It’s almost eerie. Just before that earthquake-triggered tsunami hit the Indian Ocean in December, best-selling novelist Michael Crichton released his new docu-novel, “State of Fear.” In it, environmental activists try to ramp up public fears of global warming—by setting off an earthquake-triggered tsunami in the Pacific with a series of submarine bombs. They planned their “natural disaster” to coincide with a big global warming conference, just as real-life activists tried to link the real tsunami with global warming.
Crichton’s novel is a good read—and it’s also close to the mark on the activists’ stake in a shaky global warming theory.
Crichton understands that the Green movement has no evidence humanity is overheating the planet. All we know is that the planet has warmed moderately. He says global warming is “hardly happening,” and actually documents that with scientific references in the book.
Crichton understands that our global warming started too soon (1850) to be CO2-driven. The Greenhouse Theory says the Earth will warm by radiation from an overheating atmosphere—but Crichton knows the atmosphere is hardly warming at all.
The environmental movement would like to immobilize the affluent, high-tech society they dislike with their Greenhouse Theory—and they may succeed.
Hospital operating rooms can’t function from the erratic electrical output of solar panels or windmills. Biofuels would take millions of acres of deforested land to power even a few trucks or cars. Yet the environmental movement tells us to leave our 200 years worth of coal and tar sands unused. They told California that even natural gas wasn’t a clean enough fuel for power plants. They sued emission-free nuclear power out of business.
They gave California its rolling blackouts. They think they’d like to brown out the whole of human society.
Immobilizing society in the face of enormous population pressures is a bigger crime against humanity—and ultimately against wildlife—than the tsunami that Crichton’s fictional eco-activists attempt to set off in “State of Fear.”
Crichton has performed an important public service by calling wide public attention to the weakness of the Greenhouse Theory through the power of well-written fiction. I fault him only for not going far enough.
Crichton doesn’t tell us why the planet has been warming slowly, 0.8 degrees C, in the past 150 years. For a nervous species like humanity, “hardly happening” is still happening.
Europeans Willi Dansgaard, Hans Oeschger, and Claude Lorius shared the big Tyler environmental prize for discovering the moderate, natural 1500-year climate cycle in the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores clear back in the 1980s.
America’s Gerard Bond, of Columbia University found the cycle in North Atlantic seabed sediments in the 90s—along with carbon14 and beryllium10 isotopes that link our climate to a cycle the sun’s irradiance.
All this has been in the science journals, but not in the popular press.
We all need to understand the message of the ice cores: that the Earth’s unstoppable climate cycle will warm our planet—mostly pleasantly—for centuries more. Then the same cycle will cool Earth—unpleasantly. There will be shifting patterns of extended drought, at varying locations, in both the warming and cooling phases.
We can’t stop the moderate solar-driven climate cycle, or its related droughts. We can only adapt to it—if our technologies are good enough.
