Fresh Optimism
*
Greenhouse Warming Advocates Say:
"Nineteen ninety-nine was the most violent year in the modern history of weather. So was 1998. So was 1997. And 1996.... A nine-hundred-year-long cooling trend has been suddenly and decisively reversed in the past fifty years.... Scientists predicted that the Earth will shortly be warmer than it has been in millions of years. A climatological nightmare is upon us. It is almost certainly the most dangerous thing that has ever happened in our history."
"Climate extremes would trigger meteorological chaos—raging hurricanes such as we have never seen, capable of killing millions of people; uncommonly long, record-breaking heat waves; and profound drought that could drive Africa and the entire Indian subcontinent over the edge into mass starvation."
"From sweltering heat to rising sea levels, global warming's effects have already begun.... We know where most heat-trapping gases come from: power plants and vehicles. And we know how to limit their emissions."
"Such policies like cutting energy use by more than 50 percent can contribute powerfully to the material salvation of the planet from mankind's greed and indifference."
"No matter if the science of global warming is all phony ... climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world."
Reality-Based Skeptics Say:
"The study, appearing in the March 21 issue of the journal Science, analyzed ancient tree rings from 14 sites on three continents in the northern hemisphere and concluded that temperatures in an era known as the Medieval Warm Period some 800 to 1,000 years ago closely matched the warming trend of the 20th century."
"I want to encourage the committee to be suspicious of media reports in which weather extremes are given as proof of human-induced climate change. Weather extremes occur somewhere all the time. For example, in the year 2000 in the 48 coterminous states, the U.S. experienced the coldest combined November and December in 106 years.... The intensity and frequency of hurricanes have not increased. The intensity and frequency of tornados have not increased.... Droughts and wet spells have not statistically increased or decreased."
"Hurricanes, brutal cold fronts and heat waves, ice storms and tornadoes, cycles of flood and drought, and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are not unforeseeable interruptions of normality. Rather, these extremes are the way that the planet we live on does its business. Hurricanes, in some parts of the world, provide a third of the average annual rainfall. What we call "climate" is really an average of extremes of heat and cold, precipitation and drought.... [A]ll the evidence from paleoclimatology and geology suggests that over the long haul, the extremes we face will be substantially greater than even the strongest in our brief historical record."
"[T]he number of major [Chinese] floods averaged fewer than four per century in the warm period of the ninth through eleventh centuries, while the average number was more than double that figure in the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries of the Mini Ice Age."
We have a large faction of intensely interested persons who say the warming is man-made, and dangerous. They say it is driven by releases of greenhouse gases such as CO2 from power plants and autos, and methane from rice paddies and cattle herds. The activists tell us that modern society will destroy the planet; that unless we radically change human energy production and consumption, the globe will become too warm for farming and the survival of wild species. They warn that the polar ice caps could melt, raising sea levels and flooding many of the world's most important cities and farming regions.
However, they don't have much evidence to support their position—only (1) the fact that the Earth is warming, (2) a theory that doesn't explain the warming of the past 150 years very well, and (3) some unverified computer models. Moreover, their credibility is seriously weakened by the fact that many of them have long believed modern technology should be discarded whether the Earth is warming too fast or not at all.
Many scientists—though by no means all—agree that increased CO2emissions could be dangerous. However, polls of climate-qualified scientist show that many doubt the scary predictions of the global computer models. This book cites the work of many hundreds of researchers, authors, and coauthors whose work testifies to the 1,500-year cycle. There is no "scientific consensus," as global warming advocates often claim. Nor is consensus important to science. Galileo may have been the only man of his day who believed the Earth revolved around the sun, but he was right! Science is the process of developing theories and testing them against observations until they are proven true or false.
If we can find proof, not just that the Earth is warming, but that it is warming to dangerous levels due to human-emitted greenhouse gases, public policy will then have to evaluate such potential remedies as banning autos and air conditioners. So far, we have no such evidence.
If the warming is natural and unstoppable, then public policy must focus instead on adaptations—such as more efficient air conditioning and building dikes around low-lying areas like Bangladesh. We have the warming. Now we must ascertain its cause...
History, science, and our own instincts tell us that cold is more frightening than warmth. It is a psychological mystery why comfortable First World residents, armed for the first time in all of history's warmings with air conditioning, have chosen to fear "global warming."
Of course, the advocates of man-made warming have attempted to bolster a scientifically weak case with a number of essentially baseless scary scenarios...
More than a Million of the World's Wild Species Will Go Extinct in the Next Century
We know that species can adapt to abrupt global warming because the climate shifts in the 1,500-year cycle have often been abrupt. Moreover, the world's species have already survived at least six hundred such warmings and coolings in the past million years.
The major effect of global warming will be more biodiversity in our forests, as most trees, plants, birds, and animals extend their ranges. This is already happening. Some biologists claim that a further warming of 0.8 degrees Celsius will destroy thousands of species. However, the Earth warmed much more than that during the Holocene Climate Optimum, which occurred 8,000 to 5,000 years ago, and no known species were driven extinct by the temperature increase...
Why have humans chosen to panic about the planet returning to what is very probably the finest climate the planet has known in all its millions of years? Is it simply guilt because climate alarmists told us we humans were causing the change?
If so, then it becomes all the more important to check their evidence.
In the morning, in the night light, in the shadows before dawn, these moments with God prickling in the fabric of things, long after the sickness and melancholy which had blanketed him in those far-off days, when he had been on the orange concrete floor, either unconscious or on all fours, the fabric of things creaking and groaning in a shrill hallucinogenic shriek. What was it al about? How did he sink so low? Why were these random, rampant thoughts so consuming, when other souls went quietly about their days, their breathing animal flesh so soft, so unthreatening, so self contained.
These oddities, these peculiar spires, were all part of the infested thought disorder that had made him so vulnerable to take over. They were having lunch at the Maroubra Hotel one day with the crazy girl Karen, who had landed in Ian's lounge room for a month, and as he sipped his lemon squash and watched every other asshole on the planet enjoy a drink, a particularly evil looking person pulled up at the lights. He had Somoan tatoos all over him, the sweeping evil strokes, and his hair glistened black. His eyes, too, were black, set in a pale face.
We all looked at each other and laughed. Woh, wouldn't like to get in his way, I said. He's infested with entities, Karen said, you can see them. It seemed so patently true, he appeared completely demonic, that it was difficult to argue. You think? I asked. Certainly looks it. Of course, she said, isn't it obvious.
Her own life was not in order, she was no role model. She was out of a job, out of a house, out of a relationship, childless and scattered, and no one could pretend that everything was going well for Karen. I she an undercover agent? we asked. She's not like everybody else? No, Ian said, I've known her for ages. She was Kevin's girlfriend. Why anyone would put up with speed addled Kev, in his giant old mechanics shop covered with grease and full of old cars, was anybody's guess.
But these infestations were everywhere, through his life, through the days, through everything we ever waited for. Sadness came. Darkness. Compulsion. Nothing changed in the darkness of Vauxhall. The mornings would come and we would be desperate, hanging like dogs, the sweat building. The only thing that stood in the way of a solution was money, and our sometimes vast intellectual talents were put to evil purpose, time and time again. Rats in a maze, they went through the same arking patterns every day; wake up, find money, score.
It was dark and Dantesque, the scenario. There was nothing like Vauxhall in the middle of winter to amplify one's personal despair, to mirror the tragic destinies of that sad little gang. We were marching forward, but nothing ever stopped. The same thing would happen the next day, the same sweats, the same compulsions, the same urges, the same desperate search for money.
And then they would wait in that strange little alcove on the top floor of the Vauxhall Terrace, wait until the ladder was lowered down from the attic, and the deal was done. No one but the closest of allies were ever allowed up that ladder, where the scenes of degradation defied everything that had been seen in Train Spotter and everything that he had imagined, all those years ago in Nimbin when the hippies decided it was time to change the world.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.friesian.com/crichton.htm#crichton
If the evidence is against global warming, or ambiguous, or irrelevant, why has it become such an issue? The answer seems to be a moral and political one. We are trashing the planet with human civilization, foolishly wasting "natural resources," and hoarding wealth in the advanced countries that should be shared with the underdeveloped ones. This approach seems to be equal parts moralistic asceticism, that the virtuous embrace poverty, and the remnants of "lumpen Marxism" and the kind of half-baked socialism that is the best that the Left can do these days. The asceticism goes down well with the "chattering classes" of the press, politics, and academia, though few members of these groups practice any kind of asceticism themselves -- a point well illustrated by Crichton (the maids drive the hybrids). The socialism still sounds good in the same circles, even though all its forms are now so incoherent and discredited that they can withstand neither a moment of critical reflection nor the slightest comparison with historical experience. Nothing "trashes" the planet like even a small asteroid, or a large volcano, and human activities are pinpricks in comparison. Wealth, on the other hand, comes from human activity, not piles of "resources." Poor countries are poor, not because they lack natural resources (often they have an abundance, far more than the second largest economy on Earth, Japan), but because they lack capital, especially human capital. Human capital, indeed, consists of the kinds of skills, habits, and striving that are always bitterly resented when only ethnic minorities possess them -- minorities like the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Indians in East Africa, or Jews in Eastern Europe. They are then damned, while robbed or expelled, with all the bogus principles used to belabor capitalism -- leaving behind, of course, continuing poverty. Human capital, indeed, can generate wealth while beginning with very little of other kinds of capital. A Japan that was all but flattened by bombing, including atomic bombing, in World War II, rebuilt itself and surpassed all its former foes (except one) and allies in not much more than thirty years.
Crichton's attitude seems to have changed a bit since Jurassic Park. There we had a cautionary tale of human arrogance, with gems like, "Discovery is always a rape of the natural world," pronounced by the prophet mathematician Ian Malcolm, whose understanding of Chaos Theory seems to boil down principally to a restatement of Murphy's Law. The moral of the approach seems to be that, as Nature cannot be controlled, modern science is a fraud, a mistake, a sin, or something of the sort. Since Malcolm himself, however, says that mathematics "is just an arbitrary game," it is not clear why this, as he asserts, describes reality more fully than any other "arbitrary game." Since he doesn't advocate giving up civilization and going back to the Pleistocene (though he does seem to say that human life was just as good 30,000 years ago as now), the upshot is that we are not told what we should do instead -- and the Malcolm of the book dies, unlike the Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) of the movie. On the other hand, Malcolm also denies that the planet, or life in general, are in any kind of trouble from our activities. It is only ourselves, not the planet, that we endanger.
Although the popularity of Jurassic Park is probably due in great measure to the theme of human arrogance and "rape of the natural world" (with the irony that the embodiments of the sin, the revived dinosaurs, are as much the draw for the movie as they would have been for the fictional Jurassic Park), the Crichton of State of Fear seems to have taken the later insight, that the planet will do just fine, more to heart, to the cost of the former. At the same time, Malcolm was quite right that Nature cannot be controlled. The problem with that is just the ideology with which it is always coupled, i.e. that human beings can and should be controlled. No one complains about the human treatment of nature without wanting to stop it, to leave Nature alone, apparently because Nature is better off without us. We see the affinity of militant ecology to the Left in the desire to suppress freedom and control people, or at least people's economic activities (though the forced abortions in China are also popular in some circles). The very idea that Nature can be "preserved" is refuted by Crichton with a fine example, how Yellowstone National Park was intended, through all its history, to be a preserve of natural life, but instead was changed repeatedly by the very measures expected to preserve it. Withdrawing humans from wilderness and then believing that Nature will there simply continue unchanged is itself a form of control, one as unlikely to work as expected as any other intervention. Militant ecology indeed assumes the very principle it uses to belabor human arrogance, that human life is different and distinct from Nature. Human arrogance, of course, supposes that human life is better than Nature, while militant ecology supposes that human life is worse than Nature.
The truth is that neither Nature nor human life can or should be controlled. Human cultural, intellectual, and scientific evolution simply continues the process by which evolution produces life in the first place -- human civilization embodies more of the forms of spontaneous order that are embodied in the structures of matter, the universe, and life. Despite the popularity of ecological ideas and the moralistic condemnations in books like Jurassic Park, it is also noteworthy that political measures with significant economic costs (at least obvious ones) are commonly losers in politics. A good example of that was the "BTU" (British Thermal Unit) tax that was proposed by the Clinton Administration when it assumed office in 1993. The idea behind such a tax was to make all forms of energy more expensive, which would discourage energy use and promote the development of "alternative" sources of cheap energy. This had in particular been a campaign theme of Bill Clinton's Vice President, Al Gore, who published an eco-doomsday book for the campaign (Earth in the Balance). With solid majorities in Congress, there was nothing to stand in the way of such a proposal by the Democratic Party. Nevertheless, the tax failed and was never revived (although other taxes were increased). Despite it being a constant theme of ecological complaint that gasoline in the United States is too cheap, and should be more like the $5 a gallon common in Europe, it does not escape notice that any serious rise in gasoline prices is greeted with howls of protest. The Democratic Party knew that it is better that such protests be directed at the oil companies and the market, rather than at a Democratic Congress.
A similar political dislocation occurred in 2004 with the movie The Day After Tomorrow. This was a heavy handed tale of ecological doom, based on the idea that Artic melting would lower the salinity of the North Atlantic, stop the Gulf Stream, and plunge Europe, at least (North America too, in the movie), into a new Ice Age. This is a real theory, and of some interest. Its catastrophism suffers from the difficulty that the Gulf Stream does not simply flow north and then sink (as heavy salt water) and return south at depth, but that the circulation on the surface is a clockwise pattern, driven by wind, all around the North Atlantic basin. Either way, the extrapolations in the movie are preposterous. What we see are several gigantic storms in the northern hemisphere that return the Pleistocene ice caps to their full size in the course of just a few days. Storms, however, require a lot of energy, and Arctic cold, however warmed from the past, cannot provide it. Hurricanes, or the moisture for a New England "Nor'easter" snowstorm, comes from the tropics. This impossible storm over North America then generates a huge storm surge that buries New York City in water. Unfortunately, storm surges are generated by storms at sea, which is where this storm isn't. The clincher, though, is that the giant storms draw down super cold air from the stratosphere into their centers, which flash freezes everything, including the water that is to reconstitute the Pleistocene glaciers. The producers, writers, or advisors to the movie, however, failed to recollect that storms form around low pressure centers and that in low pressure centers air is rising, not falling. High pressure, where air descends, commonly brings the coldest temperatures, with clear skies. A comparable problem occurs with the portrayal of an outbreak of tornadoes in Los Angeles. Now, small tornadoes have been spotted in the Los Angeles Basin, and waterspouts have been filmed off the coast, but outbreaks of tornadoes have rather more to do with geography than with anything else. Flat terrain between a dry continental north and the warm, humid Gulf of Mexico makes central North America the tornado capital of the world. Mountains, of whatever size, break up airflow and disrupt tornado formation. This is evident anywhere, but is particularly conspicuous in the genuinely mountainous environs of Los Angeles.
So it must be asked why the movie takes these liberties with the truth. First, it could simply be a traditional Hollywood "disaster" movie, where truth and science are suspended for purposes of entertainment. This is "poetic license." The movie succeeds on that basis and was very successful at the boxoffice. Second, however, the movie could be a dishonest bit of political propaganda. This is more what it looks like. The political dimension of the movie is obvious, first because it begins at an environmental conference, attended by the Vice President of the United States -- an obvious version of actual Vice President Dick Cheney. A nastier political edge runs through the film when we see that the Vice President is the one really in charge and that the President, a George Bush clone, is uninvolved and ineffectual. The President gets killed, and the Vice President, who has fled to the American Embassy in Mexico, finds eco-Religion, confessing his sins and undertaking to Save the Earth.
Greenhouse Warming Advocates Say:
"Nineteen ninety-nine was the most violent year in the modern history of weather. So was 1998. So was 1997. And 1996.... A nine-hundred-year-long cooling trend has been suddenly and decisively reversed in the past fifty years.... Scientists predicted that the Earth will shortly be warmer than it has been in millions of years. A climatological nightmare is upon us. It is almost certainly the most dangerous thing that has ever happened in our history."
"Climate extremes would trigger meteorological chaos—raging hurricanes such as we have never seen, capable of killing millions of people; uncommonly long, record-breaking heat waves; and profound drought that could drive Africa and the entire Indian subcontinent over the edge into mass starvation."
"From sweltering heat to rising sea levels, global warming's effects have already begun.... We know where most heat-trapping gases come from: power plants and vehicles. And we know how to limit their emissions."
"Such policies like cutting energy use by more than 50 percent can contribute powerfully to the material salvation of the planet from mankind's greed and indifference."
"No matter if the science of global warming is all phony ... climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world."
Reality-Based Skeptics Say:
"The study, appearing in the March 21 issue of the journal Science, analyzed ancient tree rings from 14 sites on three continents in the northern hemisphere and concluded that temperatures in an era known as the Medieval Warm Period some 800 to 1,000 years ago closely matched the warming trend of the 20th century."
"I want to encourage the committee to be suspicious of media reports in which weather extremes are given as proof of human-induced climate change. Weather extremes occur somewhere all the time. For example, in the year 2000 in the 48 coterminous states, the U.S. experienced the coldest combined November and December in 106 years.... The intensity and frequency of hurricanes have not increased. The intensity and frequency of tornados have not increased.... Droughts and wet spells have not statistically increased or decreased."
"Hurricanes, brutal cold fronts and heat waves, ice storms and tornadoes, cycles of flood and drought, and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are not unforeseeable interruptions of normality. Rather, these extremes are the way that the planet we live on does its business. Hurricanes, in some parts of the world, provide a third of the average annual rainfall. What we call "climate" is really an average of extremes of heat and cold, precipitation and drought.... [A]ll the evidence from paleoclimatology and geology suggests that over the long haul, the extremes we face will be substantially greater than even the strongest in our brief historical record."
"[T]he number of major [Chinese] floods averaged fewer than four per century in the warm period of the ninth through eleventh centuries, while the average number was more than double that figure in the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries of the Mini Ice Age."
We have a large faction of intensely interested persons who say the warming is man-made, and dangerous. They say it is driven by releases of greenhouse gases such as CO2 from power plants and autos, and methane from rice paddies and cattle herds. The activists tell us that modern society will destroy the planet; that unless we radically change human energy production and consumption, the globe will become too warm for farming and the survival of wild species. They warn that the polar ice caps could melt, raising sea levels and flooding many of the world's most important cities and farming regions.
However, they don't have much evidence to support their position—only (1) the fact that the Earth is warming, (2) a theory that doesn't explain the warming of the past 150 years very well, and (3) some unverified computer models. Moreover, their credibility is seriously weakened by the fact that many of them have long believed modern technology should be discarded whether the Earth is warming too fast or not at all.
Many scientists—though by no means all—agree that increased CO2emissions could be dangerous. However, polls of climate-qualified scientist show that many doubt the scary predictions of the global computer models. This book cites the work of many hundreds of researchers, authors, and coauthors whose work testifies to the 1,500-year cycle. There is no "scientific consensus," as global warming advocates often claim. Nor is consensus important to science. Galileo may have been the only man of his day who believed the Earth revolved around the sun, but he was right! Science is the process of developing theories and testing them against observations until they are proven true or false.
If we can find proof, not just that the Earth is warming, but that it is warming to dangerous levels due to human-emitted greenhouse gases, public policy will then have to evaluate such potential remedies as banning autos and air conditioners. So far, we have no such evidence.
If the warming is natural and unstoppable, then public policy must focus instead on adaptations—such as more efficient air conditioning and building dikes around low-lying areas like Bangladesh. We have the warming. Now we must ascertain its cause...
History, science, and our own instincts tell us that cold is more frightening than warmth. It is a psychological mystery why comfortable First World residents, armed for the first time in all of history's warmings with air conditioning, have chosen to fear "global warming."
Of course, the advocates of man-made warming have attempted to bolster a scientifically weak case with a number of essentially baseless scary scenarios...
More than a Million of the World's Wild Species Will Go Extinct in the Next Century
We know that species can adapt to abrupt global warming because the climate shifts in the 1,500-year cycle have often been abrupt. Moreover, the world's species have already survived at least six hundred such warmings and coolings in the past million years.
The major effect of global warming will be more biodiversity in our forests, as most trees, plants, birds, and animals extend their ranges. This is already happening. Some biologists claim that a further warming of 0.8 degrees Celsius will destroy thousands of species. However, the Earth warmed much more than that during the Holocene Climate Optimum, which occurred 8,000 to 5,000 years ago, and no known species were driven extinct by the temperature increase...
Why have humans chosen to panic about the planet returning to what is very probably the finest climate the planet has known in all its millions of years? Is it simply guilt because climate alarmists told us we humans were causing the change?
If so, then it becomes all the more important to check their evidence.
In the morning, in the night light, in the shadows before dawn, these moments with God prickling in the fabric of things, long after the sickness and melancholy which had blanketed him in those far-off days, when he had been on the orange concrete floor, either unconscious or on all fours, the fabric of things creaking and groaning in a shrill hallucinogenic shriek. What was it al about? How did he sink so low? Why were these random, rampant thoughts so consuming, when other souls went quietly about their days, their breathing animal flesh so soft, so unthreatening, so self contained.
These oddities, these peculiar spires, were all part of the infested thought disorder that had made him so vulnerable to take over. They were having lunch at the Maroubra Hotel one day with the crazy girl Karen, who had landed in Ian's lounge room for a month, and as he sipped his lemon squash and watched every other asshole on the planet enjoy a drink, a particularly evil looking person pulled up at the lights. He had Somoan tatoos all over him, the sweeping evil strokes, and his hair glistened black. His eyes, too, were black, set in a pale face.
We all looked at each other and laughed. Woh, wouldn't like to get in his way, I said. He's infested with entities, Karen said, you can see them. It seemed so patently true, he appeared completely demonic, that it was difficult to argue. You think? I asked. Certainly looks it. Of course, she said, isn't it obvious.
Her own life was not in order, she was no role model. She was out of a job, out of a house, out of a relationship, childless and scattered, and no one could pretend that everything was going well for Karen. I she an undercover agent? we asked. She's not like everybody else? No, Ian said, I've known her for ages. She was Kevin's girlfriend. Why anyone would put up with speed addled Kev, in his giant old mechanics shop covered with grease and full of old cars, was anybody's guess.
But these infestations were everywhere, through his life, through the days, through everything we ever waited for. Sadness came. Darkness. Compulsion. Nothing changed in the darkness of Vauxhall. The mornings would come and we would be desperate, hanging like dogs, the sweat building. The only thing that stood in the way of a solution was money, and our sometimes vast intellectual talents were put to evil purpose, time and time again. Rats in a maze, they went through the same arking patterns every day; wake up, find money, score.
It was dark and Dantesque, the scenario. There was nothing like Vauxhall in the middle of winter to amplify one's personal despair, to mirror the tragic destinies of that sad little gang. We were marching forward, but nothing ever stopped. The same thing would happen the next day, the same sweats, the same compulsions, the same urges, the same desperate search for money.
And then they would wait in that strange little alcove on the top floor of the Vauxhall Terrace, wait until the ladder was lowered down from the attic, and the deal was done. No one but the closest of allies were ever allowed up that ladder, where the scenes of degradation defied everything that had been seen in Train Spotter and everything that he had imagined, all those years ago in Nimbin when the hippies decided it was time to change the world.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.friesian.com/crichton.htm#crichton
If the evidence is against global warming, or ambiguous, or irrelevant, why has it become such an issue? The answer seems to be a moral and political one. We are trashing the planet with human civilization, foolishly wasting "natural resources," and hoarding wealth in the advanced countries that should be shared with the underdeveloped ones. This approach seems to be equal parts moralistic asceticism, that the virtuous embrace poverty, and the remnants of "lumpen Marxism" and the kind of half-baked socialism that is the best that the Left can do these days. The asceticism goes down well with the "chattering classes" of the press, politics, and academia, though few members of these groups practice any kind of asceticism themselves -- a point well illustrated by Crichton (the maids drive the hybrids). The socialism still sounds good in the same circles, even though all its forms are now so incoherent and discredited that they can withstand neither a moment of critical reflection nor the slightest comparison with historical experience. Nothing "trashes" the planet like even a small asteroid, or a large volcano, and human activities are pinpricks in comparison. Wealth, on the other hand, comes from human activity, not piles of "resources." Poor countries are poor, not because they lack natural resources (often they have an abundance, far more than the second largest economy on Earth, Japan), but because they lack capital, especially human capital. Human capital, indeed, consists of the kinds of skills, habits, and striving that are always bitterly resented when only ethnic minorities possess them -- minorities like the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Indians in East Africa, or Jews in Eastern Europe. They are then damned, while robbed or expelled, with all the bogus principles used to belabor capitalism -- leaving behind, of course, continuing poverty. Human capital, indeed, can generate wealth while beginning with very little of other kinds of capital. A Japan that was all but flattened by bombing, including atomic bombing, in World War II, rebuilt itself and surpassed all its former foes (except one) and allies in not much more than thirty years.
Crichton's attitude seems to have changed a bit since Jurassic Park. There we had a cautionary tale of human arrogance, with gems like, "Discovery is always a rape of the natural world," pronounced by the prophet mathematician Ian Malcolm, whose understanding of Chaos Theory seems to boil down principally to a restatement of Murphy's Law. The moral of the approach seems to be that, as Nature cannot be controlled, modern science is a fraud, a mistake, a sin, or something of the sort. Since Malcolm himself, however, says that mathematics "is just an arbitrary game," it is not clear why this, as he asserts, describes reality more fully than any other "arbitrary game." Since he doesn't advocate giving up civilization and going back to the Pleistocene (though he does seem to say that human life was just as good 30,000 years ago as now), the upshot is that we are not told what we should do instead -- and the Malcolm of the book dies, unlike the Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) of the movie. On the other hand, Malcolm also denies that the planet, or life in general, are in any kind of trouble from our activities. It is only ourselves, not the planet, that we endanger.
Although the popularity of Jurassic Park is probably due in great measure to the theme of human arrogance and "rape of the natural world" (with the irony that the embodiments of the sin, the revived dinosaurs, are as much the draw for the movie as they would have been for the fictional Jurassic Park), the Crichton of State of Fear seems to have taken the later insight, that the planet will do just fine, more to heart, to the cost of the former. At the same time, Malcolm was quite right that Nature cannot be controlled. The problem with that is just the ideology with which it is always coupled, i.e. that human beings can and should be controlled. No one complains about the human treatment of nature without wanting to stop it, to leave Nature alone, apparently because Nature is better off without us. We see the affinity of militant ecology to the Left in the desire to suppress freedom and control people, or at least people's economic activities (though the forced abortions in China are also popular in some circles). The very idea that Nature can be "preserved" is refuted by Crichton with a fine example, how Yellowstone National Park was intended, through all its history, to be a preserve of natural life, but instead was changed repeatedly by the very measures expected to preserve it. Withdrawing humans from wilderness and then believing that Nature will there simply continue unchanged is itself a form of control, one as unlikely to work as expected as any other intervention. Militant ecology indeed assumes the very principle it uses to belabor human arrogance, that human life is different and distinct from Nature. Human arrogance, of course, supposes that human life is better than Nature, while militant ecology supposes that human life is worse than Nature.
The truth is that neither Nature nor human life can or should be controlled. Human cultural, intellectual, and scientific evolution simply continues the process by which evolution produces life in the first place -- human civilization embodies more of the forms of spontaneous order that are embodied in the structures of matter, the universe, and life. Despite the popularity of ecological ideas and the moralistic condemnations in books like Jurassic Park, it is also noteworthy that political measures with significant economic costs (at least obvious ones) are commonly losers in politics. A good example of that was the "BTU" (British Thermal Unit) tax that was proposed by the Clinton Administration when it assumed office in 1993. The idea behind such a tax was to make all forms of energy more expensive, which would discourage energy use and promote the development of "alternative" sources of cheap energy. This had in particular been a campaign theme of Bill Clinton's Vice President, Al Gore, who published an eco-doomsday book for the campaign (Earth in the Balance). With solid majorities in Congress, there was nothing to stand in the way of such a proposal by the Democratic Party. Nevertheless, the tax failed and was never revived (although other taxes were increased). Despite it being a constant theme of ecological complaint that gasoline in the United States is too cheap, and should be more like the $5 a gallon common in Europe, it does not escape notice that any serious rise in gasoline prices is greeted with howls of protest. The Democratic Party knew that it is better that such protests be directed at the oil companies and the market, rather than at a Democratic Congress.
A similar political dislocation occurred in 2004 with the movie The Day After Tomorrow. This was a heavy handed tale of ecological doom, based on the idea that Artic melting would lower the salinity of the North Atlantic, stop the Gulf Stream, and plunge Europe, at least (North America too, in the movie), into a new Ice Age. This is a real theory, and of some interest. Its catastrophism suffers from the difficulty that the Gulf Stream does not simply flow north and then sink (as heavy salt water) and return south at depth, but that the circulation on the surface is a clockwise pattern, driven by wind, all around the North Atlantic basin. Either way, the extrapolations in the movie are preposterous. What we see are several gigantic storms in the northern hemisphere that return the Pleistocene ice caps to their full size in the course of just a few days. Storms, however, require a lot of energy, and Arctic cold, however warmed from the past, cannot provide it. Hurricanes, or the moisture for a New England "Nor'easter" snowstorm, comes from the tropics. This impossible storm over North America then generates a huge storm surge that buries New York City in water. Unfortunately, storm surges are generated by storms at sea, which is where this storm isn't. The clincher, though, is that the giant storms draw down super cold air from the stratosphere into their centers, which flash freezes everything, including the water that is to reconstitute the Pleistocene glaciers. The producers, writers, or advisors to the movie, however, failed to recollect that storms form around low pressure centers and that in low pressure centers air is rising, not falling. High pressure, where air descends, commonly brings the coldest temperatures, with clear skies. A comparable problem occurs with the portrayal of an outbreak of tornadoes in Los Angeles. Now, small tornadoes have been spotted in the Los Angeles Basin, and waterspouts have been filmed off the coast, but outbreaks of tornadoes have rather more to do with geography than with anything else. Flat terrain between a dry continental north and the warm, humid Gulf of Mexico makes central North America the tornado capital of the world. Mountains, of whatever size, break up airflow and disrupt tornado formation. This is evident anywhere, but is particularly conspicuous in the genuinely mountainous environs of Los Angeles.
So it must be asked why the movie takes these liberties with the truth. First, it could simply be a traditional Hollywood "disaster" movie, where truth and science are suspended for purposes of entertainment. This is "poetic license." The movie succeeds on that basis and was very successful at the boxoffice. Second, however, the movie could be a dishonest bit of political propaganda. This is more what it looks like. The political dimension of the movie is obvious, first because it begins at an environmental conference, attended by the Vice President of the United States -- an obvious version of actual Vice President Dick Cheney. A nastier political edge runs through the film when we see that the Vice President is the one really in charge and that the President, a George Bush clone, is uninvolved and ineffectual. The President gets killed, and the Vice President, who has fled to the American Embassy in Mexico, finds eco-Religion, confessing his sins and undertaking to Save the Earth.
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