I wrote an article yesterday remembering Michael Crichton, who died Tuesday. Look there for kind words about his positive contributions. One topic of his, beyond all others, I think requires special discussion in a separate fashion, and that is the legacy of his controversial book State of Fear and its impact on all of us.
Many people have described his book as attempting to refute the science behind concern about Global Warming. In after-the-fact interviews, Crichton seems to put a better spin on it claiming that the book was just trying to raise the level of dialog on the subject to use more science, although it's hard to tell if this was just cognitive dissonance at play.
The following is from a January, 2005 interview on NPR:
Michael Crichton: We need a strong and effective and science-based environmental movement and we don't have it, and I think that we are risking significant environmental degradation as a result of very outmoded thinking.
...
There has been a privileging of computer models over efforts to actually acquire data directly from the environment.
Ira Flatow (host): Why write a fictional book about it? Why don't you take your evidence and publish it in a journal and duke it out the way the other scientists do?
Crichton: Well, there's a couple of reasons. One is that I'm not a climate scientist and what I've done here, how I look at what I've done, is to say that this is an outsider's view.
And by the way, I came to this kind of accidentally. I mean, I was reading a certain article in the front of the book of a science journal, and it didn't make a lot of sense and I kept reading it and reading it and finally I began to say, “why—what's going on?” It was a one page article, and I thought—usually what happens is when you see a short piece of writing like this that is self-contradictory is that the writer wants to say something that they can't say.
I thought well, the only thing that this particular writer could want to say is that global warming is not as convincing as we think, and I thought well that's ridiculous. But at a certain point between books when I had a chance I went and started looking at the temperature record and all of that data is online. I encourage every interested person to take a look for themselves. You don't have to take my assessment of this. Go and see what you think. I was very surprised at what I found.
No one is denying that temperature is increasing. It is, and the question is what exactly is taking place. And that's a much more complex issue than many people are talking about. One of the most interesting recent things has to do with whether or not the correction for land use in general and the urban heat island in particular is adequate. What has happened is...
I guess we can each hear this conversation differently, but what I get from this is that Crichton had the fanciful notion that it is possible to model the world's global climate without serious computation. Because a statement like “all of that data is online” is probably already false just to start with. And the notion that any old interested person, regardless of credential, can just “take a look for themselves” is dangerously naive.
It's also worth noting that US Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), famously relied on Crichton as a “scientist” and cited State of Fear as an example of the scientific community not having a consensus. And surely there were others who clung to this “evidence” as well.
Exactly because the rest of his works inspired us all to see the world through his eyes, and exactly because people had come to trust us that he would offer us things that ought to spark our imagination, he should not have written this book. This book inspired people to doubt science and to think they were competent to evaluate complex scientific models by casual means. The global weather system is unfortunately more complicated than that, which is why it has defied weather men for years.
Through this literary vehicle, Crichton pretended that he could personally see into the hearts of large numbers of scientists committed to saving the world from possible devastation and call them out as doing bad science. The self-evident hypocrisy of such a claim is awesome in its proportions.
This very book is an example of armchair science and holds itself out as a condemnation of a planet full of career scientists. The book alleges that many of these scientists said what they said in order to continue their funding when many of these scientists hold tenured positions or work in socialized countries where their job is secure regardless of their position on this matter.
In an essay I wrote in April, 2008, I explained in some detail the reasons why I think climate scientists are, if anything, more conservative than they should be in their predictions. Some of Michael Crichton's legacy is that they will necessarily hold back on predictions rather than volunteer useful speculation. Crichton owed us better science himself before he claims that all these scientists are overestimating what's going on. If anything, we owe it to those scientists to recognize that they are probably underestimating because they're trying not to be alarmist. As a consequence of the need to err on the conservative side, I'm on record as betting that nearly all articles you'll ever read on this subject will include phrases like “faster than expected” or “sooner than expected.”I personally measure the true cost of Crichton's effect on this matter in harsher terms than most, since I don't really care at all about the effects of this book. It's what he didn't write that matters to me. Yes, he wrote a book condemning Climate Change, but the book was quickly dismissed by many people and not one of his most accepted books. The real cost of the book is the opportunity cost that it represented. He could have written other books, but didn't. He wrote a book getting people inspired to run out and do good science. He didn't imagine a scenario in which there was a Climate Change problem, in the way he imagined a world in which there were dinosaurs again, and then take us into that world and show us the power of good science. A whole generation of scientists could have grown up as intrigued by climate science as by mutating bacteria or dinosaurs or time travel.
In the worst case, if Climate Change is as bad as some of us are worried it is, and if every second counts, it's conceivable that we'll find that mankind did not act quickly enough to respond to Climate Change, and then was gone. No one will be here to write the obituary in that case, so it will be hard to know whether we missed by a little or missed by a lot in terms of how we responded. But in that scenario, where we just blew it and there wasn't enough time left, it is within the realm of possibility that had he written a different book, we'd all still be there thanking him for having gotten us moving in time.
For more information on climate change, see my climate change page.
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Comments
The New York Times's Ideas blog had a short bit about this yesterday with a link to his speech from 2003 where he said environmentalism has become the new fundamentalist religion of urban atheists. The speech is here if you're interested.
I thought it was terrible, but I think it was probably quite influential with a certain segment of the population. In fact, I still hear it mentioned by climate change skeptics of the sort who would never do much other research or reading. I don't think it was influential because it was a good book; I think it was influential because Michael Crichton wrote it and people trusted him. It's a shame that he squandered his reputation that way.
I was a research assistant for the recent book The Social Construction of Climate Change--a collection of peer reviewed papers from seven countries which exlored how cultures deal with climate change. I think of it as how truth embraces --or not--truth. (It was reviewed as "edgy" which thrilled the editor and me!)
The fact that Crichton selected the three "scientists" who are funded by the oil company and that the book was used to bad effect by crooked politicians makes me think that the author was paid a little honorarium himself by Mobil Oil.
The International Panel for Climate Change is 2,500 scientists which represent the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the huge volume of evidence for climate change.
It was worse than a disservice. It was criminal.
rated and ranted
A mind's direction and capability for self-correction can be as important as its raw power.
"...how power embraces truth--or not."
senior moment...
Crichton didn't just posit that other factors than carbon emissions were contributing to global warming, he made the environmental movement the antagonist in the story. One of the main themes is his work was best expressed Jurassic Park. It was that today's scientists are so busy asking if they can do something that they don't stop to ask if they should. For those who haven't read the book, but have seen the movie, in the book, Hammond was not a jolly old St. Nick eager to give the kids of the world dinosaurs. He was the primary antagonist (him and the raptors- not the T-rex, Mr. Spielberg).
If State of Fear had been about a scientist who was pressuring underlings to suppress alternate data about global warming, it still would have been a failure, but it wouldn't have felt like such a betrayal. What he did in SoF was analogous to making Dr. Grant the antagonist of Jurassic Park.
His statements later about the book just reinforced the view that SoF was nothing more than an attack on and attempt to discredit the entire enviromentalist movement. It was bad fiction, but it was also shameful propaganda. Sadly, it seriously tarnished his legacy for many people.
While his death was certainly a shock at his age, I couldn't find myself feeling a great sense of loss. Perhaps that is cold of me, but I am speaking about what his death means to me personally, not about whether his death was tragic. There are those who died too young, leaving the world and its culture lessened by their passing and those who died too young after their contribution to the world had already been made (or made and sullied). Crichton falls into the latter category for me, in large part due to State of Fear. I cried at the news of Phil Hartman's murder (The Simpsons was never the same after his loss. On a side note, the first episode of the last season of Newsradio was probably the best 30 minutes of any sitcom ever aired). I was numbed by the early death of Douglas Adams. After seeing The Dark Knight, I fully realized the talent that had been lost in Heath Ledger's death. Crichton's death saddens me, of course, but it makes me sad that someone who had given me such pleasure passed away. What is missing is the sense of loss over what the world will be missing with him gone.
(I realize that much of this overlaps with Kent's other post on the passing of Crichton, but it is hard to divorce the bitter taste SoF left in my mouth from Crichton's ultimate legacy).