Bush's Chat with Novelist Alarms Environmentalists

By Michael Janofsky
The New York Times

Sunday 19 February 2006

Washington - One of the perquisites of being president is the ability to have the author of a book you enjoyed pop into the White House for a chat.

Over the years, a number of writers have visited President Bush, including Natan Sharansky, Bernard Lewis and John Lewis Gaddis. And while the meetings are usually private, they rarely ruffle feathers.

Now, one has.

In his new book about Mr. Bush, "Rebel in Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush," Fred Barnes recalls a visit to the White House last year by Michael Crichton, whose 2004 best-selling novel, "State of Fear," suggests that global warming is an unproven theory and an overstated threat.

Mr. Barnes, who describes Mr. Bush as "a dissenter on the theory of global warming," writes that the president "avidly read" the novel and met the author after Karl Rove, his chief political adviser, arranged it. He says Mr. Bush and his guest "talked for an hour and were in near-total agreement."

"The visit was not made public for fear of outraging environmentalists all the more," he adds.

And so it has, fueling a common perception among environmental groups that Mr. Crichton's dismissal of global warming, coupled with his popularity as a novelist and screenwriter, has undermined efforts to pass legislation intended to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a gas that leading scientists say causes climate change.

Mr. Crichton, whose views in "State of Fear" helped him win the American Association of Petroleum Geologists' annual journalism award this month, has been a leading doubter of global warming and last September appeared before a Senate committee to argue that the supporting science was mixed, at best.

"This shows the president is more interested in science fiction than science," Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, said after learning of the White House meeting. Mr. O'Donnell's group monitors environmental policy.

"This administration has put no limit on global warming pollution and has consistently rebuffed any suggestion to do so," he said.

Not so, according to the White House, which said Mr. Barnes's book left a false impression of Mr. Bush's views on global warming.

Michele St. Martin, a spokeswoman for the Council on Environmental Quality, a White House advisory agency, pointed to several speeches in which Mr. Bush had acknowledged the impact of global warming and the need to confront it, even if he questioned the degree to which humans contribute to it.



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The Journalistic Triumph of Michael Crichton
By John Rennie
Scientific American Observations

Saturday 11 February 2006

In these days of James Frey's phony memoirs becoming best-selling nonfiction, why shouldn't a novel full of half-truths and misleading nonsense win a journalism award? And so in that spirit of "reality sucker-punching irony into submission," let's have a round of applause for Michael Crichton, whom the American Association of Petroleum Geologists has honored with its Journalism Award for those hard-hitting journalistic classics State of Fear and Jurassic Park. (See Editor & Publisher for its note on this.)

We all know Jurassic Park, which blew the lid off the secret dinosaur cloning activities of that billionaire industrialist operating an unlicensed theme park. Thanks to Crichton's enterprising reporting on that scandal, the incidence of velociraptor attacks has plummeted to an historic low. State of Fear didn't sell quite as well, but it is a best-seller, and I wrote about it back in December 2004. Or as the New York Times put it recently:

"State of Fear," dismisses global warming as a largely imaginary threat embraced by malignant scientists for their own ends.

"It is fiction," conceded Larry Nation, communications director for the association. "But it has the absolute ring of truth."

"Absolute" except for the made-up and wrong parts, that is.

More:

That is not the way leading climate scientists see it. When the book was published in 2004, climate experts condemned it as dangerously divorced from reality. Most of these scientists believe human activity, chiefly the burning of fossil fuels, is changing the atmosphere's chemistry in ways that threaten unpredictable, potentially damaging effects.

See substantial debunkings of the book by the RealClimate.org gang.

A cynic might assume that this award is something that the AAPG hands out regularly to global warming deniers, but a look at the past winners suggests that's not the case. Yet it's hard to reconcile the specious science of State of Fear with the association's stated purpose for the award, which is "in recognition of notable journalistic achievement in any medium which contributes to public understanding of geology, energy resources, or the technology of oil and gas exploration." It's further doubtful that the book met this listed guideline ("Therefore, if at all possible, documentation as to the degree of improvement in public understanding would be quite important and useful") given the number of reviews and comments on the book demonstrating that it's hokum.

No, it seems likely that State of Fear won just for presenting a plot that involved geology and the environment to millions of readers, irrespective of its misinforming them about geology and the environment in the process. By those criteria, Immanuel Velikovsky should have won a prize from the American Astronomical Society, Erich von Daniken ought to have been feted by the Archaeological Institute of America and the Weekly World News should be eligible for a Pulitzer. In the words of Stephen Colbert, they are all chock full of "truthiness."

And it's unfortunate for the AAPG that this award will probably make a number of people assume that it is in fact just shilling for industry:

Daniel P. Schrag, a geochemist who directs the Harvard University Center for the Environment, called the award "a total embarrassment" that he said "reflects the politics of the oil industry and a lack of professionalism" on the association's part. (NY Times)

Kudos, AAPG! And for next year's award, may I bring this book to your attention?

Update (2/13):

It looks like I've given the AAPG too much credit. Reader Larry Mewhort points out to me:

I beg to differ with your assumption that the AAPG gave Crichton his award because "it seems likely that State of Fear won just for presenting a plot that involved geology and the environment to millions of readers, irrespective of its misinforming them about geology and the environment in the process."

I believe that the AAPG executive thinks that Crichton is right. Have a look at their statement on climate change. There is also a very favorable review of "State of Fear" in the February AAPG Explorer.

It makes me want to agree with what Luis Alvarez is reputed to have said about some geologists: "they are not really scientists - more like stamp collectors."

That quote made me wince, but not as much as this twaddle from the AAPG's climate change position statement:

Human-induced global temperature influence is a supposition that can be neither proved nor disproved. It is unwise policy to base stringent controls on energy consumption through taxation to support a supposition that cannot be substantiated.

And then there's this from the review:

First, much of what passes for science is actually fiction.

... [The character] Kenner's repeated exposition of scientific studies shows that there is a substantial amount of evidence that the planet is not warming at all. In spite of the dire pronouncements we hear from the mouths of reporters, musicians, actors and fellow scientists, the science of climate change is not nearly as clear as could be wished. In fact, a case might be made that the earth is actually cooling.

As judges of journalistic merit, these petroleum geologists are just bubbling black crude.