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| more on Global Warming and Michael Crichton's State of Fear | | Date Created: Jun 19, 2005, 11:28 PM |
 Here is an essay by Dr. Donald Miller, an academic cardiac surgeon, on Michael Crichton's State of Fear and the issues of global warming that includes some worthwhile links. The original can be found here. Miller is on LewRockwell.com along with other interesting essays.
I completely agree with Dr. Miller on Michael Crichton, his book, and the issue of global warming, but interestingly he buys into conspiracy and pseudoscience when it comes to mercury in vaccines and dental amalgams. One would think that if you can see the politicized science in global warming you ought to be able to see the pseudoscience in mercury poisoning. Both are examples of creating a state of fear.
Toro! Toro! Michael Crichton
...In State of Fear, a novel about ecoterrorism published on December 7, 2004, Michael Crichton addresses the science of climate change. This book has angered the environmental "politico-legal-media complex" (his term) because it raises doubts about global warming. Like a bull (Toro) in a bullring, proponents of human-caused global warming are charging after him. The New York Times’ reviewer calls State of Fear a "ham-handed" novel that is "half movie treatment, half ideological screed;" and he suggests that "Mr. Crichton" is seeking "to drum up publicity for himself by being provocative and contrarian." Regarding the climate science cited in the book, the reviewer says that it, like the book’s story, is also fiction. TheNew Yorker comments, "Blondes with lightning burns aside, State of Fear wants, weirdly enough, to be taken seriously." Slate calls him "right-leaning [and] contrarian" and the book a "political and hectoring screed." ("Contrarian" and "screed" are two terms that left liberals like to use to brand people and the articles and books they write that criticize their worldview.)
Americans learn in school and are told on television and in the print media, including in respected magazines like The National Geographic and Scientific American, that global warming threatens the planet.
...Authorities warn that the consequences of this human-caused global warming could be catastrophic.
...A better definition of global warming, however, which another character in the book gives, is this: "[It] is the theory that increased levels of carbon dioxide and certain other gases are causing an increase in the average temperature of the earth’s atmosphere because of the so-called ‘greenhouse effect.’" ...according to the theory of global warming, human activity is causing the Earth to warm.
...Michael Crichton has studied climatology with the eye and rigor of a well-trained doctor/scientist. Before State of Fear was published I had read a lecture he gave at Caltech, in January 2003, titled "Aliens Cause Global Warming." I was impressed with his grasp of this subject and also with his cogent observations on science in general. In this lecture he warns, as he does in the book, "once you abandon strict adherence to what science tells us… you [can] subvert science to political ends."
... His conclusion: There is no human-caused global warming.
He’s right.
Claims trumpeted by the media about how much warmer the planet is now compared with previous decades, centuries, and millennia are equally false.
...Policy makers and environmentalists claim that a "consensus of a very large group of scientists" agrees that greenhouse gas emissions are causing global warming. In his Caltech lecture, Dr. Crichton says, "I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels… In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results… Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough."
...Environmental activists view CO2 as a pollutant. If plants could talk, however, they would disagree. Like oxygen is for animals, CO2 is a plant’s lifeblood. CO2 levels 200 million years ago were 5 to 10 times higher than they are now (without mothers driving SUVs). The planet was greener, enabling dinosaurs to thrive. "Contrarians" can say, with good evidence to support it, that burning fossil fuels to raise atmospheric CO2 levels promotes healthy plant growth. Studies show that a 300-ppmv boost in CO2 above current levels (in climate-controlled greenhouses) increases the productivity of plants by 30 to 50 percent, as measured by rate of photosynthesis and biomass production. Orange trees produce twice as many oranges, each containing a 20 percent greater amount of vitamin C. Rather than cause catastrophic global warming, perhaps continued burning of fossil fuels will help forestall the onset of the next ice age.
Why do so many people (including those 1,500 scientists) believe in global warming? One reason, as one of the characters in State of Fear puts it, is that "all reality is media reality." People who get their information from watching television and reading the New York Times do not learn the true facts of the matter. Media reality says there is man-made global warming, which if not constrained will be catastrophic.
For some scientists their views on this subject can affect their livelihood. Government and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) award $2 billion in grants each year for climate research. These organizations expect the scientists they fund to support the idea that global warming is a problem. As Michael Crichton points out (in his Caltech lecture), we now live in an "anything-goes world where science – or non-science – is the hand maiden of questionable public policy… Evidentiary uncertainties are glossed over in the unseemly rush for an overarching policy, and for grants to support the policy by delivering findings that are desired by the patron."
There are two other reasons why people believe in human-caused global warming despite strong evidence against it. Global warming is like a religion. In "Distinguishing Reality from Fantasy, Truth from Propaganda," a lecture given to the Commonwealth Club in September 2003, Michael Crichton identifies environmentalism as "the religion of choice for urban atheists." Gaia, the living planet, is its Mother Goddess. In this religion’s canon, industrial civilization (to paraphrase Merlin Stone, author of When God Was a Woman) is acne on her face. Crichton notes how environmentalism mimics Judeo-Christian beliefs: "There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability." The Kyoto Protocol is it's articles of faith. What about the fact no change in satellite and balloon-measured temperatures has occurred over the last 25 years despite rising CO2 levels? No problem. Adherents of this religion ignore facts like this and recite their catechism of apocalyptic computer climate models.
Global warming also has ideological underpinnings. "Environmentalism is the last refuge of socialism," as one observer puts it. Although socialism may have failed as an economic model, many believe it can halt man-made global warming and, by this means, reform civilization. Constraining CO2 greenhouse gas emissions, as stipulated in the Kyoto Treaty, will require a kind of global governance that only a socialist state can provide – a totalitarian global bureaucracy with international government inspectors at one’s doorstep that closely regulates, prosecutes, and confiscates property of people and industries that make "greedy [CO2 producing] choices" (like driving SUVs). The apparatchiks of this movement – lawyers, bureaucrats, environmentalists, and media people – use scare tactics as part of a "global warming sales campaign" to promote their agenda and acquire influence. As Professor Norman Hoffman in State of Fear points out, fear is one of the best managers of social control in a state’s armamentarium.
... John Kenner in State of Fear says, "Enviros refuse to take into account the possible harm the policies they recommend can cause" (p. 488). David Brown’s answer to that is, "Human suffering is much less important than suffering of the planet" (he is the founder of Friends of the Earth). Because of their hostility to markets and self-directed human activity, environmental activists would rather there be mass starvation (of people in Africa) than have capitalists profit from preventing it by employing such "unnatural" measures as high-yield genetically engineered crops. (I recommend Paul Driessen’s Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Deathand Robert Bidinotto’s Death by Environmentalism for further reading on this subject, and also my article Advantages of Nuclear Power on why switching to wind and solar power won’t help.)
A real life John Kenner is Harvard professor Willie Soon. Like Dr. Kenner in the book, a professor from nearby MIT, Dr. Soon, tirelessly and without flinching, takes on the global warming establishment. He, in collaboration with fellow professor Sallie Baliunas and others, has identified the true cause of global warming (and cooling). The cause is variability in energy output from the sun. (Modelers take for granted that solar luminescence is constant in their computer climate models.) Sun spots, which reflect changes in solar magnetic field, deflect and modulate galactic cosmic rays – and cosmic rays affect the cloud cover of the earth and thus drive terrestrial climate. When sun spots occur frequently, its effect on cloud cover causes global temperature to rise. When they decrease, or are absent, global temperature falls. (Currently they are more frequent.)
...As one of the 483 reviewers of the book on Amazon.com writes, "He [Michael Crichton] is making a lot of people look ridiculous. He is Martin Luther, Salman Rushdie, and Andre Sakharov. He is smashing the established order and it will not be tolerated. The liberal inquisitors will do everything in their power to destroy him over this book, if only to attempt to discourage further truth telling by like-minded authors. That is reason enough for you to buy this book."
Toro! Toro! Michael Crichton.
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