first published in weblog eighty five on Sunday 26th March 2006
I spent a hundred minutes on the phone with my daughter in the evening which must be my longest ever phone call to her. She reckons I am wasting my time trying to wheedle out the facts behind global warming.
I first did some work on this at the end of 2004 with a view to giving Fourth World Review a review of Michael Crichton’s State of Fear. However Crichton’s line about the falsification of the environmentalists’ case...and the convincing evidence he brought to bear in support of his view...meant that I needed to do more delving before publishing a controversial review.
I also hoped that a colleague would read State of Fear and give me some moral support but that has not yet happened.
Anyway to cut a long story short I am now convinced that my work got lost in one of my dongle and computer collapses so I have been recreating everything from an old draft in hard copy and some scribbled notes.
In an interview with the BBC World Service’s The Ticket programme. Michael Crichton explained that he began to look into the subject of global warming after reading an article and feeling it didn't make very much sense.
"I finally concluded that the difficulty that was occurring on this page was that the author wanted to say something he wasn't allowed to say - and what he wanted to say was that global warming wasn't real." the author recalls on. I thought, 'that's absurd, isn't it'?"
According to Crichton, the evidence from temperature records wasn't anywhere near as impressive as he thought it would be. The data appeared to show that global temperatures had risen three tenths of a degree in the last 30 years. But for the 30 previous years, temperatures had declined while the amount of carbon dioxide being released was increasing. "I thought why does the 30 years of decline not count, but the 30 years of increasing temperatures do count as demonstrating this influence of carbon dioxide?"
This then caused him to wonder why people were so concerned about the last 30 years. "I was extremely disappointed in the answer," he said. "They do computer simulations and conclude that global warming is of human origin. The difficulty that I have with that is that I simply don't believe computer simulations."
State of Fear is published by HarperCollins. It describes how the head of an environmental group initiates terrorist acts to focus attention on global warming. The public is so alarmed at what they see that they are driven to donate funds to the organisation.
Like many of Charles Dicken's novels, State Of Fear is a work of fiction that uses facts. The simplest version of Crichton’s argument is that a lawsuit filed now on global warming could not be won. There would not be enough evidence to take it to court.
The idea that carbon dioxide emissions are a significant factor in global warming is the basis for the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty the government of George W. Bush refused to ratify. Crichton said that his own agenda came from what he believed to be the facts.
“Almost every aspect of environmental thought has attached to it a political tag.I think that's madness. There’s only one position, and that is the position that the data leads you to. People say to me, 'now you're agreeing with President Bush'. I do, but only by accident. I'm not interested in what Bush thinks; I'm interested in what the data says."
Michael Crichton died of cancer on 5th November 2008 at the age of 66 [Editor]
