Crichton’s “State of Fear” Novel Blasts Environment Fascists Racy Tale Points Finger At Global Warming Fanatics;“Zealots Seek To Warn The World By Faking “Natural” Disasters” In The Real World, Why Won’t The BBC, Media Tell The Truth? “You can’t have shame genes and work at the BBC” “Political leaders were using dodgy, unproven data about climate change to frighten the rest of us into submission to their agendas, which were almost entirely collectivist” The BBC believes that humans are influencing climate and our environment is warming up because of this. No matter that the BBC is, in theory at least, a news organisation which should only be a conduit for opinion, where views can be expressed, news reported in a fair and balanced way, and conclusions drawn by an educated public. The BBC’s reporters never say in their pieces on climate change that some, if not most, highly qualified scientists believe that human induced warming is not proven or is an illusion. The BBC always gives the impression that man’s hand in the warming of the planet is a proven fact, and only a few right-wing weirdoes or those in the pay of big oil and coal believe otherwise. It was therefore only a matter of time before the BBC found a way of linking the Tsunami in the Indian Ocean to Global Warming. It took Britain’s state controlled and financed media monopoly just over a week, and the link it found was ridiculously tenuous to say the least but that didn’t bother them. You can’t have shame genes and work at the BBC. Swivel-Eyed Nutter The BBC’s World This Weekend programme on Radio 4, after wracking its collective brains for 7 days, came up with this gem – “What if human induced global warming led to rising sea levels, wouldn’t that be just like the Indian Ocean tidal wave disaster?” The fact that the answer was “of course not, you infantile fools” didn’t deter the BBC, and it recruited swivel-eyed environmental nutter and Guardian columnist George Monbiot to push this ludicrous theory. Also invited by the BBC to spread his usual smarmy false alarmism about human induced global warming and climate change was Jonathan Porrit. Porrit must have had the nation spluttering its collective Sunday lunch gravy over its Habitat tablecloths when he said that people had to be re-educated in the use of energy until they realised that trips like flying to Florida on honeymoon were immoral. Corrupt Purveyors Of Conventional Wisdom The BBC, and the likes of the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and our own dear Guardian, resists all attempts to report evenly and fairly about the human race’s role in global warming and sucks up to the dubious claims by environmentalists on the left, and other corrupt conventional wisdom purveyors. Because of this, I must admit to a frisson of excitement when I heard that Michael Crichton’s new novel “State of Fear” starred fanatical environmental zealots so convinced that they must save humanity and the world from global warming, they try and induce a series of natural disasters to “prove” their point. Denial of human impact on global warming has become the truth that dare not speak its name. As U.S. syndicated columnist George Will said in piece in December 2004 published in The Washington Post”, this belief “is now so conventional that it seems to require no supporting data.” Firstly, I must declare an interest. I was Reuters’ global Science and Technology Correspondent from 1994 until 1998, and one of the first stories I tackled was human induced climate change. Because I listened to the BBC and read the mainstream media I assumed that mankind was guilty, and in order to save the planet for our children, this had to be stopped. My story was to be about how this fight was progressing. The Best From Albania to Zimbabwe Imagine my amazement when, even with Reuters’ first class ticket to the best scientific sources in the world, I couldn’t find anybody to back this up. I asked top scientists in the U.S., in Massachusetts, California and Washington. Not proven, some said. Not happening, said most. The balance of probabilities points to it, said one or two of the mealy-mouthed variety. The same went for top scientists in Europe. The only people willing to go on the record for human induced global warming were some “experts” from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and they weren’t climate scientists at all, mainly bureaucrats whose careers depended on the IPCC gravy train. The IPCC, as one wag once said, brings together all the world’s top climate scientists, from Albania to Zimbabwe. Trying To Frighten Us The bottom line was that political leaders were using dodgy, unproven data about climate change to frighten the rest of us into submission to their agendas, which were almost entirely collectivist. Socialists could hardly believe their luck. Having lost all the arguments during the twentieth century when they tried to order us about in the name of progress, (some, like Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Allende, Castro and Pol Pot were a little heavy handed in their race to make us better) now they had a dream agenda. If we didn’t conform to their orders – get out of our cars, stop flying on holiday, give up exotic produce jumbo-jetted from across the world – we’d all die. So I have shared Michael Crichton’s Road to Damascus in my own way. As he researched his story, Crichton found, like Bjorn Lomborg in his “The Skeptical Environmentalist”, that the evidence was a mirage; the more you pushed for proof, the more you realised it was illusory, pap, made-up, lies. Personally, it was deeply disappointing to write stories which were iconoclastic and true, but ignored by the rest of the mainstream media. Hopefully Michael Crichton will be more successful. Crichton, who has written a string of best sellers including “The Andromeda Strain” and “Jurassic Park”, also accuses the environmental movement of exploiting the public’s fears to further their own careers and make money. The Python And The Rat His hero in the book, the mysterious, Ivy League presumably CIA operative John Kenner, stuffs it intellectually to the Hollywood Gulfstream V environmental poseurs in an argument where Kenner “was looking at Bradley (a Hollywood actor) they way a python looks at a rat”. In this chapter, where the author’s imaginative rhetoric is backed up by charts and footnotes which are scientifically kosher, Kenner demolishes the notion that humans are having an impact on climate via carbon dioxide emissions. He starts off by pointing out that CO2 is not a poison but a plant stimulant, and then blasts out of the water some of the notions put about by corrupt environmentalists and repeated so often everybody thinks they are true. The Sahara desert is shrinking, not gaining, specie extinction isn’t happening, glacier disappearance, ditto; hurricane activity isn’t gaining pace, it’s falling. The book also points to the dodgy use of data which purported to show ice caps are melting because of warming at the poles. The reverse is happening. Arctic warming reported in November 2004 by the mainstream media as though the end was nigh, was the result of gerrymandered data which allowed the report to purport to show the area was warming. In fact, the Arctic region has been cooling since the late 1930s and the ice thickening. Four Hundredths Of A Degree Kenner also turns his fire on another Hollywood character, explaining the impact of the Kyoto treaty to limit CO2, which comes into affect in February 2005. The recipient this time is a lady of a certain age who lunches, and leads the local dinner party social whirl and of course raises money for charity. She is a “committed” environmentalist (with 4 homes, a private jet, and a couple of gigantic SUVs). “The effect of Kyoto would be to reduce warming by 0.04 degrees Celsius in the year 2100. Four hundredths of a degree. Do you dispute the outcome,” says Kenner. “I certainly do. Four what? Hundredths of a degree? That’s ridiculous,” she says. “Well maybe because the United States didn’t sign it - .” “No, that would be the effect if we did sign it,” says Kenner. The Kyoto treaty seeks to return CO2 emissions to about 5% below 1990 levels by 2012. The U.S. declined to sign. Third world nations like India, China, and Brazil were excluded. Russia recently decided to sign up, bringing the total of signatories to the level where it could be declared mandatory by the U.N. Warming, Cooling, Warming During the narrative, Crichton makes clear that the climate has never been consistent, warming and cooling over thousands of years. He also points to the uncomfortable fact for environmentalists that the world cooled significantly between 1940 and 1975 while CO2 emissions continued to expand, thus breaking the tenuous link between the two. One review of the book, published on The Science & Environmental Policy Project’s web site (www.sepp.org), hopes “State of Fear” will become a bestseller, and will be read by Congress, and Senators John McCain (Republican) and Joe Lieberman (Democrat) in particular, who have been attempting to turn U.S. public opinion in favour of Kyoto. “Politicians through the world (should read it) including we hope Britain’s science adviser Sir David King,” said the review. Fatuous King said, fatuously, late last year that global warming was of more danger to civilization than terrorism. Crichton, helpfully, spells out at the end of the book after the action has stopped, a list of reasons why human induced global warming is not proven, and is especially hard on those calling for the precautionary principle and sustainable development – “It is a nice way of saying (sustainable development) to the third world “we got ours and we don’t want you to get yours, because you’ll cause too much pollution”. “The precautionary principle, properly applied, forbids the precautionary principle. It is self-contradictory. The precautionary principle therefore cannot be spoken of in terms that are too harsh,” said Crichton. He ends with his tongue in cheek. “Everybody has an agenda, except me,” says Crichton. More power to you Michael, maybe you can turn the conventional wisdom around. And make the BBC eat its words. (State of Fear, HarperCollins, £17.99) http://www.michaelcrichton.net Neil Winton – January 5, 2005 Top