[extropy-chat] Greg Benford on climate change and Crichton

[Damien Broderick]

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050121/news_lz1e21benford.html

ON CLIMATE CHANGE
Fear of reason

By Gregory Benford and Martin Hoffert
January 21, 2005

Michael Crichton has taken us to fantastic places like Jurassic Park and 
into realistic ones, as in his TV series "ER." But now he ventures into 
rugged scientific terrain, and loses his footing.

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Crichton's new novel, "State of Fear," takes on global warming and climate 
change. He lards it with arguments against the reality of climate change 
and includes many references to the scientific literature, including one of 
ours. In a recent speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco he even 
cited our paper from the peer-reviewed journal Science. Such attention can 
be heartwarming to scientists, but not this time – because Crichton gets 
the science wrong.

Despite "State of Fear's" long bibliography, Crichton seems to have 
actually read only secondary sources, and does not understand them. He 
writes that our paper "concluded that there is no known technology that 
will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century." But 
we didn't say that. Instead, we outlined plenty of technologies that must 
be further developed to stop a probable several-degree rise in global 
temperatures. We called for a Manhattan Project-style effort to explore 
technologies we already have.

Perhaps because he wanted a dramatic, contrarian theme, Crichton did not 
let facts get in the way. For example, he argues in "State of Fear" that 
our oceans are not warming. This is important because, as Arthur Clarke 
reminded us, it makes little sense to call our planet "Earth" when 70 
percent of its surface is ocean. Not only are the oceans warming at the 
surface, there is well-documented and pronounced subsurface warming and 
heat storage – as predicted 20 years ago and consistent with atmosphere and 
ocean climate models.

He's wrong, too, when he claims that a simple fact – that cities are warmer 
than countryside, leading to a "heat island effect" – has been ignored in 
climate temperature data taken near cities. He misleads his readers when he 
has his characters say that temperatures measured by Earth satellites are 
inconsistent with global warming derived from thermometers on land. To 
"document" his claims, Crichton shows many plots downloaded from the 
NASA/GISS Web site – but he misrepresents the data.

Further, he invokes the pseudo-sciences of eugenics and Lysenkoism (in the 
former Soviet Union) as examples of mainstream scientists being led astray. 
But these were politically driven ideologies. They have more in common with 
the voodoo science of the climate contrarians than the dominant view of 
atmospheric scientists and geophysicists. In keeping with many relevant 
professional societies, like the American Geophysical Union, we are 
convinced that the fossil fuel greenhouse is already here, and has the 
potential to vastly transform terrestrial climate for millennia to come.

To believe Crichton and company, you have to believe that there's a vast 
conspiracy – involving the editors of Science, Nature, Scientific American 
and some dozen other peer-reviewed journals – to exclude and reject climate 
skeptics papers. The skeptics mainly publish books and on Web sites, 
avoiding journals.

The reality of climate change triggered by continued fossil fuel burning – 
and increasingly coal – threatens entrenched energy interests. Some of 
these lobby against it with the ferocity of the National Rifle Association. 
Desperate for scientific cover, some opponents have seized on Crichton's 
fiction. Incredibly, in a Jan. 4 speech, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, 
invoked "State of Fear" as an argument against the bipartisan 
McCain-Lieberman energy bill – which for all its failings acknowledges the 
reality of global warming. "Dr. Crichton," said Inhofe, "a medical doctor 
and scientist, very cleverly weaves a compelling presentation of the 
scientific facts of climate change – with ample footnotes and documentation 
throughout – into a gripping plot." But Crichton freely admitted that 
Saturday afternoon movie cliffhangers inspired his plot.

The New York Times Book Review summary of "State of Fear" – "Reverse 
eco-terrorists create natural disasters to convince the public that global 
warming is real" – underscores that Crichton is redirecting fear of global 
warming to anger at the messengers.

This is a tragedy. Our Science paper argues that responding in a 
technically innovative way to the climate/energy challenge can generate 
countless jobs and economic growth in the United States.

Much is at stake if we embrace "State of Fear's" take on global warming. 
Antarctic ice cores show that our civilization has enjoyed a long, 
comfortable climate for the last 10,000 years. To disturb this with a 
sudden rise in temperature could soon endanger us. Worse, there are some 
clues that we could tilt the global equilibrium and not be able to get back 
to the balmy era we've enjoyed throughout human history. That would be a 
catastrophe dwarfing the recent tsunami's destruction.

The climate/energy issue failed to surface in the last election not because 
it's unimportant but because we fail to sense the urgency. In large part 
this is because of deniers like Crichton, resulting in a U.S. policy that 
is "aprs moi le déluge."

Still we don't sandbag against the floods of tomorrow. Fairly comfortable 
now, we live in a science fictional narrative whose ending we're shaping 
with our inaction.


  Benford is a professor of physics at UC Irvine and the author of "Deep 
Time" and the science-fiction Nebula award-winning "Timescape." Hoffert is 
professor of physics at New York University and lead author of studies on 
stabilizing climate change from the fossil fuel greenhouse that have 
appeared in Nature and Science.