State of Fear
Crichton, Michael. 2005. State of Fear. Avon.
Rating:
8
Summary:
The book follows the stories of several individuals as they come to the realization that a group of violent environmentalists are attempting to create disasters in order to confirm that global warming is a serious threat in the popular consciousness. The public face of the more violent group is a Beverly Hills based environmental organization named NERF, which is run by an attorney named Nicholas Drake. While he isn’t the sole villain, he is the primary villainous character in the book.
The group that joins forces against Nick Drake and the other members of the violent environmentalist group is lead by Dr. Kenner, a professor at MIT and secret agent for the U.S. government. His sidekick, Sam Jiang (sic?), is a Tibetan soldier and scholar who is also the tech guru of the group. The other members of the group are all connected in one way or another with George Morton, an aging philanthropist, who begins the book as one of the primary supporters of NERF. After a visit from Professor Kenner, Morton decides his efforts and funds would be better spent working against NERF and ultimately trying to help the environment in other ways. His beautiful assistant, Sarah, also joins with the team, as does his personal lawyer, Peter Evans, who doubles as the main character of the book. A couple additional people get thrown into the mix later on, including Kenner’s niece and couple of movie actors.
The basic plot involves the Kenner-led group uncovering the environmental disasters the NERF associated group are trying to cook up and then foiling them. The disasters are designed to coincide with a public conference NERF is holding on rapid climate change that is supposed to highlight the dangers of global warming. In the process of preventing all of the disasters (there are four total), the group travels from California to Antarctica to the Southwestern U.S. and then to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. In the process, Peter Evans, Sarah, and Morton all have near death experiences, including: being left for dead in an ice crevasse, being poisoned, shot, and even attacked by cannibals.
Ultimately the Kenner-led group foils NERF’s schemes, but not without considerable pain, bloodshed, and the loss of a famous actor to a cannibal feast.
Review:
The story detailed above is really just a framework that allows Crichton to rant about global warming. But the real beauty of this book is that he hasn’t signed on board with the rest of Hollywood’s celebrities and taken the “anti global warming” approach. Instead, Crichton drives home the point that global warming is a theory that has been co-opted by environmentalist groups and the media to induce a “state of fear” in the world. The goal of the theory, of course, is to allow those two groups to gain both power and money.
Crichton does a very good job detailing all of the problems with global warming as a theory and convincingly argues that, as the data currently stands, there is almost no support for the theory. He uses Dr. Kenner as a sotto voce, dropping his views and reading of the scientific literature thickly into the pages. In fact, the novel reads more like something Ayn Rand would write – with a very different purpose, of course – than a typical Crichton novel. Several of the “technical” dialogues wherein Kenner trounces the other members of the group in debates over global warming go on for pages (or minutes in my case).
I may have liked this book more than many people because I don’t hold fast to the arguments behind global warming. I recognize the harms of pollution and I certainly stand behind the reduction of pollutants in the atmosphere. But I was pretty much convinced before reading this book that the evidence for global warming was pretty sketchy to begin with and that advocates of global warming had not ruled alternative explanations, namely climate change cycles. The earth cycles through warm and cold periods and has for millions of years, well before humans came on the scene. How much of the recent climate change is due to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is completely unknown and likely unknowable. So, because I was a skeptic of the theory to begin with, I found Crichton’s arguments compelling. Keep in mind that Crichton isn’t saying global warming isn’t taking place. He repeatedly says throughout the book that it just isn’t known at this point whether it is happening or not. That is clearly the safest and most well-reasoned position to take. And no, I don’t think Crichton is playing the “shill” for big business, even though he is undoubtedly a multi-millionaire. He is just being skeptical, even though the popular thing to do right now is side against big corporations regardless of the evidence to the contrary.
I particularly enjoyed Crichton’s postscript in which he answers the question that was on my mind throughout – he details his views on global warming. I was hoping he would do that and he did.
As far as the story goes, I liked it. But, like I said above, it’s very much an Ayn Randian type story – the story is really just the framework for the message and the message in this story, like Rand, is not hidden or even subtely disguised – it’s out in the open and laid bare for everyone to see it.
In conclusion, this isn’t the most entrancing novel Crichton has written, but it is clearly the most political. He doesn’t beat around the bush in conveying his message – by the end of the book it is pretty clear he is shotgunning the bush repeatedly. If you don’t come away from the book having had your perspective on global warming challenged, you obviously didn’t read the book.
(One final point, I didn’t realize it before, but Crichton is pretty clearly a libertarian atheist. Maybe he didn’t start out as such, but it’s pretty certain he is after reading this. I’m all for libertarian atheism, though I wouldn’t consider myself one – I still have too many socialistic tendencies.)
(Note: I listened to this book on my new IPod Nano! ;)