Michael Crichton: State of Fear

If you want to see what an apoplectic fit looks like in print, check out Michiko Kakutani’s review/denunciation in the New York Times of State of Fear, the latest book from Michael Crichton. Crichton is the author of Jurassic Park, Disclosure, The Andromeda Strain, and much more (or, in the case of Prey, less); in State of Fear he dares to challenge the numbskull pieties of “global warming” and that has made Michiko very mad indeed. State of Fear is, she writes, “shrill,” “preposterous,” and, horror of horrors, “right-wing.”

So many angry, foam-flecked adjectives jostle for attention in the text of Kakutani’s padded-cell philippic (I’d use the words “shrill” and “preposterous,” but she got there first) that the fastidious will want to mop the page for spittle before reading. Crichton’s book is, she sneers, “ham-handed”; the plot of this “sorry excuse for a thriller” is “ludicrous,” its disquisitions “talky,” its facts “cherry-picked,” its assertions “dogmatic,” and its efforts to make a case “lumbering.” Still, at least she spared Crichton contemporary culture’s most fashionable insult, that irrevocably staining mark of Cain, that deepest red of all scarlet letters, that other N-word. The Los Angeles Times does not; according to its reviewer, Crichton has written “the first neocon novel.” Ouch.

At this point, wiser, calmer readers will suspect that a book that attracts that sort of condemnation in the pages of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times (reassuringly, The New Yorker didn’t like it either) must be really, really good. The wiser, calmer readers will be right. It is.

Crichton has, unsurprisingly, chosen to incorporate his message into the medium he knows best, the thriller, but what is surprising is that this latest effort is packed with graphs, scientific discussion, footnotes, a manifesto, and an extensive bibliography: not usually the stuff of popular fiction. And, remarkably, the whole package — all 600 pages of it — succeeds. State of Fear is a good, solid, exciting read, and if the writing is occasionally wooden, it is so in the finest, somewhat flat tradition of Ludlum, Turow, and the other bards of the airport bookstore.

State of Fear is a didactic work, but its author has not neglected the conventions of his genre: Men are men, women are hot (it’s the planet that’s not), and deaths are excruciating. Bullets fly, cars crash, poisonous octopi do their worst, hideous catastrophe looms, and, the last surviving fans of the late H. Rider Haggard will be delighted to know, cannibals make an appearance. Cannibals! And not effete Lecters either, but real honest-to-goodness, traditional missionary-in-the-pot anthropophagi, who know that fresh flesh needs neither sips of Chianti nor fava-bean frippery to make it something truly tasty.

But all those daunting graphs and lurking footnotes are a reminder that, populist format or not, Crichton is making a serious point about the dead and dangerous end that modern “environmentalism” has reached. In the hands of contemporary Greens, it no longer has much to do with brains, or, at least, reason. Protecting our planet has, he argues, degenerated into a religion — a matter of faith, not science.

The frenzied response to State of Fear proves his point. Crichton’s arguments have not been treated as a contribution to a legitimate debate, but as blasphemy. Yet if this is an urgent, insistent, sometimes overstated book, it’s because Crichton cares so much about the environment, not so little. Who with any brains does not?

Yes, Crichton raises the rhetorical stakes very high, but the real stakes are even higher. If the prescriptions of the Kyoto Treaty are followed, the cost could run into hundreds of billions of dollars a year, a cost that, if history is any indication, will be disproportionately borne by the world’s poor. Under the circumstances, the science that backs it had better be rock solid. Crichton argues that it is not.

To take just a sample of the intriguing data that turn up in this book, the melting of Antarctica is confined to just one relatively small peninsula. The continent as a whole is getting colder, its ice thicker. At the other end of the planet, Greenland too is chilling up, while here at home, the temperature in the United States is roughly where it was in the 1930s, there has been no increase in extreme weather, and changes in upper-atmospheric temperature have been far smaller than most global-warming models would suggest.

Those are some cherries, Ms. Kakutani.

In her disdain for inconvenient, ornery facts, however, Kakutani is sadly typical. While there are those in the Kyoto crowd who have genuine, and carefully thought-through, scientific concern about the fate of the Earth, the motivation of the many who shout so loudly and so dogmatically about the perils of global warming frequently owes less to logic than to neurosis, misplaced religious faith, and, often, the characteristic dishonesty of a Left looking for yet another stick with which to beat both Western civilization and those wicked, dirty capitalists.

And then there’s something else: greed. One of the more entertaining aspects of Crichton’s tale is that the clever, conniving, white-collar villains, regular thriller fare of course, are not the standard corporate swine. No, in this book they are environmentalists acting from exactly the sort of motives more usually attributed to the bad boys from the boardroom than to the saints from the NGOs. In State of Fear, the Gekkos are Green. They are caricatures, but Crichton is making a fair point: Big Environment is a big, big business, “a great fundraising and media machine — a multi-billion industry in its own right — with its own private agenda that’s not necessarily in the public interest,” and like any big business it comes complete with temptations, timeservers, fat paychecks, fatter payrolls, and a legion of lawyers trying to make a fast buck.

This combination of false gods and real mammon has replaced the hard science of global warming with scaremongering, publicity stunts (both have a key part to play in State of Fear), and relentless pressure, political and otherwise, to sign up for the new orthodoxy. The problem for its believers, however, is that it’s an orthodoxy that the facts do not support. In reality, the facts, such as they are, do not support any orthodoxy. There aren’t enough of them, and those that exist often appear to contradict one another. The hard science of global warming is, as Crichton explains, well, hard; the data are far from reliable, and there are so many variables that, even for today’s computers, the value of most climate-prediction models lies somewhere between a bookie’s tip and a crystal ball.

Crichton has his own theories as to what is going on (very roughly: mild warming, possibly purely natural, perhaps associated with the heat islands of urban development, or maybe both), but he is at pains to describe these as guesses, a humility that would be equally welcome among those who would base their highly interventionist environmental policy on little more than hysteria and a hunch — something, I suspect, that helps explain their reluctance to see their version of the truth subjected to serious intellectual criticism.

For matters to improve, Joe Friday science, freed from agendas, has to return to the center of the investigation of global warming. How mankind responds to those facts, once discovered, is a legitimate topic for political controversy and debate. Trying to establish what they are should not be. If Michael Crichton can push thinking even a little way in this direction, he will have written a very good book indeed.