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New Scientist, 5 March 2005
Jeremy Leggett is chief executive of Solarcentury, the UK's largest independent solar electric company, and a member of the UK government's Renewables Advisory Board. State of Fear by Michael Crichton is published by Harper Collins
WHEN I visited America during my time working for Greenpeace International in the 1990s, time and again people would say to me "we really don't approve of the way your organisation blew up that French ship", or words to that effect. It happened once at the end of a meeting with a lawyer in Philadelphia. He was defending Lloyds of London against a suit filed by Exxon after the Valdez oil spill. He wanted to thank me kindly for all the excellent free technical information I had furnished him with in support of his defence, but he really hadn't enjoyed having to talk to me because my people had murdered somebody in New Zealand.
How could it be, I used to wonder, that Americans got the French secret service's sinking of the Greenpeace ship the Rainbow Warrior the wrong way round so consistently? I encountered the phenomenon in no other country. I never knew why for sure and still don't. Whatever the explanation, it happened so many times to me and my colleagues that I had to conclude it was something cultural.
Michael Crichton's new novel State of Fear offers a window into that culture. It launches an assault on the scientific underpinnings of a problem many believe to be the single biggest threat to a liveable future on the planet. The story is this: massively resourced and clinically efficient environmentalists-turned-terrorists generate a tsunami that is timed to boost their case that global warming exists. These ecomaniacs are foiled by a "professor of risk analysis" with links to the US military. That's it. End of story. John Le Carré this is not.
While travelling the world in a Gulfstream jet, our professor launches lengthy harangues at his travelling companions, especially a young lawyer who works for a thinly disguised version of the Natural Resources Defense Council. The lawyer slowly converts, in the face of the evidence, to the view that global warming is a myth. The book comes replete with graphs - most of them historical temperature records from individual locations showing no warming or cooling - and footnotes referring to scientific papers we are to gather that Crichton has read and understood.
By tilting at science and climate scientists in the course of a threadbare story Crichton conjures up bizarre scenes one after the other. Look at some examples. Gorgeous environmentalist-agent seduces wave-machine PhD student in Paris, masked men burst in and inject him in post-coital state with slow-working paralysing agent, environmentalist fires gun to drive men off, then bestows more sexual favours on him, then walks him along the Seine by Notre Dame as drug begins to take effect, and dumps his incapacitated and by now thoroughly confused body into the river. Right.
Billionaire environmentalist, his lawyer, and head of NRDC-equivalent fly to Iceland in a private jet to persuade a glaciologist they are funding to withdraw a paper saying he has found a rare glacier that is advancing not retreating, or else. As they would.
Machine-gun-toting ecoterrorists trick a large group of families into having a picnic in a national park, fire rockets into clouds upstream of them to create a fierce storm, generating a flash flood intended to kill the children live on network news (they have also tricked a TV crew into attending) just before a conference on abrupt climate change. And so on.
The novel reads as though it has been written in a rush by a committee of comic-culture schoolboys, and nowhere more so than where the all-important conference is concerned. It is run by the NRDC-equivalent secretly collaborating with "ex-Greenpeace and Earth First" ecoterrorists who plan to create three immense climatic disasters during the climate conference. Apart from the aforementioned dud tsunami and abortive flash flood, the professor-hero Crichton mouthpiece (with not a CIA or FBI operative in sight) foils them by blasting the mother of all icebergs off the edge of Antarctica.
To anyone who has worked in an international environmental organisation, State of Fear will evoke feelings that veer between hilarity at this picture of their peers, and deep disgust. Crichton's book ends with a long message from the author explaining his philosophy when it comes to the mirage of global warming, an essay on "Why politicised science is dangerous", and an annotated bibliography that elaborates on his grand theme.
The place to start in trying to understand this horrific assault on sanity is this bibliography. It is indeed extensive, and shows that the author has read the basic texts on the human-enhanced greenhouse effect, apparently without being impressed. What does impress him is every un-peer-reviewed neoconservative-funded pamphlet and book you can think of. And he doesn't hesitate to say so. As for the 12 volumes of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): on this painstaking compilation of the work of hundreds of climate scientists around the world, we find not a word of editorial comment.
In the hectoring by the hero as he flies the world in his jet, there are sideswipes at the IPCC. Let me give you a flavour. Flying back from Antarctica to Los Angeles, the all-knowing hero has a lot of pages in which to harangue the suggestible lawyer. Climate scientists are skilled at manipulating the media, he argues. "Don't forget the last minute changes in the IPCC report."
What did this "huge group of bureaucrats and scientists under the thumb of bureaucrats," as Crichton calls them, do wrong?
"The 1995 report announced with conviction that there was now a 'discernible human influence' on climate. You remember that?"
"Vaguely."
"Well, the claim of a 'discernible human influence' was written into the 1995 summary report after the scientists themselves had gone home.
"Originally, the document said scientists couldn't detect a human influence on climate for sure, and they didn't know when they would. They said explicitly 'we don't know'. That statement was deleted and replaced."
This is the stuff of Greenpeace blowing up the French. I was in Madrid when the scientists agreed what they agreed in 1995. Here is how I described it in my eyewitness account of the first decade of the climate negotiations, The Carbon War (Penguin, 1999).
More than a hundred of the world's best climate scientists sit in the room, chaired by the head of the UK Met Office. I was there. All these people, Crichton asks us to believe, are working in cahoots with politicians, concerned only for their funding (which will somehow be higher if they are alarmist about global warming). With them are a handful of stressed-out environmentalists and a swarm of fossil fuel lobbyists and their proxies: oil ministry officials from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait exercising their right to be scientists for the day.
The oil lobbyists openly ferry written instructions to the Saudi and Kuwait delegates. Despite constant interventions by the latter aiming to torpedo the process, the text agreed at the end of the meeting, by consensus, reads "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." But the header, "significant new findings since IPCC 1990," has gone, negotiated away under the pressure of time to appease the oilmen, along with other strongly-worded text.
The head of the Saudi Arabian delegation, Mohammed al-Sabban, later told Nature that the report "is now balanced and cautious enough not to mislead policymakers". Nature pressed him about his motivations for seeking the sweeping changes in drafting "he" had. He responded: "Saudi Arabia's oil income amounts to 96 per cent of our total exports. Until there is clearer evidence of human involvement in climate change, we will not agree to what amounts to a tax on oil."
A senior researcher from the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, in contrast, asked towards the end of the meeting if he could have his name removed from the report, so blatant had been the manipulation by American oil and coal-industry lobbyists.
"Through it all," I wrote in The Carbon War, "the lead author of the detection section, Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore Lab, had been in the thick of the discussions and enforced redrafting. It was he who had to deal with many of the carbon club and proxy brickbats. This he did in a dignified and patient manner. At the end of the meeting, Santer was duly told to go back to the original full report and make appropriate changes to match the changed Policymakers' Summary. The carbon club would be able to turn even this simple instruction into a grenade."
A grenade that was to explode recurrently over subsequent years as the neocon oil-lobby got to work. Now the lie is regurgitated in popular fiction by one of the world's bestselling authors. Thus is history written in our modern world.
"Nobody knows how much warming will occur in the next century," Crichton writes in his endnotes. "I would guess the increase will be 0.812436 °C. There is no evidence that my guess about the state of the world one hundred years from now is any better or worse than anybody else's." Really? The climate models run at the Met Office, NCAR, NASA, the Livermore Lab, and all the other governmental and university climate laboratories may be estimates at the end of the day, but they are, at least, constrained estimates. What else could have pushed most of the world's governments to the view that unmitigated global warming is sufficiently dangerous for the Kyoto protocol to be needed, not to mention ongoing painful negotiations to strengthen it?
The last line of the author's message reads: "Everybody has an agenda. Except me." What are we to make of this? If Crichton has no agenda, why all the pages of tortured justification of his view that global warming is tosh and most environmentalists are fraudsters and - we must imagine - wannabe terrorists? Is he trying to be funny, or is he serious? Almost everybody has an agenda when it comes to global warming. And why not? With a liveable future on the planet at stake if the vast majority are right and the neocons and their allies wrong, isn't that just a little understandable?
“A senior scientist asked to have his name removed from the report, so blatant was the lobbying”
If he is joking, given those stakes, then shame on his cavalier arrogance. If he is serious, what does that tell us about the immensity of his delusion?
I once shared a debating platform with an American who would enjoy Crichton's novel. Before an audience of coal industry executives, he painted environmentalists as defeated communists who had turned green. He urged the executives to mobilise against we evil-doers, and get as much coal to market for burning as fast as they could.
I had a quick shot at persuading him he was wrong. I told him about the concerned professionals who were then jumping ship to Greenpeace in growing numbers, doing their best to bolster the credibility of the idealistic kids and gentle veterans. I told him how proud I was never to have witnessed a transgression of Greenpeace's code of non-violence. I told him how some of my colleagues were actually quite conservative in their political views, and how a public party-political statement was a serious offence in the organisation.
I remember his face as I tried to inform him of the reality: the blankness in his eyes as he framed his dismissive response. An ideologue, I thought. He needs his enemies to be as he imagines them. That man's name was Harlan Watson. He is now a US negotiator at the international climate negotiations.
Crichton's book will no doubt hit a ready audience. There are enough contrived gunfights between the Crichton-esque professor and his ecoterrorist enemies to please even members of the National Rifle Association. Hence the film will be made, no doubt, and it will be a hit too. Millions will thus be drawn into the paranoid world that Crichton throws up: programmed to believe that climate scientists worried about global warming must somehow be manufacturing alarm because they lust after research grants, that nothing an environmentalist says can be true, and that the boundaries between environmental groups and the new generation of terrorists are blurring.
________________________
It's a long one.
For anyone with a NS subscription wishing to read it in a more comfy format, clicky
http://www.newscientist.com/article...bscriberType=1&doLogin=true&id=mg18524891.600
Jeremy Leggett is chief executive of Solarcentury, the UK's largest independent solar electric company, and a member of the UK government's Renewables Advisory Board. State of Fear by Michael Crichton is published by Harper Collins
WHEN I visited America during my time working for Greenpeace International in the 1990s, time and again people would say to me "we really don't approve of the way your organisation blew up that French ship", or words to that effect. It happened once at the end of a meeting with a lawyer in Philadelphia. He was defending Lloyds of London against a suit filed by Exxon after the Valdez oil spill. He wanted to thank me kindly for all the excellent free technical information I had furnished him with in support of his defence, but he really hadn't enjoyed having to talk to me because my people had murdered somebody in New Zealand.
How could it be, I used to wonder, that Americans got the French secret service's sinking of the Greenpeace ship the Rainbow Warrior the wrong way round so consistently? I encountered the phenomenon in no other country. I never knew why for sure and still don't. Whatever the explanation, it happened so many times to me and my colleagues that I had to conclude it was something cultural.
Michael Crichton's new novel State of Fear offers a window into that culture. It launches an assault on the scientific underpinnings of a problem many believe to be the single biggest threat to a liveable future on the planet. The story is this: massively resourced and clinically efficient environmentalists-turned-terrorists generate a tsunami that is timed to boost their case that global warming exists. These ecomaniacs are foiled by a "professor of risk analysis" with links to the US military. That's it. End of story. John Le Carré this is not.
While travelling the world in a Gulfstream jet, our professor launches lengthy harangues at his travelling companions, especially a young lawyer who works for a thinly disguised version of the Natural Resources Defense Council. The lawyer slowly converts, in the face of the evidence, to the view that global warming is a myth. The book comes replete with graphs - most of them historical temperature records from individual locations showing no warming or cooling - and footnotes referring to scientific papers we are to gather that Crichton has read and understood.
By tilting at science and climate scientists in the course of a threadbare story Crichton conjures up bizarre scenes one after the other. Look at some examples. Gorgeous environmentalist-agent seduces wave-machine PhD student in Paris, masked men burst in and inject him in post-coital state with slow-working paralysing agent, environmentalist fires gun to drive men off, then bestows more sexual favours on him, then walks him along the Seine by Notre Dame as drug begins to take effect, and dumps his incapacitated and by now thoroughly confused body into the river. Right.
Billionaire environmentalist, his lawyer, and head of NRDC-equivalent fly to Iceland in a private jet to persuade a glaciologist they are funding to withdraw a paper saying he has found a rare glacier that is advancing not retreating, or else. As they would.
Machine-gun-toting ecoterrorists trick a large group of families into having a picnic in a national park, fire rockets into clouds upstream of them to create a fierce storm, generating a flash flood intended to kill the children live on network news (they have also tricked a TV crew into attending) just before a conference on abrupt climate change. And so on.
The novel reads as though it has been written in a rush by a committee of comic-culture schoolboys, and nowhere more so than where the all-important conference is concerned. It is run by the NRDC-equivalent secretly collaborating with "ex-Greenpeace and Earth First" ecoterrorists who plan to create three immense climatic disasters during the climate conference. Apart from the aforementioned dud tsunami and abortive flash flood, the professor-hero Crichton mouthpiece (with not a CIA or FBI operative in sight) foils them by blasting the mother of all icebergs off the edge of Antarctica.
To anyone who has worked in an international environmental organisation, State of Fear will evoke feelings that veer between hilarity at this picture of their peers, and deep disgust. Crichton's book ends with a long message from the author explaining his philosophy when it comes to the mirage of global warming, an essay on "Why politicised science is dangerous", and an annotated bibliography that elaborates on his grand theme.
The place to start in trying to understand this horrific assault on sanity is this bibliography. It is indeed extensive, and shows that the author has read the basic texts on the human-enhanced greenhouse effect, apparently without being impressed. What does impress him is every un-peer-reviewed neoconservative-funded pamphlet and book you can think of. And he doesn't hesitate to say so. As for the 12 volumes of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): on this painstaking compilation of the work of hundreds of climate scientists around the world, we find not a word of editorial comment.
In the hectoring by the hero as he flies the world in his jet, there are sideswipes at the IPCC. Let me give you a flavour. Flying back from Antarctica to Los Angeles, the all-knowing hero has a lot of pages in which to harangue the suggestible lawyer. Climate scientists are skilled at manipulating the media, he argues. "Don't forget the last minute changes in the IPCC report."
What did this "huge group of bureaucrats and scientists under the thumb of bureaucrats," as Crichton calls them, do wrong?
"The 1995 report announced with conviction that there was now a 'discernible human influence' on climate. You remember that?"
"Vaguely."
"Well, the claim of a 'discernible human influence' was written into the 1995 summary report after the scientists themselves had gone home.
"Originally, the document said scientists couldn't detect a human influence on climate for sure, and they didn't know when they would. They said explicitly 'we don't know'. That statement was deleted and replaced."
This is the stuff of Greenpeace blowing up the French. I was in Madrid when the scientists agreed what they agreed in 1995. Here is how I described it in my eyewitness account of the first decade of the climate negotiations, The Carbon War (Penguin, 1999).
More than a hundred of the world's best climate scientists sit in the room, chaired by the head of the UK Met Office. I was there. All these people, Crichton asks us to believe, are working in cahoots with politicians, concerned only for their funding (which will somehow be higher if they are alarmist about global warming). With them are a handful of stressed-out environmentalists and a swarm of fossil fuel lobbyists and their proxies: oil ministry officials from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait exercising their right to be scientists for the day.
The oil lobbyists openly ferry written instructions to the Saudi and Kuwait delegates. Despite constant interventions by the latter aiming to torpedo the process, the text agreed at the end of the meeting, by consensus, reads "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." But the header, "significant new findings since IPCC 1990," has gone, negotiated away under the pressure of time to appease the oilmen, along with other strongly-worded text.
The head of the Saudi Arabian delegation, Mohammed al-Sabban, later told Nature that the report "is now balanced and cautious enough not to mislead policymakers". Nature pressed him about his motivations for seeking the sweeping changes in drafting "he" had. He responded: "Saudi Arabia's oil income amounts to 96 per cent of our total exports. Until there is clearer evidence of human involvement in climate change, we will not agree to what amounts to a tax on oil."
A senior researcher from the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, in contrast, asked towards the end of the meeting if he could have his name removed from the report, so blatant had been the manipulation by American oil and coal-industry lobbyists.
"Through it all," I wrote in The Carbon War, "the lead author of the detection section, Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore Lab, had been in the thick of the discussions and enforced redrafting. It was he who had to deal with many of the carbon club and proxy brickbats. This he did in a dignified and patient manner. At the end of the meeting, Santer was duly told to go back to the original full report and make appropriate changes to match the changed Policymakers' Summary. The carbon club would be able to turn even this simple instruction into a grenade."
A grenade that was to explode recurrently over subsequent years as the neocon oil-lobby got to work. Now the lie is regurgitated in popular fiction by one of the world's bestselling authors. Thus is history written in our modern world.
"Nobody knows how much warming will occur in the next century," Crichton writes in his endnotes. "I would guess the increase will be 0.812436 °C. There is no evidence that my guess about the state of the world one hundred years from now is any better or worse than anybody else's." Really? The climate models run at the Met Office, NCAR, NASA, the Livermore Lab, and all the other governmental and university climate laboratories may be estimates at the end of the day, but they are, at least, constrained estimates. What else could have pushed most of the world's governments to the view that unmitigated global warming is sufficiently dangerous for the Kyoto protocol to be needed, not to mention ongoing painful negotiations to strengthen it?
The last line of the author's message reads: "Everybody has an agenda. Except me." What are we to make of this? If Crichton has no agenda, why all the pages of tortured justification of his view that global warming is tosh and most environmentalists are fraudsters and - we must imagine - wannabe terrorists? Is he trying to be funny, or is he serious? Almost everybody has an agenda when it comes to global warming. And why not? With a liveable future on the planet at stake if the vast majority are right and the neocons and their allies wrong, isn't that just a little understandable?
“A senior scientist asked to have his name removed from the report, so blatant was the lobbying”
If he is joking, given those stakes, then shame on his cavalier arrogance. If he is serious, what does that tell us about the immensity of his delusion?
I once shared a debating platform with an American who would enjoy Crichton's novel. Before an audience of coal industry executives, he painted environmentalists as defeated communists who had turned green. He urged the executives to mobilise against we evil-doers, and get as much coal to market for burning as fast as they could.
I had a quick shot at persuading him he was wrong. I told him about the concerned professionals who were then jumping ship to Greenpeace in growing numbers, doing their best to bolster the credibility of the idealistic kids and gentle veterans. I told him how proud I was never to have witnessed a transgression of Greenpeace's code of non-violence. I told him how some of my colleagues were actually quite conservative in their political views, and how a public party-political statement was a serious offence in the organisation.
I remember his face as I tried to inform him of the reality: the blankness in his eyes as he framed his dismissive response. An ideologue, I thought. He needs his enemies to be as he imagines them. That man's name was Harlan Watson. He is now a US negotiator at the international climate negotiations.
Crichton's book will no doubt hit a ready audience. There are enough contrived gunfights between the Crichton-esque professor and his ecoterrorist enemies to please even members of the National Rifle Association. Hence the film will be made, no doubt, and it will be a hit too. Millions will thus be drawn into the paranoid world that Crichton throws up: programmed to believe that climate scientists worried about global warming must somehow be manufacturing alarm because they lust after research grants, that nothing an environmentalist says can be true, and that the boundaries between environmental groups and the new generation of terrorists are blurring.
________________________
It's a long one.
For anyone with a NS subscription wishing to read it in a more comfy format, clicky
http://www.newscientist.com/article...bscriberType=1&doLogin=true&id=mg18524891.600
I wasn't saying the article wasn't biased, but there are pieces of observational evidence in there that you simply can't ignore. He was there in 1995, not Crichton.
