of time the earth has existed. It could very well be normal for temperatures to change significantly over cycles that last thousands of years, and it seems that species of plants and animals disappear "naturally," even when bad humans aren't messing everything up. That said, I do believe in respecting the earth, limiting pollution, trying to preserve diversity when possible, etc. But one doesn't have to be a fanatic about it--some environuts act as if the only right thing to do is eliminate the human race. I'm not into suicide.
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