Living in a "State of Fear"

Ronald Bailey, in today's WSJ, has a good piece (A Chilling Tale) reviewing Michael Crichton's new book, State of Fear:

"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.

In case your Sunday paper doesn't include the suppliment, Parade Magazine, or you happened to miss it when it came out on December 5th, 2004, they previewed Crichton's book in the cover article, Let's Stop Scaring Ourselves. It's a good article. Check it out.

In the 1970's, we were about to be engulfed in an ice age. Now, they say the polar ice caps are melting. Whatever the imminent fear du jour happens to be, they are discovered, philosophically cultivated and broadly promoted for one reason...to extract money from one group so that another group will be enriched, whether it is on a local level or national level. The Kyoto protocol comes to mind.

Crichton can't be accused by Global Warming advocates of being an unenlightened oaf even though he doesn't parrot their politically correct agenda. He's a graduate of Harvard Medical School for starters. Much more about Michael Crichton is available at his website.