State of Fear by Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton's latest novel created quite a stir among environmentalist groups when it was released last year. In the guise of a fictional story, Crichton unleashes a scathing condemnation of those who demand that mankind alter his lifestyle to forestall a threat (global warming) that has not even been proven to be caused by man, if it is indeed happening at all. The book's title, State of Fear, speaks to the alarmist and hyperbolic rhetoric some environmentalist groups use to raise money and effect social change.

As a narrative, State of Fear is nothing special, but as a good old-fashioned polemic, it is hugely successful. Crichton raises many interesting scientific objections to the conventional global warming theory; objections that you never hear amid the media drumbeat for the Kyoto treaty. I did not know, for example, that the ice caps of Greenland are actually growing, or that the interior of Antarctica is cooling, or that the world's mean temperature declined from 1940-1970 (when, according to greenhouse gas theory, it should have been rising), or that current world temperatures are just now returning to the levels of medieval times, or that the America of 2005 is no warmer than the America of the 1930s.

The plot takes a while to get going, and once it does, it is not particularly engrossing. The Earth Liberation Front (which is a real eco-terrorist organization) is plotting to artifically create natural disasters such as tsunamis, breaking ice shelfs, and freak lightning storms to coincide with a worldwide conference on the dangers of global warming. A globe-trotting intelligence analyst from MIT must stop the eco-terrorist cells before they can strike. Along the way, he must put up with mindless Hollywood actors and well-meaning environmentalist activists. And that's about it. The plot is secondary to Crichton's overall purpose of discrediting environmentalist conventional wisdom; although, I must say, his insights into the vicissitudes of the female mind are not be missed.

One of Crichton's strongest points is that global climate has never been static; the earth has been cooling and warming and changing for thousands of years. The only difference from today is that ancient man didn't have Greenpeace around to tell him how disastrous these climate changes would supposedly be. Global climate shifts are not unprecedented, but man's ability to measure them is. It is this increased awareness of climate fluctuations, not the fluctuations themselves, Crichton concludes, that is the main cause of the current global warming hysteria.

Crichton concludes State of Fear with an essay on why politicized science is so dangerous. He points to the now-discredited theory of eugenics, which held tremendous sway among the intellectual and political elites of the world during the early twentieth century. Back then, pseudo-science led to the suffering of untold millions. Who is to say it can't happen again?