Crichton gives environmentalist hysteria its comeuppance

Suzanne Fields, who is a damn good writer by the way, does a nice job explaining the environmental impact, so to speak, of Michael Crichton's new novel, State of Fear. Here are some key points:

Not long ago his speech, "Science Policy in the 21st Century," was sponsored by two think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, and it's about what he thinks about environmentalists in general, and climate change in particular. He has a lot of thoughts about the way science influences public policy.

He minces no words. What passes for science by so-called experts in the debate over "global warming," he says, influences policy that is based on faulty data and ideological considerations. This does considerably more damage than good.

Ideology drives the scientists who get the grants to conduct research; the government agency that gives grants is driven by politics. In the novel, a page-turning action thriller, major characters, including a scientist, a lawyer, a philanthropist and two gorgeous women, are superheroes who foil the devices of environmental extremists, evil missionaries with messianic drives, pushing policies born of their own egos.

In a novel twist on the novel, the author appends footnotes and a bibliography to document scientific reports, and two hard-hitting essays explaining how and why politicized science is dangerous.

He compares the science of the environmentalists as similar to that of the study of eugenics a century ago. The study of eugenics, the idea that the human race could be "improved" by selective breeding, was at first supported by presidents, Nobel laureates, major universities, the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations, and together they molded public opinion. The science was insidious, pseudo-, and wrong.

Eugenics, recognized nearly everywhere now as both morally and criminally wrong, led directly to the Holocaust, with the Nazis killing first the feeble-minded, and ultimately extended to include Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals. Those who opposed eugenics were reactionary, ignorant or both. Research motivated by racism, fear of immigrants and "keeping the wrong people out of the neighborhood," drew few protests.

Michael Crichton argues that many environmental studies today are similarly flawed, directed by scientists who shape their research to fit the cause, and read by an ill-informed public duped to believe that scientific papers are "objective."