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Michael Crichton: Environment Fears Overblown Jarret Wollstein, NewsMax.com There's a long history of overblown warnings by radical environmentalists and other prophets of doom, says best-selling author Michael Crichton – who urges scientists to "reject hysterical predictions."
Many alarmists are warning that unless government takes drastic action immediately, global warming will soon spawn unending "killer hurricanes," flood our coastal cities and turn farmlands into wastelands.
Crichton asks, "When will they ever learn?"
On November 15, Crichton addressed a forum in San Francisco sponsored by the libertarian Independent Institute. The topic: "States of Fear: Science or Politics."
Crichton is the author of 21 books, including "Jurassic Park," "Timeline" and most recently "State of Fear."
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In the new novel, the hero stumbles on an insidious global warming plot. In fact, "State of Fear" is a cautionary tale of the destructive consequences of imagined threats that never materialize, largely fueled by small special interest groups with hidden agendas, media hype and political hysteria.
He said the book was inspired by the way the establishment media reported the Chernobyl nuclear crisis.
Initial media projections were that between 15,000 and 30,000 people would immediately die from the partial meltdown, and ultimately as many as 15 million could die from radiation poisoning. In fact, according to the official UN report, just 56 died immediately, and long-term radiation deaths are now estimated at perhaps a few hundred.
"How could the media get it so wrong, and how could so many people be taken in?" Crichton asks. His answer: Fear sells and most people, who have no training in science, don't know any better.
Population explosion warnings in the late 1970s are another example of environmental hysteria that proved baseless. In his 1978 book "The Population Bomb," Paul Ehrlich warned that unless government took drastic, totalitarian action to curb population growth, humanity would swell to an unsustainable 14 billion people by the mid-21st Century if not sooner.
The predicted result: Devastation of the environment, the end of industrial civilization, global disease, war and mass death.
It never happened.
Population (excluding immigration) is now shrinking in most Western nations, including the U.S. Most experts agree that population will stabilize at 6 to 7 billion or less in the 21st Century, and could even shrink worldwide as more countries become affluent and people act voluntarily to reduce the size of their families.
Thirty years ago, radical environmentalists warned about a great global cooling crisis, an impending "ice age." Some reputable scientists went so far as to say that unless we acted immediately, the entire human race could freeze to death before the year 2000.
Obviously, they were dead wrong.
Similarly, says Crichton, recent warnings about imminent "killer storms" and earthquakes are overblown. The earth is such a vast place that every year there are some 1.5 million earthquakes – including one the size of the recent 8.2 quake in Pakistan every eight months.
Crichton explained that these perennial predictions of environmental disaster fail to materialize again and again because most analysts simply don't take into account the enormous size and complexity of the earth. For instance, a single molecule of hemoglobin is hundreds of times more complex than some environmentalist models of the entire earth's ecosystem.
Many environmental activists are still using old, simplistic, linear models to interpret the natural world, which produces "junk science," according to Crichton.
We can't even predict ocean current flows a few weeks in the future, much less global temperatures decades in advance.
"Understanding of complex systems is missing from most environmental thought," said Crichton. "A complex system like an ecosystem cannot be controlled, only managed. So, reject hysterical predictions and embrace complexity."
Although Crichton did not directly address most global warming issues, several of the distinguished scientists on a panel following his speech did.
Dr. William M. Gray, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado State University and a Fellow of the American Meteorology Society, said recent global warming was the result of natural forces and a continuation of a centuries-long trend, as the world continues to recover from the "little ice age" of the Middle Ages.
Most global warming during the last 120 years occurred before 1945, when there was much less industrial activity then there is today. "Current global warming is part of a natural cycle, not a result of human activity," said Gray.
Sallie Louise Baliunas, staff astrophysicist at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said predictions about global warming are the result of a false "positive feedback loop" model, in which carbon dioxide emissions result in a runaway greenhouse effect. In fact, temperature rise is self-limiting, since more heat in one area means greater cooling in other areas.
Dr. Baliunas says a more reasonable prediction of temperature rise in the next 50 years as a result of all factors is 0.3 degrees – not the 2 to 5 degrees predicted by radical environmentalists.
And even a rise of a few degrees would not necessarily be harmful and would actually take us close to a "global optimal climate," the most desirable temperature range for human civilization and ecological health.
The bottom line: The slight warming of the earth that is presently occurring is a result of natural processes, not human activity. Consequently, there is no need to take radical action, like passage of the Kyoto Accords, to cut our carbon dioxide emissions, or to abandon industrial civilization.
Editor's note:
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