'climate of fear'

A little science fun from Michael Crichton. He dives into environmental debate in his new book State Of Fear.

Michael Crichton [author of Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, and Timeline] is a big man with big ideas, a storyteller of nearly seven feet who turns popular science into popular fiction.

He has questioned global warming in his new thriller, State of Fear, about eco-terrorists who plot a series of natural disasters - earthquakes, underwater landslides, a tsunami - to prove that global warming is a threat to humanity. A ragtag band of scientists and lawyers uncovers the scheme.

State of Fear sounds like a typical Crichton thriller, but this time he used the novel as a platform, tacking on a five-page message stating his notion that the theory of global warming is speculative at best, and a 14-page bibliography of works supporting his views.

"The current near-hysterical preoccupation with safety is at best a waste of resources and a crimp on the human spirit, and at worst an invitation to totalitarianism," he concludes.

Calling the scientific consensus on climate change "creepy", he told the BBC : "Science has nothing to do with consensus. Politics is about consensus."

Scientists and environmentalists greeted his arguments with derision. Tony Jupiter, director of Friends of the Earth, said: "It's interesting to see how climate change sceptics have truly entered the world of fiction.

"They've been in that world for some time, but they've been positioned as factually based. The fact that these arguments are presented as a novel puts them in their correct place in society.

"Go to the basic model prepared by the Hadley Centre. [It shows] a very clear relation between rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere and rising temperatures. These temperature increases could be very considerable in a very short period of time.

"That's not scaremongering. It is based on the scientific consensus."