Book Review: The State of Fear by Michael Crichton
I was in eighth grade when I first read Jurassic Park, probably Crichtons best-known novel. This was just before the book became such a huge sensation, (or at least, I had never heard of it before a friend lent it to me. Weeks later, everyone seemed to be talking about it.) I really liked it, and quickly moved on to read almost everything else Mr. Crichton had written at that time. I have read most of his novels since then as well.
For me, Crichtons writing has always been about the ideas, not about the characters, or even really the plots for that matter. When I read his last novel, Prey, I was fascinated by the concept of rouge nanobot clouds and by the unexpected interactions they had with other living systems. I can name a dozen interesting scenes and events from that book, but I couldnt tell you the name of even one of the characters.
In general, I tend to prefer character-based stories, but for the most part, Crichtons concepts and ideas have been sufficiently interesting to hold my attention through cardboard heroes and one-note eccentrics. Hmm, even as I write that, I wonder if that is too harsh an assessment of his characters. Harsh perhaps, but not inaccurate, his characters arent awful, they just primarily exist in order to facilitate the plot, which is the real point. As such, we dont get much of a sense of their lives outside the main story. Characters tend to be all bad or all good with one eccentric idiosyncrasy each.
State of Fear continues this pattern on both counts. The characters and main plot are nothing special. The ideas are pretty darn interesting, whether you agree with them or not. And believe me, this one will divide people.
You see, the basic premise is that global warming isn't real, or at least, it is not known to be real. Instead, entrenched environmental groups, desperate to increase fund-raising, have essentially invented the "crisis" of global warming from sketchy data, in order to scare people into giving money. He describes how they shifted the emphasis from "global warming'" to "abrupt climate change" because global warming was hard to sell during ice storms and blizzards.
Crichton provides dozens of footnotes and graphs from actual scientific references in an attempt to back all this up. This is the part of the book that really kept me interested. Now, I'm definitely not following him quite as far as he wants me to go. The book's main plot follows the attempt to stop a (fictional) environmental activist group from artificially causing natural disasters that can be then blamed on global warming. Since the entire premise is that they are faking it in order to increase fundraising, the millions they are apparently spending on this effort seems a bit counter-productive when there are so many genuine natural disasters around. Likewise, I don't think that the high ups in the big environmental groups are really just pretending to believe in global warming when they really know better.
That said, Crichton makes some very interesting points. In the many footnotes (and a HUGE bibliography) he points out a fair amount of scientific data that seems to contradict many of the claims made about global warming. He discusses the urban heat island effect and how temperature data may not be sufficiently correcting for it. He discusses the difficulty in providing reliable sea level data. But his best point is about the incredible complexity involved in managing even small, localized ecosystems.
He elaborates his feelings in the author's notes. It is not that he knows global warming is not real, he says. It is just that the environmental activists do not know that it is. In some ways, the way scientific data is interpreted is very similar to the recent debacle involving "bad intelligence" regarding the Iraq war. There is so much data out there that there is no way for any one person to make sense of all of it. There is no option but to select some and ignore others, hopefully selecting the best and ignoring the worst.
But how do we know which is which? If someone believes global warming is happening, they are more inclined to believe the data that suggests that. If someone believes it is not happening, they are more likely to believe the other data. As a result, both groups feel that they have the science on their side, and the conversation gets shrill and angry very quickly.
What do I think? Well I come down relatively close to what Crichton says in his author's notes, as opposed to where his fictional proxy in the novel says. It seems to me that there is an awful lot of data that can be interpreted in any number of different ways. In addition, computer models have not so far been able to predict much of anything over the long term, so using those to make a point essentially amounts to guesswork. Informed guesswork, perhaps, but still not proof. Is global warming happening? Might be. Will that be a bad thing or a good thing? Um, well, probably it will be good for some people and bad for other people. Is that true of everything that ever happens anywhere? Yes.
One of the points Crichton makes rather effectively is that the myth of “the balance of nature” is really pretty silly, at least in the way it is often used in discussions. It implies some theoretical utopian equilibrium where everything is fine and it is only when man comes in and screws everything up that ecosystems change, and always for the worse.
Now, I'm into Biology. I studied it some in school, and I've always been interested in it, though I am by no means an expert. Still, I know enough to know that nature changes all the time, and more often than not, our attempts to "preserve" a specific ecosystem are like trying to hold water in a sieve. Consider, for example, forest fires. We want to preserve old growth forests, so we put out forest fires before they get too big. But we forget that a lot of those very trees we are trying to save need forest fires in order to reproduce! In addition, never having fires come through results in thick, choked-off forests instead of more open areas. That's good for some species, and bad for others. History is filled with attempts to preserve a specific balance and screwing it up. Not enough wolves in an area, lets bring in more. But now they're eating too many of the elk? Now we temporarily legalize wolf bounties so the elk can recover, but the population boom of elk means that they eat all the bark off of a certain kind of tree, making it useless for beaver dams. It goes on and on.
Let me perfectly clear here. I'm not an anti-environmentalist. I believe in pollution controls and wilderness areas and attempts, imperfect as they may be, at managing wildlife in order to prevent extinctions. All of this is very important, and I would never want to suggest otherwise. Yet sometimes, environmental regulations can get really silly, and ludicrously expensive. When someone owns a huge piece of land, but they are told they can't build anything on it ever because an endangered butterfly might live there, that's getting ridiculous.
Likewise, some pollution controls can go way beyond any pretense of being cost-effective. Because I don't have specific numbers right in front of me, let me just use a hypothetical here. Say a new regulation is passed that will cut down on madeupium emissions from industry. It is expected to save 20 lives a year, at a cost of $40 million dollars a year. That breaks down to $2 million per person, and this is where you start hearing things like: "How can we put a price on human life?" and "If we save just one person, it will be worth it." Those things are hard to dispute, because they are emotional arguments, but think of this: How many more lives could that $40 Million save if it were devoted to providing food and safe drinking water to poverty-stricken third-world countries. What if it was devoted to AIDS research? Renewable energy research?
Now, I know it's not a zero-sum game. The money being spent by industry in order to comply with various regulations would not otherwise be going directly to drought relief or fuel-cell research. The point is simply that any action, no matter how noble the intention, is going to have all sorts of ramifications. We make DDT illegal because it is harming wildlife. But removing the best available tool for mosquito control has made the global death rate from Malaria skyrocket. We made CFC's illegal to save the ozone layer, but without them, refrigerants are more expensive, so fewer people around the world can afford them, and more people die from malnutrition and food poisoning. Does that mean we should have left DDT and CFC's legal? Not necessarily. I'm just pointing out that there are side effects to everything we do, and even if the intent of a regulation is a positive thing, we have to consider what we are willing to sacrifice for it, and it's not just money in our pockets. There can be global consequences, such as the ones I've just mentioned.
Basically, I'm just saying that when we consider new environmental regulations, we need to consider all the possible implications and decide if it is really cost-effective, or whether there might be a better way to distribute those particular resources.
To bring this back to global warming... I'm concerned about it. Okay? But I'm not convinced that we should cripple our economy (leaving that much less money to spend in other areas, like medical research or disaster relief) in order to pass the Kyoto protocol when it's A) not proven that global warming is happening at all, B) not clear that, even if it is happening, that the protocol will have the desired impact, and C) not obvious that global warming would even be a necessarily bad thing. To be sure, bad for some people, but good for others.
*sigh* I'm probably sounding like an anti-environmentalist again. This is a frustrating issue for me, because it seems silly to spend trillions of dollars on something that may or may not have any impact at all, when that money could be used to do so much real good in other, proven ways. Well, all I can say at this point is that I'm still keeping my eyes open on the current research and data. Just consider this: when you think to yourself that there is so much more data supporting the theory of global warming than opposing it, consider how you are getting that information. Which sells more papers? Imminent global catastrophes, or reports that we don't really know what's happening and may not ever know until it has already happened? What kind of fundraiser gets more cash? The one with dire warnings about impending doom or the ones where they announce that more research is needed? Just keep that in mind.
Okay, enough rambling and ranting. This always happens to me. I come off as sounding like I think global warming is not happening, just because I am not convinced that it is happening. The truth is, I just don't know, and you know what? I don't think anybody does. The world is just too complex, a fact that I find simultaneously wonderful and terrifying.
Name:Christiana Ellis
Name:Mike Meitín
