December 2004

Review of “State of Fear” by Michael Crichton
(HarperCollins, 603 pages, $27.95),

Michael Crichton — Dr Michael Crichton MD, to be precise – is of course well known for his techno-thrillers “The Andromeda Strain” and “Jurassic Park,” plus more than a dozen other novels and non-fiction works. “State of Fear” is a little different. While constructed as a novel, it is also a guide to environmental issues and its advocates, principally the problem of climate change. It carries a message about Global Warming and will certainly have an important impact on the ongoing policy debate.

The message conveyed is two-fold:

**The scientific evidence does not support Global Warming fears — or even the occurrence of a significant warming trend.

**The environmental movement – and its well-paid leadership – has jumped on the GW bandwagon because that’s where the money is. The book mirrors real-life environmental activists, says Ronald Bailey, Reason magazine’s science correspondent, in his book review for the Wall Street Journal (Dec. 10, 2004).

The scientific evidence is well presented with numerous graphs and references, but more can be said. The climate has never been constant — always either warming or cooling on all time scales (year-to year, decadal, millennial, and over millions of years) -independent of any human influence. While the observed pre-1940 warming is real and mostly natural (a recovery from the preceding Little Ice Age that terminated around 1850), the cooling from 1940 to 1975 is certainly not a greenhouse effect. The warming data reported during the past 25 years from surface stations (almost all of them on land) are likely contaminated by urban effects; we don’t see such warming in the atmospheric record of weather balloons or from weather satellites that cover the whole globe (including the 70% of oceans) on a regular basis. The most we can assign to human greenhouse effects would lead to a temperature rise by 2100 of a measly 0.8 degrees C.

[The so-called scientific consensus claims that if climate is currently warming at 0.08 degC per decade, then temperatures will “increase between 4 degrees F and 10 degrees F by the end of this century” — with all sorts of dire consequences. This remarkable demonstration of poor arithmetic assumes further that all of the current increase is due to human influences rather than natural ones — and also ignores the fact that greenhouse theory predicts a less-than-proportional temperature increase with increasing carbon dioxide. My own considered estimate for 2100 is about one degree F — based not on climate models but on the observational evidence.]

The not-so-hidden message of “State of Fear,” spelled out in copious footnotes, a lengthy afterword, an appendix and a 20-page bibliography, is an oddly reassuring one for a Crichton book, even if many scientists would disagree with it: There is no such thing as Global Warming, or not that anyone can prove or predict; and when it comes to climatic change, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, and the compromised and politicized experts who are in the business of purveying it.

For good measure, his protagonist, “MIT professor on special leave” John Kenner, also delivers a number of mini-lectures challenging some of the Green movement’s most cherished beliefs and arguing, for example, that DDT is safe enough to eat, that the giant sequoias are practically junk trees, and that the methane emitted by termites is potentially a greater hazard than the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide.

Throughout the novel and in the afterword, Crichton takes the opportunity to disparage a number of other widely held fears. Fossil-fuel shortage? Not to worry, we’ll come up with something. Population explosion? Nope, birth rates are coming down. Cancer from power lines? Please, you’ve got to be kidding.

Media reports I have seen (ABC, CNN, BBC) all emphasize the fact that the book is fiction, implying that readers should not believe the science either. But this would be a mistake. All scientific claims are backed by footnoted references to articles in science journals – certainly an unusual feature for a novel.

In fact, there is much more evidence backing Crichton’s message. Not only is the current warming well below even the lowest limits given by the IPCC, the UN-appointed climate science panel, but the IPCC claim (in its 2001 report) that the 20th century was the warmest in 1000 years has turned out to be complete fiction — based on mishandled data and faulty methodology.

The key is whether we can believe the climate predictions of the elaborate computer models quoted by the IPCC. First, the predicted temperatures span a range of over 400 percent. Even worse, none of the models can “hindcast” the climate observations of the past century. Models show the atmosphere warming more rapidly than the surface; data show the opposite. Models show the Polar Regions warming most rapidly; again – no support from the data. [The Arctic “warming” reported in Nov 2004 by the inter-governmental Arctic Council has turned to come from a gerrymandered choice of the Arctic region to include areas that experienced strong warming; all previous publications show a cooling trend with max temperatures in the late 1930s.

As the book points out, many influences on the climate are so poorly known that they have not been included into the models – even though they could be important enough to change the sign of the outcome from warming to cooling. So, until the models are validated, it would be irresponsible to use them as a base far-reaching policy.

Crichton’s story starts out with a series of seemingly disconnected events in far-flung places: Paris, Malaysia, London, Tokyo, Vancouver, Iceland, etc, and mostly California — but gradually comes into focus as we discover that the National Environmental Resource Fund (NERF), a fictitious environmental organization, is planning a gigantic worldwide conspiracy: major catastrophes to simulate imagined impacts of a sudden climate change. In contrast to the notorious movie “The Day After Tomorrow,” these disasters are carefully engineered by eco-terrorists and not at all connected to any climate change.

But our heroes, led by John Kenner, manage to scotch the nefarious doings of NERF and its egomaniac chief, Nicholas Drake – but just barely. Drake and his minions want to surreptitiously trigger a series of natural disasters, including a supersize hurricane and a giant tsunami that would hit California with 60-foot waves; these disasters would be timed to coincide with NERF’s big media conference, thereby awakening the public to the dangers of climate change wrought by Global Warming.

In the process, Kenner and company survive all sorts of perils, from frostbite in Antarctica to death by multiple lightning strikes to captivity by cannibals in the South Pacific. It is an exciting story. I read it in essentially one sitting, broken only by a few hours of sleep.

“State of Fear” is on its way to becoming a bestseller and will be read by members of Congress (including, we hope, Senators McCain and Lieberman) and by politicians throughout the world (including, we hope, Britain’s science adviser Sir David King). Although the author displays no political agenda, his book will strengthen the position of President George Bush (and most of the US Senate) in turning down the Kyoto Protocol. This may account for the rather negative book review in the New York Times and the gnashing of teeth by environmental bloggers.

What then are Crichton’s agenda? Hugely successful and nearing retirement age, why would he want to stick his neck out instead of playing it safe? There are certain clues, many of which appear in his widely quoted Michelin Lecture at CalTech::
<http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote04.html>:

He disparages consensus science: If it’s consensus, it’s not science. He would have fun with a current controversy started by a Univ of Cal professor: In an article in Science, Naomi Orekes claims that there is a “complete scientific consensus” about Global Warming, based on a literature search she conducted. She was forced to admit, however, that she used the wrong key words in her search; but that did not stop her from later publishing an op-ed in the Washington Post (12/26/04) making the same outrageous claim.

I suspect that Michael Crichton is motivated by the same anger of so many of us who don’t want to see science misused for political purposes or just to gain grants from government and foundations. These are the sentiments that led to the founding of my organization, The Science and Environmental Policy Project. I was therefore pleased to see the great respect paid by Crichton to the late UCal professor Aaron Wildavsky, a founding director of SEPP.

Tellingly, the book points out that critics of the “consensus” and skeptics about Global Warming tend to be mainly retired academics, scientists who are no longer in the rat race for tenure, research grants, and career-building honors.

As Crichton states disarmingly (p.573): “Everybody has an agenda. Except me.” Well, almost. The hundreds of scientific skeptics who have signed the Heidelberg Appeal, Leipzig Declaration, and Oregon Petition share the same agenda as Crichton.
———————-

Atmospheric and space physicist S. Fred Singer is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia and serves as president of the non-profit Science & Environmental Policy Project .<www.sepp.org > He has held a number of academic posts and federal positions, including as Director of the US Weather Satellite Service and as Chief Scientist of the US Department of Transportation. He has received many civic and professional honors and holds degrees in Electrical Engineering and a D.Sc. from Ohio State and a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University. His most recent book is “Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Debate.”

Well grant the editorial staff at Nature this: They never are shy about printing really loosey-goosey stuff whenever the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) needs a boost or on the eve of another glitzy UN confab to discuss global climate change. Who can forget Natures 1996 gaffe timed in conjunction with the meeting in Geneva, Switzerland that gave rise to the Kyoto Protocol? Nature published a paper by various federal climatologists intended to demonstrate how upper-air data from 1963 through 1987 was in synch with gloom-and-doom generated by various climate models.

     As our long-time readers will recall, the researchers failed to use the complete temperature record a record that actually spanned 1957 through 1995. Once the long-term record was plugged in (sometime after the conference) all correspondence between the climate model results and climate reality evaporated. It turns out 1963 (six years after the starting point of the available data) was very cold thanks to eruption of Agung, a very large volcano. And it hardly was a coincidence that 1987 (a point eight years shy of the available records end) was unusually warm because of an El Nio event. The use of a foreshortened record of course results in a projection of robust global warming whereas the overall record shows no dramatic trend.
   
  But that was then and this is now a time when things really are political.
   
  British Prime Minister Tony Blair shortly will assume a years presidency of the G-8. Hes already spoken of his two top priorities: global warming and terrorism. Is that really the order of precedence? It seems to be. Blairs science advisor, Sir David King, is hopscotching the world and telling anyone who will listen that global warming is a far greater threat than international terrorism.

     Its no surprise, then, that Nature is willing to oblige Kings political agenda and publish yet another were-all-gonna-die story pegged to Europes 2003 summer heat waves, citing them as evidence that such a thing can be expected to happen every other year by mid-century, according to researcher Peter Stott.

     And how might Stott know this? A climate model tells him so, of course a climate model that factors in a 0.83 percent per year increase in the atmospheres carbon dioxide concentration. This is an intriguing assumption in light of the fact the actual increase was 0.39 percent in the 1970s, 0.45 percent in the 1980s, and 0.42 percent during the 1990s. The last three decades, in other words, average something like half what the climate model (and Stott) assumes.

     Climate models largely are linear with respect to the warming they project related to increasing carbon dioxide. As a consequence, the model that is the basis for this particular Nature article over-predicts warming during the next several decades by the same 50 percent! It cant help but to do so.

     We want to be clear about this. Were not claiming that the concentration of CO2 wont rise during the next fifty years. Thats the trend, after all. But assuming that it already is happening at a pace that will result in a 0.83 percent per year average increase for the next 50 years simply has no basis in fact, which should in and of itself invalidate the published result. This becomes especially true when one realizes that the time that it takes a carbon dioxide increment to fully express itself in terms of increased surface temperature is several decades (at least). In other words, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, today, will have more influence on surface temperature in 2050 than will the atmospheric concentration in 2025.

     CO2andClimate Alert senior editor Patrick J. Michaels confronted Myles Allen (listed as third author of the new Nature article) with this climatologic reality when they appeared together live on BBC-TV. Allens defense? They use the wrong number because, he says, thats the number the UN uses and it is a respected scenario. Later, under the glare of the studio lights, Allen admitted that if one were to tune their model with a realistic CO2 rise instead of their looney 0.83 percent scenario, the result would be exactly the amount of warming Michaels has projected for years a mere three-quarters of a degree rise per half-century.

     So which do you trust, reality or a made-up scenario?

     What is particularly galling about Stotts and Allens paper is its use of blatant political polemics masquerading as science. Nature routinely requires a first paragraph intended to function much as an abstract of a science paper, an opening paragraph distilling the relevant research findings into something that people who are too busy to read the details can quickly grasp. In other words, the opening paragraph (abstract) is supposed to reflect the research papers content. Consider, then, the first sentence in this particular articles first paragraph, The Summer of 2003 was probably the hottest in Europe since at least A.D. 1500, and unusually large numbers of heat-related deaths were reported in France, Germany and Italy.
 
    If death were the key word used to search the four-page article for additional relevant detail, what would the reader find? Nothing. Not one occurrence. A better teaser for Stotts article might have been, Sir David King, Prime Minister Tony Blairs science advisor, wants you to believe global warming is a greater threat than international terrorism, so consider this: The summer of 2003 was probably the hottest in Europe since at least A.D. 1500, and unusually large numbers of heat-related deaths were reported in France, Germany and Italy.

     In greater service to Sir David, Stott et al. go on to write: it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that potentially dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system is already under way. Well give Stott and his co-authors this much credit, they didnt go on to write, and as the climate warms, people are so stupid that they will choose to slowly fry and expire, rather than adapt to this gradual change (although the implication is there). Writing something like that would have been exceedingly absurd because that hypothesis has been tested. The results were reported by the International Journal of Biometeorology in what was awarded climate paper of the year by the Association of American Geographers. What that prize-winning research found was that, as urban climates slowly warmed for causes not related to global warming, heat-related deaths became more infrequent. In fact, in some cities, such deaths could no longer be statistically located. Yet Stott et al., brandish the future prospect of hundreds of thousands of heat-related deaths in front of Tony Blair and cant bring themselves to cite an article you can read more about at www.co2andclimate.org/wca/2003/wca_2bpf.html.

References
Stott, P.A., Stone, D.A., Allen, M.R., 2004. Human contribution to the European heatwave of 2003. Nature, 432, 610-614.

Davis, R.E., Knappenberger, P.C., Novicoff, W.M., Michaels, P.J., 2003. Decadal changes in summer mortality in U.S. cities. International Journal of Biometeorology, 47, 166-175.

This year’s most politically incorrect book–and also the one likely to have the biggest impact on public opinion–is not by HUMAN EVENTS’ Ann Coulter. Nor, surprisingly, is it by any other prominent conservative writer or talker. It’s Michael Crichton’s new novel, State of Fear.

When I first thumbed through my copy, I was worried that this time Crichton had gone too far in weighing down his plot with complex scientific information. That the characters spent too much time in long didactic discourses.

Happily, this first impression was wrong. Crichton works his usual magic, deftly weaving loads of technical detail, including footnotes, graphs, and charts, into a fast-paced adventure. His tens of millions of devoted readers will not be disappointed. State of Fear is a page turner.

But this review is not aimed at Crichton’s fans, but at conservatives who don’t usually read sex-and-violence-packed techno-thrillers. My advice to fellow conservatives is: make an exception. Read State of Fear.

What makes State of Fear thoroughly objectionable to liberal establishment orthodoxy is that Crichton has cast as his villains leaders of the modern environmental movement. And to top that, the scam that environmentalists are trying to peddle is global warming alarmism.

Environmentalists who have spent thirty years convincing the public that their motives are pure are going to be outraged. They will complain that the portrayal of Nicholas Drake, president of the National Environmental Resource Fund, is a reprehensible caricature of real environmentalists. True, but it does make a change from the genre’s usual assortment of slimy corporate bad guys and their crude right-wing politician stooges who have no regrets about destroying the planet if only they can make a buck out of it.

Crichton doesn’t hint that environmental leaders are in it for the money and the power. He hits us over the head with it. In one hilarious passage, Drake is caught on a surveillance tape explaining to his PR chief what’s wrong with global warming:

“I hate global warming,” Drake said, almost shouting. “…It’s a (expletive deleted) disaster.”

“It’s been established,” Henley said calmly. “Over many years. It’s what we have to work with.”

“To work with? But it doesn’t work,” Drake said. “That’s my point. You can’t raise a dime with it, especially in winter. Every time it snows people forget all about global warming…. They’re trudging through the snow, hoping for a little global warming. It’s not like pollution, John. Pollution worked. It still works. Pollution scares the (expletive deleted) out of people. You tell ’em they’ll get cancer, and the money rolls in.” (page 295)

Mr. Ebell is director of global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

In response to the environmental experts busily creating links between the recent tsunami and global warming, Dr. Pat Michaels (VA state climatologist, author, UVA and Cato scholar) made the following announcement:

“Anyone who has the moral audacity to blame thousands of deaths caused by the Indian Ocean tsunamis on global warming is in grave contravention of well- known facts about changes in sea level in that region. Unfortunately, it is another ‘Predictable Distortion’ of global warming, similar to dozens documented in my recent book.

Topex-Poseidon satellite data published in 2001 in Science Magazine by Cabanes et al. show that the region where the tsunamis were most devastating has, in general, experienced a recent decline in sea level. When extended back 50 years, by matching satellite data with submarine measurements, the region shows a rise averaging about 0.35 inches per decade, for a fifty-year total of 1.75 inches. This is typical of global rates of sea-level change that have been constant for centuries, even millennia, as the planetary surface has warmed, cooled, and warmed.

The highest estimate for the recent tsunami currently stands at 35 feet, or 24,000% higher than the secular rise in sea level in the region in the last half-century. Additionally, the long-term record of sea level changes for Bombay was published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1995. It shows a net decline in sea level in the last 50 years.

In his new book, State of Fear, Michael Crichton repeatedly demonstrates that global warming ambulance-chasers often assume things to be true that simply are not. The book centers around a lawsuit by pacific islanders because of sea level rise; their case falls apart when the facts disclose that sea levels were actually falling in the region in question. Life imitates fiction. Michael Crichton should sue environmentalists who blame the massive death toll from the Indian Ocean’s tragic tsunamis on sea level rise for plagiarism.”

References:

Cabanes, C., et al. Sea level rise during the past 40 years determined from satellite and in situ observations. Science, Vol 294, 840-42 (2001).

United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 1995: Climate Change 1995. Cambridge Press. Data on page 367.

Dr. Michaels is a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and visiting scientist with the Marshall Institute in Washington, D.C. He is a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and was program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. He holds A.B. and S.M. degrees in biological sciences and plant ecology from the University of Chicago, and he received a Ph.D. in ecological climatology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1979. Michaels is a contributing author and reviewer of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. His writing has been published in the major scientific journals, including Climate Research, Climatic Change, Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Climate, Nature, and Science, as well as in popular serials such as the Washington Post, Washington Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Houston Chronicle, and Journal of Commerce. He has appeared on ABC, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” PBS, Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, BBC and Voice of America. According to Nature magazine, Pat Michaels may be the most popular lecturer in the nation on the subject of global warming.

To schedule an interview with Dr. Michaels, please contact Audrey Mullen at 202-861-5677 or 202-270-2772.