State of Fear

Michael Crichton

Avon Books: New York, 2004. ISBN: 0-06-101573-3. Pp. 672 (bibliography)

"Her intentions are good," she said.
"And her information is bad," Kenner said. "A prescription for disaster."

Judging by the amount of vitriol directed against this best-seller, one would think that Mr Crichton came out with an earnest version of Swift's modest proposal. While not advocating the culinary delights and economic benefits of eating babies, this novel does gore a cow that is sacred to a lot of people, usually to the left on the political spectrum. For many intelligent and educated people, any attack on the man-made global warming credo is akin to Holocaust denial. I have read some reviews that blame Crichton for distorting data, for misrepresenting the scientific consensus, for promoting the views of right-wing crooks or disreputable scientists in the pay of evil industrial behemoths.

Since I read these reviews after finishing the book, I am astonished. It's as if these people have read something else entirely. How else can one explain a complete and willful disregard for the obvious point Crichton was making in his novel? Oh wait, I know the answer to that one. It's just that for many people asking certain questions is beyond the pale. Whereas I would certainly agree that denying the Holocaust is just such an activity worthy of every ounce of scorn heaped upon it, I do not know that the same holds for valid questioning of scientific conclusions. I do not care how many trees you want to hug or how much you love Gaia or how much you believe we are unworthy of inhabiting this planet or how fervently you wish to return to some imaginary la-la land to commune with mud and bugs or how much you think the world is ruled by a conspiracy of cretinous but rapacious corporations. Some questions are worth pondering.

As far as I can tell, and contrary to the ink being spilled as if from a ruptured Exxon Valdez, Mr Crichton's main point is as simple as it is profound: every action has negative consequences; therefore, any public policy must be made on the bases of a careful cost-benefit analysis. There is nothing controversial here (I hope, although I know that some people are prepared to pursue their favored polices no matter what the costs involved). Applying this to global warming, the logic goes as follows. We know very little about how climate functions and what its natural trends are. Although we know carbon dioxide is increasing and the present trend is one of warming, we do not know how much of it is man-made. We don't know exactly how much different human activities contribute to this warming. Therefore, any policy that attempts to deal with global warming as if all these answers were known is bound to be problematic, if not actively harmful.

Something even more interesting lurks beneath this line of thought. It seems that many people take scientific claims as gospel. They are nothing of the sort. Whereas some claims can be regarded as true because they have been confirmed in numerous experiments and observations, others are much more tentative and are contingent on our present state of knowledge. Science is an ever-evolving discipline where today's orthodoxy may be tomorrow's rejected theory. Consensus or not, we should treat all new results with a healthy dose of skepticism. It really does not matter how many scientists believe something to be true. Why? Because this is a specious argument from authority. In fact, science is a social discipline and we should never underestimate that. Thomas Kuhn wrote a wonderful, if perhaps somewhat biased, book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and there's plenty of evidence that scientists are normal people. That is, they have to function in an environment that rewards particular activities and penalizes others. This is not to say that scientists unthinkingly hew to some dogma, but it does go to say that scientists may not ask certain questions or may attempt to disprove answers they do not like a lot more vigorously than accepting ones they do.

The so-called precautionary principle simply does not hold water. If we do not know how a system works, we cannot tell whether not doing something (or stopping something we think is harmful) will produce a better outcome than doing it. Coupling this with the fact that all reforms proposed to return us to some supposed "natural" state are immensely costly, it's not exactly clear that they will not be actively harmful in their effects on humans. Crichton also makes the entirely valid point that nature itself does not exist in a state of stasis: it constantly changes, everything evolves, everything attempts to adapt, some things die others survive. It is fundamentally misguided to pursue polices that assume it is good to lock nature in some perfect state. Not just because we have no idea what such a state would look like but because this is fundamentally unnatural as well.

You may be surprised how little we know about the impact of environmental efforts. I have heard colleagues complaining that the World Bank has no idea whether the millions of dollars it spends in Africa on environmental projects have any effect. Why? Because nobody knows that to measure. Nobody knows what constitutes progress. It's a sad state of affairs really, and Crichton is right to suggest that the only way out of this morass is to pay for more research before we run around implementing good-intentioned but ill-informed policies. In that respect, his comparison with eugenics is valid: it was a theory that enjoyed a wide support in society, in and out of academia, but which was completely discredited eventually. This does not mean that man-made global warming with detrimental consequences will necessarily be discarded, of course. But it does mean that we have to be careful about claims that need further verification. When a lot of climate science comes from computer models, one really has to worry. Real life is not SimLife where you can save the game and restart it if you don't like the outcome of your policies.

That's why I think a lot of critics have misread Crichton's novel: he does not deny global warming but he does want to question the assumptions going into environmental policies. We must not forget that these policies have lots of very real immediate effects. In fact, the hue and cry about the book is ironically anticipated in the novel itself in the way Crichton depicts pro-environment zealots. Readers who find themselves accurately described have strenuously objected to the characterization, but in my experience is it on the mark. When Kenner (the MIT professor who moonlights as a 007-style government agent) talks to any of these characters, the result is a mess, not a dialogue. People get offended, they refuse to acknowledge valid points, ignore new information, discard logic, become agitated when it is pointed out to them that they do not know certain basic facts, and in the end walk away convinced of their own moral superiority as if that were enough to construct a valid argument. I have first-hand experience with people like this and my conversations usually have gone exactly as Crichton describes them in the book. While there are many knowledgeable proponents of the view Crichton criticizes (and they are not shown in the book, leading to accusations of bias), it does seem the case that many vocal and ardent supporters of these "feel-good" ideas have no clue what they are talking about. It's like all those college students sporting Che Guevara T-shirts.

As a novel, State of Fear is breath-taking, as just about every Crichton book I have read. Sure, the characters are flat and somewhat cliched: all the women are stunning, Kenner is implausibly well-trained in everything from obscure physics to economics to combat to piloting a helicopter, lawyers are universally evil or at least not too bright, environmentalists are kooky, and the public is ignorant and easily manipulable by some sinister politico-legal-media complex. But so what? This is a thriller, not some study of the human psyche. And as a thriller, it is superb. Numerous events taking place around the world cohere to form a global conspiracy to effect three "natural" disasters timed to coincide with a conference on abrupt climate change. The goal is to boost the sagging money-making ability of the premier environmental organization by making the public afraid of the consequences of inaction. Since nature cannot provide these consequences on its own (at least not soon enough), it needs a little nudge to produce a storm with killer flash floods, a gigantic tsunami, and the lopping off of the largest iceberg in Antarctica. All courtesy of eco-terrorists who do not hesitate to murder thousands of people to make their point.

Whether any of this is plausible is, of course, beside the point. I would never use a fictional novel as a source of information to educate myself about any issue, global warming included. (However, Crichton's annotated bibliography provides a nice starting point.) In a way, the frequent lectures Kenner delivers throughout the book (in the form of grating Q&A) do detract from the plot somewhat and slow down the novel. And when the story includes little delicious (pun intended) comeuppances like one annoying actor getting eaten alive by cannibals, one does want to go as fast as possible. Now, forgive me if I am a bit skeptical about eco-terrorists doing all the things they are supposed to be doing, but it's a novel, not a chronicle of reality. It's sad, really, when one mistakes the two, as many have done with the similarly popular The Da Vinci Code. Right now, I will tend to support the man-made global warming theory, mostly because of the recent findings by NASA. But what I take to be Crichton's main point remains just as valid.

January 20, 2006