Revisiting Michael Crichton’s State Of Fear: An Excerpt

Michael Crichton’s name evokes the word ‘plaudits’ in my mind, with too many to name. (200,000,000 copies of his books published worldwide does make its own statement.)

A life too short and yet his storied career gave us so much. He invented the oft-used writing format of techno-thriller, where you didn’t know whether it was fact or fiction you were reading. The reason for that was because he wove his plots around well-researched facts.

One of the best examples is State of Fear. If you are a student of the climate change furor it is a must read.

The much-used critique ‘a good read’ is applicable but it’s also chock full of intelligent insight into the twisted pseudoscience driving the environmental movement that has gone mad and morphed into the mass hysteria that is climate change.

His notes and appendices are extremely valuable along with a full bibliography useful for those doing research on climate. (Though published in 2006, it’s still as relevant today, if not more so.)

A bit of serendipity took place as I was just finishing a reread of the book and an excerpt from its appendix was published at Climate Change Dispatch that’s well worth reading.

Chance also provided me with a brilliant excerpt transcribed below. Most importantly, those that believe in catastrophic climate change should read this, especially their children.

To set the scene, this excerpt is toward the end of the book.  I’ll take a bit of poetic license here. Crichton has cleverly reversed the alarmist’s ‘end of the world’ mantra.

The protagonists have ‘saved the world’ from the antagonists, who are environmentalists bent on wanton destruction just to make their point that global warming is real. Crichton deftly summarizes the reality of nature and man via the use of the main character’s narration. (emphasis added)

Let’s remember where we live, Kenner was saying. We live on the third planet from a medium sized sun. Our planet is five billion years old, and it has been changing constantly all during that time.  The Earth is now on its third atmosphere.

The first atmosphere was helium and hydrogen. It dissipated early on because the planet was so hot. Then as the planet cooled, volcanic eruptions produced a second atmosphere of steam and carbon dioxide.

Later the water vapor condensed, forming the oceans that cover most of the planet. Then, around three billion years ago, some bacteria evolved to consume carbon dioxide and excrete a highly toxic gas, oxygen. Other bacteria released nitrogen. The atmospheric concentration of these gases slowly increased. Organisms that could not adapt died out.

Meanwhile, the planet’s land masses, floating on huge tectonic plates, eventually came together in a configuration that interfered with the circulation of ocean currents. It began to get cold for the first time. The first ice appeared two billion years ago.

And for the last seven hundred thousand years, the planet has been in a geological Ice Age, characterized by advancing and retreating glacial ice. No one is entirely sure why, but ice now covers the planet every hundred thousand years, with smaller advances every twenty thousand or so. The last advance was twenty thousand years ago, so we’re due for the next one.

And even today, after five billion years, our planet remains amazingly active. We have five hundred volcanoes, and an eruption every two weeks. Earthquakes are continuous: a million and a half a year, a moderate Richter 5 quake every six hours, a big earthquake every ten days. Tsunamis race across the Pacific Ocean every three months.

Our atmosphere is as violent as the land beneath it. At any moment there are one thousand five hundred electrical storms across the planet. Eleven lighting bolts strike the earth every second. A tornado tears across the surface every six hours. And every four days a giant cyclonic storm, hundreds of miles in diameter, spins over the ocean and wreaks havoc on the land.

The nasty little apes that call themselves human beings can do nothing except run and hide. For these same apes to imagine they can stabilize this atmosphere is arrogant beyond belief. They can’t control the climate.

The reality is, they run from the storms.

The world is not going to end and neither is civilization. Cold, not heat, is to be feared. Life has survived both extremes of climates. What is termed as extreme weather events have always existed.

We are getting better every day with understanding our environment, working with it and adapting to its harsher realities (graph to right)

State of Fear is still in print and is an important guide for future decisions in life.