As I grow older and wider, I've been thinking about trading up to a bigger gas eater in a few months when my lease is up on the Nissan Sentra. The only thing that has been standing in the way of more comfort, frankly, is a touch of guilt.
Thankfully, however, I picked up a copy of Michael Crichton's new bestselling novel, "State of Fear," and I've been set free.
There is no global warming, it turns out. The whole thing is a scam perpetrated by environmentalists and scientists to justify their own existence and make an easy buck in the process.
Crichton, the writer of "Jurassic Park" and several other books that became Hollywood sensations, offers this contrarian message in two neat packages.
First, there's the fictional (as far as we know) story of an environmentalist plot to slice off a chunk of ice in Antarctica. This would turn part of California into an underwater park and a good deal of the United States into a rain forest, bolstering the cause of a "politico-legal-media complex" that has created a State of Fear!
Thankfully, a crack government agent is on the job, racing the clock to expose the evil plot. He manages, as New Yorker magazine noted, to get a blond damsel in distress to strip to her skivvies in order to survive an attack of artificial lightning.
Scientists may be laughing, but no one in Hollywood is.
The second part of the package is Crichton's end-of-the-book pronouncement that global warming projections are nothing but guesswork, and no more useful or accurate than his guess that there's nothing to worry about. We're in a natural warming trend, he says, which "began about 1850."
"We know astonishingly little about every aspect of the environment, from its past history, to its present state, to how to conserve and protect it," Crichton says.
This is partly true, as is much of what Crichton says, and his broader view is shared by a tiny minority of scientists. The guy is no dummy, having worked his way through Harvard medical school by writing thrillers. And his points about modern political hyperventilating and exaggeration, and about scientists delivering the results desired by those who fund their research, are valid if not new.
The question is why, on the subject of global warming, we should believe a techno-thriller writer rather than thousands of scientists from around the world, many of whom have devoted years to the study of climate change.
