this bloated book

Michael Crichton's State of Fear is, to me, disappointing. As an avid reader of all sorts of books, I wouldn't really continue this if it weren't assigned. Which happens a lot in college, but I can always fall back on the point, "at least I learned something". And yeah, I'm learning something in this silly book. Clearly we're not reading it for the action-thriller aspect, because yikes. But where can you go from the Andromeda Strain? State of Fear is very teach-y. The book is so long because he interjects his action with hoards of his research. But can we really believe him when he is going against the scientific establishment? Definitely we must admit that consensus isn't what science is about. But it is what politics is about. It seems like Crichton looked at the issue of global warming and decided to take the side of the few. And really, why do it unless you have a political ax to grind? ANyway, the why isn't so intriguing as how. How do you create a best-seller out of a bunky opinion? Somehow he took the same data that climate scientists use, and form the opposite opinion? This is where his charts and graphs come in as awesome seeing devices. He speaks of satellites taking measures of sea levels that are better than the on-land tools. His footnotes almost sparkle with brilliant evidence. And this definitely works on some people, but I'm not so sure i'm convinced.

I took a really awesome geography class once and we talked a lot about global warming. One thing I remember is what global warming is exactly. And it is right in the name. Global warming refers to the global mean surface temperature. Obviously the earth heats and cools in stages, and not in a uniform way. But that gets overlooked, and as Jennifer tries to declare, "And its effect is presumably the same every where in the world. That's why it's called global warming" (475). Crichton uses a lot of temperature data from specific locations. He tries to show that warming isn't happening everywhere. Yes, that's totally true. As you get more centralized on a specific point, local weather has a greater effect on the surface temp. But that's why it is so important to take a large scale area average temperature, which will show a clear warming trend. For Crichton to pick out specific cites of cooling doesn't really matter.

In his first appendix he strangely pulls together global warming with the 19th century eugenics movement. He calls dangerous the "intermixing of science and politics" as a "bad combination, with a bad history. We must remember the history, and be certain that what we present to the world as knowledge is disinterested and honest" (731). First, to connect the science behind global warming and eugenics is a cheap one. Second, this dude's book is full of politics and clearly he is blind to it.