LONDON, DEC. 11. He is most famous for his far-fetched tale of how dinosaurs could be brought to life with DNA from mosquitoes trapped in amber. Now the best-selling author, Michael Crichton, has written a thriller about eco-terrorism that critics say is equally fantastic in its refusal to accept that global warming is a clear and present danger.
With two million copies of the State of Fear hitting bookshops, Crichton's thesis that the "interminable yammering of fearmongers" about climate change is being used to keep ordinary people perpetually anxious, will reach a huge audience.
As diplomats and scientists gathered at the tenth international convention on climate change in Buenos Aires on Friday to discuss where to go from Kyoto, the 62-year-old author of Jurassic Park and Rising Sun arrived in Britain to promote his 600-page "techno thriller."
The story of a South Pacific island which launches a multimillion pound lawsuit against the United States on account of global warming, and green terrorists who plot to manufacture a series of earthquakes, underwater landslides and tsunamis to prove that global warming is happening, it has an unusual denouement: a 14-page bibliography and a five-page note on his scepticism about global warming.
Dismissed as a "political pamphleteer" by one U.S. critic, Crichton fills his latest with graphs and "facts" against global warming. Rather than warning readers about the dangers of dinosaurs, nanotechnology or rising Japanese power, he bolsters his polemic by citing the work of prominent climate change sceptics, including the political scientist, Bjorn Lomberg.
"The current near-hysterical preoccupation with safety is at best a waste of resources and a crimp on the human spirit, and at worst an invitation to totalitarianism," he concludes.
Highlighting a "natural warming trend" currently afflicting the globe, he estimates that in the next century, temperatures will rise by just 0.812436C, well-below the 1.5-6C estimated by the intergovernmental panel on climate change.
Calling the scientific consensus on climate change "creepy," he told the British Broadcasting Corporation yesterday: "Science has nothing to do with consensus. Politics is about consensus."
Scientists and environmentalists greeted his arguments with derision yesterday. Even his hero, Mr. Lomberg, disputed his calculations. And Tony Jupiter, the director of Friends of the Earth, said: "It's interesting to see how climate change sceptics have truly entered the world of fiction."
"They've been in that world for some time, but they've been positioned as factually-based. The fact that these arguments are presented as a novel puts them in their correct place in society.
"Go to the basic model prepared by the Hadley [climatic research] Centre. [It shows] a very clear relation between rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere and rising temperatures. These could be very considerable in a very short period of time.''
The global temperature has risen by between 0.6C and 0.7C in the past century. Globally, the 1990s were the hottest decade, and the seven hottest years since 1861 fell in that decade.
"If you're always better safe than sorry you don't actually move forward, you don't invent new things, you don't achieve greatness. Worrying has its costs. If we over-worry about some things, we under-worry about others. If the Crichton story can help us to say we do over-worry about global warming, then maybe it does serve some good purpose."
