A Cold Shoulder

[Guest guest]

A Cold Shoulder

True Believers still reject global warming

 

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson

2/21/06

http://zeppscommentaries.com/S & E/crichton.htm

 

The Science Fiction community – in America, at least – has always had a strong

representation from people who are either libertarians or free marketeers, or

(for those incapable of seeing the

built-in conflict between market demands and individual rights)

both. The worst cases are Randroids, who are utterly convinced that

government is the root of all evil, and that churches and corporations wouldn’t

DREAM of taking over the power vacuum if government were to be somehow

eliminated from human affairs. Aside from being rather poorly thought out, it

also has a rather vile premise, that human greed can be counted upon to solve

all

social problems.

 

Like in Rwanda, perhaps.

 

It’s an ideology, an odd one that celebrates the individuality of humans while

vociferously opposing any other viewpoints,

labeling such as " socialist” and “authoritarian.” As if churches

or corporations wouldn’t share such traits.

 

Holding this particular ideology doesn’t mean someone can’t write great science

fiction. Robert Heinlein incorporated it

in a lot of his novels, and usually did so in a way that didn’t interfere with

the magic of the story one bit. I often most enjoyed the stories where I was

most likely to disagree with the political philosophy that informed the story.

 

Larry Niven and James Pournelle (Pournelle in particular) wrote stories driven

by a benign and efficient free market.

Then they started writing together, and wrote a couple of SF classics: “The Mote

in God’s Eye” and “Lucifer’s Hammer”.

 

They wrote some other books, but in general, the team hit a decline.

They wrote one in the late eighties in which one or both writers decided it was

high time someone gave those weak-kneed

librul environmentalists the kicking around they so richly deserved. This was

some twenty years ago, when there was a lot of room for legitimate debate about

global warming. They posited a world gripped in a massive ice age, with glaciers

spreading rapidly south of Minnesota.

 

Characters in the book ruefully admitted that they could have avoided this

disaster if they had only kept pumping CO2 into the atmosphere to stave off the

next ice age.

 

The book was written with the truculent anger of AM talk radio. It had a number

of other flaws and might have been a

failure in any event, but when reading fiction, science fiction in

particular, suspension of disbelief is all-important, and it doesn’t happen if

the writer is sitting between you and the printed word and

making faces at you.

 

Let alone shouting “This [imaginary] disaster is all YOUR fault, you

liberal bastard!”

 

They crossed a line between writing a story based on a philosophy, and tractor

art. They blew right through that line that separates advocacy from propaganda.

 

So it stood to reason that a dozen years later, Michael Crichton, always behind

the curve, would try something similar. He

wrote a book “State of Fear.”

 

Now, truth in advertising time: I haven’t read the book. Crichton is

uneven at the best of times, and reading a book that stems from an

effort to promote a long-since discredited notion (in this case, that global

warming is nothing more than fear-mongering from people who, Unabomber-like, are

Luddites who hate technology

and want us all back living in the trees.) It really doesn’t sound

like a promising read.

 

When Niven and Pournelle wrote their book [Fallen Angels], there was at least

some credibility for their belief. Michael Crichton has come along and taken an

Allen Drury approach to a topic that is, in the scientific community, no longer

even faintly controversial.

Global warming is a fact. Human involvement is regarded as a given.

 

A lot of the major corporations that did so much to promote the

ideas espoused by Crichton, Niven and Pournelle now admit those ideas are

inoperative, and are working to stave off the coming disaster.

 

But True Believers don’t handle changes in dogma from on high very well.

Ironically, Crichton includes a screed in his book warning of

“Politicized science.” Presumably, as opposed to politicized science

fiction.

 

“Sixty Minutes” ran a piece last night on the thawing of the Greenland ice cap.

A recent report noted that the melt

runoff from the ice cap had more than doubled in the past ten years (21.3 cubic

miles in 1996, 53 cubic miles in 2005). One of the most striking parts was when

the 60 Minutes reporter was interviewing one of the scientists on the ice cap,

surrounded by crevasses, and he suddenly realizes he can hear running water. The

scientist points to a crevasse. “It’s there, about 150, 200 feet down. Water

running under the icecap. The rate at which the glaciers are flowing to the

ocean has increased, tripling in the past 10 years.”

 

Quite aside from a rise in ocean levels, it has the potential to

completely shut down the Gulf Stream, which has already been reduced in volume

by a third since 1970. That would have massive effects on the globe’s weather

patterns. London might find itself with the type of climate that Juneau, Alaska

presently enjoys.

 

Reporters at the White House asked Scotty McClellan if Putsch regarded Michael

Crichton as an expert on the global warming issue. Putsch had claimed to have

read “State of Fear” and did meet

with Crichton.

 

Learning that the president was paying attention to Michael Crichton at a time

when the government supposedly is addressing the issue of global warming is a

bit like learning that the guys at JPL had invited the president of the Flat

Earth Society to review launch and trajectory plans for their next Mars orbiter,

or that the local zoo had brought in a creationist to help describe the taxonomy

of species.

 

So the reporters at the White House, still trying occasionally to act like

actual, you know, journalists, asked McClellan if Putsch regarded Crichton as an

expert on the topic of global warming.

 

McClellan refused to answer that one.

 

Not very reassuring. At a time when no sane individual questions the

fact of global warming, and only a handful question if it is anthrogenic or not,

the president is paying attention to the

SF equivalent of Victor Lysenko.

 

Even when the entities that made Putsch possible, the oil companies,

have pretty much abandoned the pretense that global warming isn’t

happening.

 

True believers.

 

I’ll get email, wanting to know if I looked at the weather reports this past

week. I did. It was cold. Even here, it dropped to 10 above, about the coldest

it’s been in several years, and unusual for late February.

 

But I know the historic averages for this region, and I know something about

this “cold snap” that most people don’t:

thirty years ago, the weather we had last week was considered normal.

 

We’re used to warmer winters.

 

--

" Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about

wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed,

by the way. When we're talking about

chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do

so "

-George W. Bush, April 20, 2004

 

Not dead, in jail, or a slave? Thank a liberal!

Pay your taxes so the rich don't have to.

 

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