Um... lol? *hopeful grin*
Not kidding. I no longer believe in the idea of human driven climate change. There can be no doubt that humans affect the environment around them (As do nearly all species), but global warming theory in its current form can no longer count me as a supporter.
Care to give a short summary? Global warming has always been a topic on which I've never really been positive of a whole lot.
Summary of the book is that ELF (The Earth Liberation Front, a real life eco-terrorist group) is planning to fake a series of natural disasters so as to make global warming theory appear to be true. For example, they detonate explosives in Antarctica and break off a large piece of sea ice to give the appearance of ice caps melting. They do this with $10 million that was donated to an environmental chairty called NERF (A fictitious organization along the lines of the Sierra Club) by tycoon George Morton. ELF and NERF launder the money and use it finance ELF's eco-terrorism.
The bulk of the book focuses on MIT scientist John Kenner's efforts to unravel this conspiracy. The book is divided neatly into action/story sequences where Kenner travels the globe chasing bad guys, evading headhunters, flying helicopters, and the like. Along for the journey are George Morton's lawyer, an earnest environmentalist named Peter Evans, and Morton's personal assistant, the tall blonde Sarah Evans. You see, Morton had suspected that his money was being laundered, and his closer confidantes help Kenner to fight the terrorists.
The second type of sequence in the book is a series of debates/discussions that Kenner has with Peter Evans. Evans believes in global warming, Kenner does not. Complete with academic citations and in-text temperature charts, Kenner casts doubts on Evans' faith in global warming. Later, Kenner does this with actor/activist Ted Bradley (A charicatured cross of Martin Sheen and Michael Douglas).
The story is fairly thin, and many parts of it are never really explained fully. The book is all a vehicle for Chricton's Kenner to convert the earnest eco-lawyer Evans and embarrass the ignorant actor Bradley. The case Kenner makes is incredibly persuasive.
The highlights of Kenner's argument are:
1. Despite television reports, sea levels are not rising rapidly. They rise at only about 4 millimeters per year, or about 20 centimeters in the last hundred years. Alarmist predictions such as the reports that the island nation of Vanuatu will be totally submerged to be baseless. The oceans around Vanuatu show no major rise in sea levels this century.
2. Glaciers and ice caps are not melting due to human activity. Glaciers have been melting for thousands of years. They are not permanent features of the Earth, but rather remnants of the last ice age. Most of them were formed during the ice age, and have slowly been melting ever since. Glacier melt precedes large scale industry, and cannot be due entirely to human emmissions. Antarctica actually has more ice on it today than it did 25 years ago when we started closely measuring. Reports of Antarctica losing ice come entirely from the Antarctic Peninsula, which comprises only 2% of the continent's area. The rest of Antarctica is actually gaining ice. Antarctica has 90% of the world's ice, so the fact that Antarctica is not melting but rather getting colder means a lot in this debate.
3. Global temperature increases should not be seen as a result of CO2 in the atmosphere. There simply isn't a correlation between CO2 and temperature increases. Between 1945 and 1980, the Earth's temperature
fell even as CO2 levels were rising. If there were a strict correlation between CO2 and temperature, this would not be true. It would be better to understand global temperature increase as a function of other factors. The first is the end of the "Little Ice Age". This was a period beteen 1500 and 1850 when the Earth was cooling. This ended in 1850 or so, and since then the Earth has gotten slightly warmer. The warming of the last 150 years is the natural swinging back of the pendulum after this abnormally cold period. The colder temperatures of the 18th Century are the anomaly, not the warmer temperatures of today. The second factor is land us. In 1850, New York City was five degrees colder than it is today. Yet the surrounding smaller cities are no warmer. Albany, for example, only 150 miles from New York City, is almost exactly the temperature is was in 1850. Why? As it turns out, cities are much warmer than rural areas because of the steel and blacktop. As New York grew, so did its temperature, while smaller more suburban rural areas stayed relatively unchanged. The is called the "Urban Heat Island Effect", and it has drastically distorted global temperature measurements. Cities have grown tremendously in the 20th Century, and these cities have gotten drastically warmer due to this growth, but we don't see corresponding increases in temperatures in most rural areas. So, we might conclude that the rise in average temperatures is not an atmospheric phenomenon spread evenly throughout the world, but rather a localized phenomenon driven by land use patterns. Third, the further back you go the less accurate the temperature records are. That one is pretty self explainatory.
There's a lot in this 600 page book obviously, and there is obviously more depth in just the areas I've talked about than what I say here. But that would be the Cliff's Notes version of Chricton's anti-warming argument.
I think this is a pretty fair-handed (negative) analysis of the book.
I would harly call that fair-handed. It's not even close, given that the reviewer admits to having skipped much of the scientific discussion because his attention scan was inadequate ("I found myself skipping page after page of his characters' interminable griping to get to the action parts.".
And it is riddled with inaccuracies. A perfect example of inaccuracies and misrepresentations in this review is Masters' attribution to Chricton of a belief in a "politico-legal-media complex". This is not Chrichton's view, but the view of one character in the book, Professor Hoffman! How can you say this review is fair minded when it attributes the fictitious views of fictional characters as being the authors actual views? Chrichton outlines his own views in a appendix to the book, and nowhere does Chrichton say he believes a politico-legal-media complex is orchestrating global warming paranoia. Steven Spielberg has made movies with characters that are Nazis, does that make him a Nazi? This illogic is so ludicrous it defies parody!
Of even greater self-parody is the reviewer's reliance on the INtergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report (IPCC) issued by the UN. Chrichton points out in his book that this report is not to be trusted (It must have been in one of the sections the reviewer decided to skip). It was written by scientists who intentionally chose
not to claim that global warming was proven, and it was re-written by UN bureacrats after the scientists had left the conference. Many protested the re-writing of a report in their names by bureacrats with no scientific or technical training. Yet this highly politicized document is the basis for nearly all the scientific criticisms the reviewer makes of Chrichton's supposed errors.
The reviewer goes on to point out the predictions of IPCC computer models and other computer models for the future of cliamte change. Again, Chrichton has pre-emptively refuted this point in his book (Again, this is why you shouldn't skip so many section to get to the action part). He points to the many earlier predictions made about climate change. He points to the 1970s hysteria that the Earth was cooling, a hysteria I discussed earlier. He points to computer models in the early 1990s that tried to predict the next 15 years. Now that these years are past us, we see that these models were not even close to the actual cliamte records. If I claim the Heat will beat the Pistons in basketball tommorrow night, this does not prove the Heat will beat the Pistons. It is merely a guess, albeit an educated one, about what will happen in the future. The fact that I think the Heat will beat the Pistons does not prove the Heat will beat the Pistons. We can know the past, but we can't predict the future, and only a fool would say that Chrichton's description of our past and present is refuted by a computer prediction of the future, especially given the woeful track record of such models.
That guy's Kung-Fu is weak. Chrichton's Kung-Fu is strong.
