basesurge's Full Review: Michael Crichton - State of Fear
If you are a consumer of popular media it is likely you think the world is in trouble. We are belching carbon dioxide into the air, the temperature is skyrocketing, the polar ice is melting, the water is rising, everything is going to Hell and the planet is going to look like Venus before you can say "inconvenient truth" -- right? Everybody agrees with that -- yes? Al Gore, Rosie O'Donnell CNN, The New York Times... We've got to do somethingNOW -- right...?
Well, hold on, there big fella. Micheal Crichton is here to tell you the sky isn't falling after all. So just calm down for a minute, OK? Global Warming occupies a spot in the uninformed popular imagination somewhere between Established Fact (like the sun rising in the east) and Established Religion (like the Immaculate Conception or Transubstantiation). For most people who get their information from places like CNN and the "New York Times" the idea that Global Warming: a). may not be happening and/or b). if it is, may not be caused be human activities, is either foolishness or blasphemy... or both.
Well, if Global Warming is a religion, "State of Fear" may very well be it's "Satanic Bible". But if you're not yet what some call "a Kool-Aid drinker" SOF may give you pause. The book is written in rather the same form as works of Philosophy used to be. The story and characters are really just vehicles to make larger and deeper points than it may first seem. On it's surface, the story concerns the actions of a very well-funded group of eco-terrorists who are attempting to stage a series of spectacular events using sophisticated technology to produce telegenic media events which would have the effect of galvanising public support for Global Warming measures like the Kyoto Treaty. This plot is thin and Bond-movie level implausible. The plot swirls around Peter Evans, a Hollywood lawyer who finds himself injected into the middle of the sinister doings. Peter is a typical Hollywood denizen in that he's a unconvicted Leftie and a right-thinking, if unenthusiastic believer in the Global Warming Consensus. As things progress, eventually ending in a scene straight outa' "Apocalypse Now", the scales fall from his eyes and he sees the Consensus for what Crichton (and I) believe it to be, B$. Along the way he encounters a variety of people from both sides of the opinion continuum as Crichton assembles his story and his case.
Stories like this remind me of Philosophy class. Philosophers of old, before the days where they could be university professors, had to at least try to make their points in an entertaining fashion. (Usually the results on the "entertaining side of things tend to be less-than-successful, but that's another story.) Aristotle and Plato wrote dialogs, conversations between various characters illustrating various points and later thinkers wrote novels where their Big Thoughts were teased out by the plot and often lengthy conversations between the characters. SOF is a lot like that, Crichton isn't so much telling a story as making a point, the point being: Global Warning is B$. Or, at least vastly overblown and not Humanity's fault in any event.
Micheal Crichton is no upstart dingbat with a short-wave radio show and a bunch of BDU-clad followers lurking in the wilds of Idaho. He is the author of "The Andromeda Strain", "Jurassic Park", "Congo", and "Prey" among others. His stories tend to rest on issues of technology and science, bio-warfare, nanotechnology, cloning, etc. His is a Harvard Med. grad (summa cum lade, Phi Beta Kappa) and Cambridge (England) University). His plots may be occasionally weak on characters but the science and technology and spot-on.
SOF is a brick of a book 500 or so pages long. With footnotes... This may be the most heavily documented work of fiction I've ever read. Crichton backs up most every claim he makes with extensive citations from Physics, Meteorology, and Climatology technical journals. Clearly somebody has done quite a bit of dense reading in the preparation of SOF. (The only thing that wasn't footnoted was the one thing I was interested in tracking down, the idea of induced (rockets trailing wires) lightning making storms more intense. Sounds cool.
Anyway...
As I said before, Crichton makes his points through his characters and their interactions with each other. I was very not-sold on the whole Global Warming Hype Fiesta before I started the book and although the book gave me a lovely bag full of clubs to whoop on True Believers with, no great revelations. The one scene I found interesting was a Philosophy-style set piece between main character Evans and a "nutty professor" type. The nub of the exchange boils down to the idea that the GWHF is something being stirred up by someone(s) for the purpose of stirring the global population into a "state of fear" in order to allow various agendas to be pushed down our collective throats in the name of what's good for "the Earth". This reminds me of what Orwell said about a totalitarian state requiring a constant state of war (and by extension crises similar in tone to war) in order to survive and prosper. This part of the book want by rather more quickly than I would have cared for as it was hustled out so the Mickey Mouse plot could get back into gear.
Oh yeah, that plot... Nobody would ever mistake Crichton's work for Proust or Chekhov, the technological whizz-bang is usually the star of the show. Characters are forgettable and plots rather linear. Here the gizmos share the stage with the scientific/political advocacy. The plot moves along at a decent clip despite the book's length but, perversely, there really isn't very much to it nor, stripped of it's technical doo-dads, is it especially compelling or original, think a mid-range James Bond movie. It seems to me that the story here is really just an armature for Crichton's anti-GWHF tub-thumping.
For the record here, I have been a GWHF skeptic since day-one. I have a very tough time believing that a gas (CO2) that constitutes far less than 1% of the volume of the atmosphere can cause the drastic changes in temperature that the GWHF believers say are on the way. I am very suspicious of these people's motives and I think their science is unadulterated crap. To the extent there is a Global Warming phenomenon (and I'm not convinced there is one) I would have to say our local star has much more to do with it than antibody's Hummer. (Given the evidence of planetary warming in such diverse places as Mars, Jupiter and Pluto, I feel even more confident in that statement.) I am also suspicious of the personalities involved. Many of these folks are old-school hippie/commie/Lefties who are pushing a global socialist agenda run by our old pals at Turtle Bay. There are also far too many people with Poly-Sci/Government degrees pontificating on abstruse technological subjects. Think about something for a second, assuming everything the GWHF believers say is true, can you think of an outfit less qualified to manage it than the UN? I am also left with the persistent memory of the original End-Of-The-World environmental panic scenario, the one that spawned Earth Day, was the Coming Ice Age. That's right, folks in the '70s everybody was panicking about Global Cooling. Pardon me all to hell if I don't take these people's present panic-mongering seriously today.
And another thing... all of those computer climate modeling programs we're constantly being beaten about the head with... They have this little problem... It's self evident, I think, that in order to rely on a mathematical model to predict the future, the model should be able to correctly "predict" the past. That means that if you propose to predict the climate in, say, 2050, it should be possible to put known climate data from 1950 into the model and have it correctly predict the weather situation today. The models that claim to do this require, ahem, adjustments in order to produce correct results. And another thing, since when do we really know enough about how the climate works to throw a computer program around it? Jeez, I could go on and on...
If you're a GWHF believer, there is probably little I can do to set you right. It's like trying to talk the Pope out of being Catholic. And if you're a believer, hard-core, Micheal Crichton will probably have little impact as well. Except, perhaps, as evidence for the "Global Warming Denier Nuremberg Trials" some of you are fantasising about (no lie!). Middle-of-the-roaders may find their views swayed and GWHF unbelievers, like your humble correspondent, will find a bag of jolly good clubs. If you're just looking for a fun thriller story with lots of techno-gizmos, and nothing else, you could probably do rather better elsewhere.
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