Facing our fears: after much research, bestselling author Michael Crichton concluded that global warming is a fraud. His persuasive conclusions form the basis of his new novel, State of Fear.

State of Fear, by Michael Crichton, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004, 603 pages, hardcover.

Michael Crichton is no stranger to the bestseller list. The father of the techno-thriller novel, he has scored numerous hits with such titles as Sphere, Timeline, The Andromeda Strain, and Jurassic Park. His works are proven attractions for Hollywood with a number of novels recast as blockbuster feature films. The most successful, Jurassic Park, holds the tenth spot all-time at the U.S. box office. Crichton's success even stretches to television, where his prime time drama ER has long been a viewer favorite.

Crichton's newest book, State of Fear, is another bestseller. Unlike his previous bestsellers, though, this book is generating more than its share of notoriety and controversy. In fact, in interviews the author has suggested that he could not have written this book earlier in his life without damaging his career.

What could be so controversial that even Michael Crichton could fear its ability to harm his career? The answer is global warming. Crichton has been increasingly critical of the global warming orthodoxy in recent years, and with State of Fear he has taken his criticisms and packaged them in such a way that they can be delivered to a wide, general audience.

Environmental Villains

Like other Crichton fare, State of Fear is a techno-thriller based on projecting the lines of technological development into the near future. And Crichton is good at this. Criticism that he is a scientific non-specialist and not qualified to discuss matters like global warming may hold some water, but not very much. He is, admittedly, not a climate scientist. But he is no stranger to science. Crichton was trained as a physician at Harvard and was a visiting anthropology lecturer at Cambridge when only 22 years old. There really is no legitimate way to doubt his scientific comprehension and sophistication.

As a novelist, Crichton weaves scientific and technical issues into his prose. In State of Fear, he crafts a plot in which desperate and well-financed environmentalists employ the latest in sophisticated gadgetry to initiate a series of environmental catastrophes that, they hope, they can attribute to runaway global warming. The bad guys even stoop, early in the book, to seducing and murdering a scientist. The episode is a bit racy. Consequently, those who find such details disquieting may wish to avoid this book.

Still, those intrigued by the author's take on global warming may wish to take the time to read it. Crichton believes that the global warming thesis is politically motivated, much as the dark "science" of eugenics was politically promoted in the U.S. and abroad in the first half of the 20th century. State of Fear is designed as a package to contain his criticisms and deliver them to the many millions of readers who devour his books.

The protagonists in the book are a rag-tag team of global warming doubters centered on one scientist turned anti-terror hero. Assisting him is a Nepalese military expert serving as his trustworthy aide, a disillusioned billionaire philanthropist and his secretary, and a pair of lawyers who gradually become aware that their environmentalist clients have wildly misled them. This group gives voice to Crichton's criticisms of the global warming thesis.

Global Warming Skeptics

MIT professor turned anti-terror investigator John Kenner and his aide Sanjong Thapa are the characters that Crichton frequently uses to give voice to his criticisms of global warming. One typical claim made by global warming theorists holds that ice sheets across the globe are melting. In particular, there are often worries that the massive quantities of ice in the Antarctic are melting. But, as Crichton points out using the character Kenner as his mouthpiece, the facts are quite different than the public perception. "The data show," Crichton has Kenner say, "that one relatively small area called the Antarctic Peninsula is melting and calving huge icebergs. That's what gets reported year after year. But the continent as a whole is getting colder, and the ice is getting thicker."

The author, though, is not satisfied with simply making such statements. He typically follows them with citations from scholarly sources. For instance, he supports his claim that the Antarctic is cooling by citing no less than nine recent studies. In addition, the book is packed with charts more befitting a serious non-fiction examination of the issue than a techno-thriller novel. These are used to show temperature variability for regions around the world. Some charts show a small warming, such as those plotting temperature trends for Rome and Kamenskoe, Siberia. Others, like those for Paris, Stuttgart, and Navacerrada in Spain, show a gradual decrease in temperature over time.

Crichton doesn't stop at the poles, but covers a variety of other global warming issues as well. These include:

* The urban "heat island" effect. Crichton has one of his characters comment on the fact that much of the change in surface temperature reading over the years can be attributed to heat generated by urbanization: "As I said before, several recent studies suggest the reduction for urban bias has, in fact, been too small. At least one study suggests that half of the observed temperature comes from land use alone. If that's true, then global warming in the past century is less than three tenths of a degree. Not exactly a crisis."

* Upper atmosphere versus ground-level warming. One of Crichton's characters notes: "The theory of global warming predicts that the upper atmosphere will warm from trapped heat, .just like a greenhouse. The surface of the Earth warms later. But since 1979 we've had orbiting satellites that can continuously measure the atmosphere five miles up. They show that the upper atmosphere is warming much less than the ground is."

* Sea levels. Using dialogue between a radical environmentalist and a global warming skeptic, Crichton points out that sea levels have been rising for "the last 6,000 years, ever since the start of the Holocene. Sea level has been rising at the rate of ten to twenty centimeters--that's four to eight inches--every hundred years." For this, as for most of the other contentious facts he cites, the author provides a footnote.

A Perpetual State of Fear

For Crichton, then, global warming is a myth, and a dangerous one at that. But State of Fear is not solely about exposing the lies and bad science behind global warming. Instead, it's about exposing the time-honored practice of manipulating public opinion for political gain by keeping the populace in a permanent state of fear.

In what is quite possibly the most interesting and original section of the book, Crichton uses the character of a renegade college professor to detail the notion of how a politically managed "ecology of thought" can lead to a state of fear. Speaking again through his characters, Crichton argues that a major initiative aimed at instilling fear in the general population got off the ground in 1989. "There was a major shift in the fall of 1989," alleges Crichton character Norman Hoffman. "Before that time, the media did not make excessive use of terms such as crisis, catastrophe, cataclysm, plague, or disaster.... The word catastrophe was used five times more often in 1995 than it was in 1985. Its use doubled again by the year 2000. And the stories changed, too. There was a heightened emphasis on fear, worry, danger, uncertainty, panic."

The increased use of such terminology and the increased frequency of sensationalistic predictions of near-term doom are clearly based in fact. Who can forget, for example, in the run-up to the year 2000 the incredible hysteria and fear about the Y2K bug? Since then, we've had increasing fears about terrorism, fears about dirty nukes, fears about super volcanoes in Yellowstone National Park, and, as Crichton argues, the pervasive fear of global warming. To what end? "I am leading to the notion of social control," Crichton's Professor Hoffman says. "To the requirement of every sovereign state to exert control over the behavior of its citizens, to keep them orderly and reasonably docile. To keep them driving on the right side of the road--or the left, as the case may be. To keep them paying taxes. And of course, we know that social control is best managed through fear."

Lest anyone dismiss the fictional Professor Hoffman's musings as just that, fiction, at the end of the book Crichton includes in an appendix an interesting review of the eugenics movement that, during the first half of the 20th century, did so much to destroy the sanctity of human life. That horrific movement, the author reminds readers, bears eerie similarities to the current global warming movement. "Imagine that there is a new scientific theory that warns of an impending crisis, and points to a way out," Crichton writes. "This theory quickly draws support from leading scientists, politicians, and celebrities around the world. Research is funded by distinguished philanthropies and carried out at prestigious universities. The crisis is reported fraudulently in the media. The science is taught in college and high school classrooms."

This sounds like it could be global warming. But it really was eugenics, a movement that held that inferior people threatened to flood the gene pool with their inferior genes and that they should, at the least, be prevented from breeding. At most, they should be eliminated altogether. An unholy alliance of pseudoscience and politics led to fears of a eugenics crisis. The fears created fertile ground for dangerous (and in the case of eugenics, genocidal) political innovation. In its design, Crichton notes, the global warming scare is not so different from the earlier eugenics nightmare.

State of Fear is not, in the end, a perfect book. Its story line is plainly superficial and serves in the main only as the delivery vehicle for Crichton's concerns about global warming alarmism. It is a valuable and noteworthy book, nevertheless. Due to its sheer market penetration and Crichton's robust popularity as a novelist, it will almost certainly lead a vast number of readers to question, finally, the lies and myths perpetuated by the global warming cartel.