State of Fear Exposes Truth of Deception

Will post my comments tomorrow, after sleeping on the Crichton thought-provoking novel, State of Fear, and dreaming of a world where everybody backed up their opinions so meticulously.

Meantime

Ron Bailey's review in the Wall Street Journal:

A Chilling Tale

By RONALD BAILEY
December 10, 2004; Page W1

We

know that nature can kill. What most people don't know is that stupid ideas about nature can kill, too.

In "State of Fear" (HarperCollins, 603 pages, $27.95), Michael Crichton delivers a lightning-paced technopolitical thriller that turns on a controversial notion: All that talk we've been hearing about global warming -- you know, polar ice caps melting, weather systems sent into calamitous confusion, beach weather lingering well into January -- might be at best misguided, at worst dead wrong. Think "The Da Vinci Code" with real facts, violent storms and a different kind of faith altogether...

Twists and Turns

"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.

For example, the climate computer models relied upon by global-warming proponents like Drake -- or, in real life, by John Adams (NRDC), Carl Pope (Sierra Club), Kevin Knobloch (Union of Concerned Scientists) and John Passacantando (Greenpeace USA) -- predict that such warming will be strongest at the earth's poles, turning glaciers into floods and raising sea levels. In "State of Fear," Drake warns that Greenland's ice cap is melting and will push the sea level up by 20 feet. (As it happens, on Wednesday of this week Sir David King, Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser, testified with similar alarm before a British legislative committee, saying: "If the ice-sheets in Greenland melt, sea levels would rise 6.5 metres and London would be underwater.")

Yet as Mr. Crichton has his scientist Kenner correctly note, Greenland's ice cap is in no imminent danger of melting away. It is well established scientifically that average temperatures in Greenland and Iceland have been falling at the rather steep rate of 2.2 degrees Celsius per decade since 1987. As for temperatures in most of Antarctica, they have been falling for nearly 50 years, and ice there has been accumulating rather than melting. And those sea levels? Nils-Axel Mörner, a professor of geodynamics at Stockholm University, has been studying the low-lying atolls of the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean. He has found "a total absence of any recent sea level rise" and has instead found evidence of a fall in sea level in the past 20 years -- a fact that Mr. Crichton has the good instinct to report in the course of pushing his plot forward.

And what about the trend in actual global average temperatures, a question central to the debate in "State of Fear"? According to satellite data, since 1978 the planet has been warming up at a rate, per decade, of 0.08 degrees Celsius. Simple arithmetic reveals that, if the rate continues, the planet will warm by 0.8 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. That compares with an increase of 0.6 degrees Celsius during the 20th century. No catastrophe there. Indeed, Mr. Crichton has one of his characters note the costly uselessness of the supposedly heat-reducing Kyoto Protocols...

http://commonsblog.org/archives/000246.php

Crichton's State of Fear Book exposes faulty climate change arguments
January 19, 2005 | Tech Central Station By Kenneth Green, Reason

http://www.reason.org/airquality/

http://www.reason.org/commentaries/green_20050119.shtml

"Aliens Cause Global Warming"

A lecture by Michael Crichton California Institute of Technology
Pasadena, CA January 17, 2003

http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote04.html


Michael Crichton’s State of Confusion II: Return of the Science
December 15, 2004

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=76

http://www.friesian.com/crichton.htm


NIST tackles State of Fear, for real...

http://math.nist.gov/~BRust/pubs/Interface2005/PrePrint.pdf

Separating Fact from Fiction in Crichton's 'State of Fear'
Posted on: 03/21/2005

http://www.environmentaldefense.org/article.cfm?contentid=4371

Distort Reform
A review of the distorted science in Michael Crichton's State of Fear
By Gavin Schmidt
01 Feb 2005

http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2005/02/01/schmidt-fear/

Crichton Mad
A review of the distorted plot and politics in Michael Crichton's State of Fear
By David Roberts
01 Feb 2005

http://www.grist.org/advice/books/2005/02/01/roberts-fear/

Michael Crichton's "State of Fear"
Posted by David Roberts at 4:27 PM on 01 Feb 2005

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2005/2/1/162744/5081?source=daily

"Environmentalism as Religion"

by Michael Crichton
Commonwealth Club San Francisco, CA
September 15, 2003

http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speeches/speeches_quote05.html

Remember fiction is fiction, faction is faction, non-fiction is non-fiction... James Frey's memoir, isn't...

Monday, December 11, 2006
global warming gaining skeptics ? or !
http://netthetruthonline.blogspot.com/2006/12/global-warming-gaining-skeptics.html

For more information on this issue use the search feature on this site located at the top left corner

http://netthetruthonline.blogspot.com/search?q=global+warming