For a world obsessed with global warming this is a revealing book. I read it in the same week as many of the world’s global warming luminaries were meeting in London and doling out yet ever more tales of gloom, doom and melt down.

I have to confess that I have never fully appreciated the global warming arguments: I haven’t always believed everything I’ve read and now Crichton has come along with a novel that has the capacity to teach us more than all of the scientists and doomsters I have ever heard.

As a novel Crichton has presented us with a story, rather incredible as it happens, of derring do, intrigue and murder most foul. One of the central characters is a lawyer who gets to travel the world with an erstwhile Professor who turns out to be a wave parting secret agent. They travel around from adventure to adventure on board a corporate jet and a lot of the books I am reading lately seem to have Lears and such like as every day companions.

This book is also populated by some of Hollywood’s finest (not real ones, just pretend) and they are not presented in a good light at all. As testament to that assertion, read the book and find out what happens to the leading actor chappie near the end of the book and tell me that Crichton thought he was a decent bloke!

The basic story revolves around a philanthropist and plots surrounding him and global warming. The philanthropist starts to shout long and loud about things that matter to him and then he dies one night under the affluence of incahol and the major sub plot surfaces to become the major plot.

There is so much in this book that it’s not really possible to do it full justice without giving away far too much. It also needs to be read to be disbelieved. The most fascinating thing, though, is the global warming aspect of the story. Crichton tells us as the end, in what he calls his author's message:

A novel such as State of Fear, in which so many divergent views are expressed, may lead the reader to wonder where, exactly, the author stands on these issues. I have been reading environmental texts for three years, in itself a hazardous undertaking. But I have had an opportunity to look at a lot of data, and to consider many points of view. I conclude:

• We know astonishingly little about every aspect of the environment, from its past history, to its present state, to how to conserve and protect it. In every debate, all sides overstate the extent of existing knowledge and its degree of certainty.
• Atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing, and human activity is the probable cause.
• We are also in the midst of a natural warming trend that began about 1850, as we emerged from a four hundred-year cold spell known as the "Little Ice Age."
• Nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be a natural phenomenon.
• Nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be man made.
• …
• there is a lot more of that but copyright must prevent me from revealing it.

I disagree that there are many divergent views presented in the book: a few people are given the opportunity to give a view, eg the Hollywood types, only to have them dashed unceremoniously on the rocks along with the dead philanthropist.

Two of Crichton’s main characters are allowed to ride roughshod over the lot of them. They do it well and convincingly I would say. Part of the vehicle for these perorations are mock trials as the island of Vanutu in the Pacific is about to try to win massive damages in a global warming linked legal case.

In one of the mock trials, this graph is presented ... 10^th April 2007 ... a gremlin has eaten away at my graphics for this page and I need to reconstruct them ... pleae bear with me!

and then this one:

"Okay," Evans said. "Just what you would expect. Carbon dioxide goes up, and makes temperatures go up."
"Good," she said. "Now I want to direct your attention to the period from 1940 to 1970. As you see, during that period the global tempera¬ture actually went down. You see that?"
"Yes ..."

Then the killer … this one:

Crichton points out that it might matter where temperature data are collected from as to whether we believe that global warming is a problem or not. After all, Crichton is presenting factual data not made up numbers that suit his story line: remember he told us in his message that he researched this subject for three years.

As a matter of interest I followed up on a couple of the footnotes in the book and found, just as Crichton had said, that they are genuine. They are!

At the point at which Crichton presents us with a truly ranting Professor I felt that the novel had become subservient to the global warming part of Crichton’s personal message. I think he took it a bit too far to be frank but I still recommend the book both from a literary and a scientific angle and will leave you with facsimiles of two pages that struck me as interesting as I was reading them. There is a lot more that surrounds those two pages of course including the reappearance of the philanthropists … well, I never thought he was dead anyway!

click on these links if you wish to see these facsimiles as they are a bit too big to include in this main page:

Click here to read page 454

Click here to read page 455

Good stuff!

Duncan Williamson
20^th February 2005 revised 10^th April 2007