KellanStec

The following is a paper that I wrote for my ethics and values class about Michael Crichton’s views on global warming and the ethical implications of his views. I know I havn’t written anything in a very long time due to classes and stuff, so I thought I’d post at least something that I have written.

Introduction

After reading Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, I was intrigued by his opinions and thoughts on global climate change. In the appendix of his book, Crichton briefly summarizes his views on the subject. Crichton believes that:

1. we know very little about the climate or what changes it,
2. humans are the cause of rising carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels—but are contributing little to warming,
3. it is much more likely that there are external factors that we are overlooking causing what little warming trends there are, and
4. we have better things to worry about than infantisimal global climate change.

Crichton sees that there are many things that go unnoticed when studying climate change, such as solar warming and land usage. If these are contributing a little to warming, how much blame is left for CO₂—and not only all CO₂, but emissions solely from human activity? It stands to reason that if our effect on the environment’s temperature is minimal, we have better things to be worrying about.

Crichton goes further to say that a scientific consensus says nothing of the validity of that consensus. There is no possible way of knowing what will happen in the future, so to make major decisions and enact policies based on models involving abundant superfluous variables is ludicrous. There were no airplanes and very few cars one hundred years ago. This demonstrates how much a global civilization can change in one hundred years. How likely is it that in one hundred years we will even still be using fossil fuels as energy?

Taking Crichton’s view, I plan to demonstrate that the only reasonable and ethical approach to the problem of climate change is to ignore it. If we really are not responsible for a majority of the climate change, and whatever change we do make cannot have immense unfavorable effects, then we have no responsibility to control it. By taking this approach, we can focus our attention, energy, and money on sensible objectives such as eradicating disease and ending poverty—not unlike Bjorn Lomborg’s views.

I will begin discussing how Crichton agrees and disagrees with the current scientific consensus. I will then move on to reasons why he believes these things and criticisms of his beliefs. Finally, I will analyze his beliefs for myself and discuss why I agree or disagree with his ideas and conclusions.

Crichton’s agreement

I would like to start detailing the areas where Crichton agrees with mainstream scientific consensus. In the Author’s Message of State of Fear, Crichton tells us that he agrees that the Earth’s CO₂ is increasing in quantity, and the probable cause is anthropogenic. He does admit that there are truths within the global warming community, and is not shy about making his agreement one of his first points: “Atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing, and human activity is the probable cause”. In a video interview with Charlie Rose, Crichton states that he believes that the earth is getting warmer—about six tenths of a degree in the past century. He also believes that environmental awareness is “desperately important”, as he learned from his environmentally aware mother.

His views here are undeniably part of the majority consensus, and are outlined in detail in mainstream reports and studies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The 2007 IPCC report summary for policymakers outlines the anthropogenic cause of CO₂: “The primary source of the increased atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide since the pre-industrial period results from fossil fuel use, with land use change providing another significant but smaller contribution”. Crichton states in the Charlie Rose interview that “I absolutely believe that warming is occurring, humans are involved, and it’s going to continue for the next 100 years”. Clearly, the IPCC and Crichton are on the same page here.

Crichton’s disagreement

So, Crichton does agree with some of the science behind climate change. He believes that we should be both aware of and careful with our environment, as well as believing there is an anthropogenic cause for global warming in the form of our CO₂ emissions. This is, however, where the similarities end. The difference between Crichton’s skepticism and mainstream science is how serious of a threat he believes global climate change to be. I will now outline what Crichton believes, backed up by secondary evidence sources.

First and foremost, Crichton points out the fact that a scientific consensus means absolutely nothing. Case in point: The Geocentric Model was once held by the majority of astronomers until at least the sixteenth century. So was the idea that the continents did not move. Consensus is the business of politics. Science requires only one investigator who happens to have gotten his numbers right. Crichton believes that the most relevant element of science is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great mostly because they broke the consensus. It is a fact of history that the consensus has been wrong in the past. As Crichton elaborated his position in an NPR debte, he is not saying that this consensus is wrong, but rather that the consensus itself is not indicative of its truth.

While he believes that we should care for our environment, he does find major flaws in the thinking of the Global Warming movement. He stated on his website in January 2005:

In my view, our approach to global warming exemplifies everything that is wrong with our approach to the environment. We are basing our decisions on speculation, not evidence. Proponents are pressing their views with more PR than scientific data. Indeed, we have allowed the whole issue to be politicized—red vs blue, Republican vs Democrat. This is in my view absurd. Data aren’t political. Data are data. Politics leads you in the direction of a belief. Data, if you follow them, lead you to truth.

This is one of the main issues he has with the global warming movement. We have allowed the science of climate change to become political. He believes that there are many examples of this in the past, citing fear mongers from his childhood warning him of overpopulation and resource scarcity.

Crichton’s website demonstrates one example of how the data has been faintly distorted to meet a political end. Refer to figure 1 below to see this example. Figure 1a is the graph used when the goal is to inspire alarm and concern. All of those jagged edges appear extreme. Figure 1b is the exact same graph, but with the bottom sixteen degrees. After it has been stretched out proportionally, those jagged edges are in reality miniscule quiverings in comparison to the total temperature. This is much like magnifying the seemingly smooth surface of a ball bearing—only to find out that it is rough up close.

Figure 1a. (Src: http://michaelcrichton.net/speech-ourenvironmentalfuture.html)

Figure 1b. (Src: http://michaelcrichton.net/speech-ourenvironmentalfuture.html)

Crichton does not solely blame human activities for all or even most of the warming trends. He thinks it is much more likely that there are external factors, as well as mistakes made in calculations that predict and measure climate change. The uncertainty is also beyond a reasonable level on which to base major and expensive decisions such as conforming to the Kyoto protocol. In fact, the first point he makes in his book covers this: “We know astonishingly little about every aspect of the environment…in every debate, all sides overstate the extent of existing knowledge and its degree of certainty.”

This level of uncertainty is illustrated by the IPCC’s own reports. Since any prediction is based only on models with many variables, all predictions made will naturally vary to some degree. The example Crichton uses is the chart of predictions for temperature changes for the year 2100. Temperature anomalies range from one and a half to six degrees Celsius in the positive direction. Crichton points out that in the real world, a four hundred percent variation is unacceptable. Does your vacation last fifteen days or sixty days? Will the new construction cost one and a half million dollars or six million dollars? In the real world, people simply do not take bets on such high uncertainties.

The reason the uncertainties are so high is that the data heavily rely on scenarios to predict the future climate change, since there is no way of knowing what the future will be like with complete certainty. Again, these scenarios involve many, many variables, and it is very difficult to know how tweaking one variable will affect the others. However, the IPCC still submits the scenarios in its summary for policy makers in the form of a graph as seen below in Figure 2.

Figure 2. (Src: http://www.ipcc.ch/present/graphics/2001wg1/large/01.05.jpg)

Crichton’s skepticism of anthropogenic climate change is enforced by research that is done considering factors other than CO₂ as the main temperature-rising culprit. In a 2002 research paper in Astronomy and Geophysics magazine done by Sami Solanki, the main conclusion of the paper was that solar warming trends have the capability to provide significant warming to the earth’s temperature:

This [graph relating sunspots to climate change] is consistent with a causal relationship between the two [temperature and solar activity] and supports, but by no means proves, the view that the Sun has had an important, possibly even dominant influence on our climate in the past.

This study suggests that the sun may be responsible for up to twenty five hundredths of a degree Celsius of warming in the past century. This is known as the solar variation theory. An addition cause of global warming could be land usage. Additional research done by Ming Cai and Eugenia Kalnay from the University of Maryland suggests that there is a strong effect of both urbanization and land use on the mean temperature for that area. The study suggests that the total effect of these factors contributes around three tenths of a degree Celsius for the century.

Crichton wonders that if these estimates are correct, then that leaves only five hundredths of a degree of this century’s warming—six tenths of a degree—can be attributed to CO₂. Yes, there is a correlation between CO₂ and temperature increase, but nobody knows how much of a temperature increase can be attributed to purely CO₂. It does not seem like it makes much sense to spend time, money, and energy reducing carbon emissions if they have little effect on the global temperature.

Ethical Implications of Crichton’s View

Crichton believes very strongly that it is a big mistake to concern ourselves with global warming. The central facet of his argument is based on the question “What crisis?”. He does not see a crisis in global climate change, and believes that there are much better things to worry about right now.

It bothers Crichton that we are concerning ourselves with something that might or might not happen in one hundred years, based only on models with so many variables that try to account for unpredictable human behavior. He believes that we will naturally make the transition from carbon to hydrogen fuels, just as we have done in the past. Crichton reminds us that as far as he knows, nobody had to mandate automobile purchases to get people off of horses. Humans will naturally pursue better and more efficient methods of luxury, and nothing needs to be forced, especially if it is based on uncertainty.

The following is a quote taken from an NPR debate, and I think it’s telling of Crichton’s ethical position on the subject:

Everyday 30,000 people on this planet die of the diseases of poverty. There are, a third of the planet doesn‘t have electricity. We have a billion people with no clean water, we have half a billion people going to bed hungry every night. Do we care about this? It seems that we don‘t. It seems that we would rather look a hundred years into the future than pay attention to what‘s going on now. I think that’s unacceptable. I think that‘s really a disgrace. This doesn‘t need to happen. We‘re allowing it to happen. And I don‘t know what‘s wrong with the rich self-centered societies that we live in the west that we are not paying attention to the conditions of the wider world. And it does seem to me that if we use arguments about the environment to turn our back on the sick and the dying of our shared world, and that’s our excuse to ignore them, then we have done a true and terrible thing. And it‘s awful.

In summation, Crichton believes there are much more serious matters at hand than what might happen in one hundred years.

Our ethical responsibilities lie with developing the world, and helping people who are living in poverty. We should not feel responsible to saving the planet until we have sufficient evidence that it is going to hell. The worse estimates predict warming of a few degrees Celsius in the next one hundred years. We have only warmed six tenths of a degree in the past century. This hardly seems like an emergency to Crichton.

Critics of Crichton

Crichton holds many controversial views, and naturally, this has drawn his fair share of critics. Scientists involved deeply with global warming have written responses to Crichton’s claims, including James Hansen. Crichton claims in his book that Hansen was off in his estimate by three hundred percent. Hansen does not know how Crichton calculated that number, and demonstrates that he was only off by fractions of a degree in all three of his scenarios.

Environmental Defense is another organization that is critical of Crichton. In a March 2005 article, they analyze State of Fear and conclude that Crichton is flat out wrong in some cases and very selective in the evidence he uses to prove his point. While Crichton believes that many scientists are “cooking” their data, Environmental Defense dismisses this claim as nonsensical. Crichton offers little data to back up this claim.

They go further to point out that in theory, it is best not to act upon uncertainty. Crichton would agree with this statement. However, this is not the way that things work in practice. We use seat belts while driving and take out life insurance policies. They state that the worst possible things we can do is sit on our hands in the face of the mounting evidence that global warming is occurring and having harmful effects on our environment. The ecosystem risks far outweigh the inconvenience of cutting carbon emissions, so Crichton’s concerns of uncertainty are moot.

RealClimate has also written a review and analysis of State of Fear. In it, they cover multiple areas of the book, including Crichton’s example of a data skewer—the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHIE). The website agrees that the UHIE does make a difference in urban areas, but makes the argument that obviously the climate scientists have accounted for these differences. After all, the data are not skewed on windy days opposed to non-windy days, as the UHIE would dictate. Wind is known to diminish the effects of the UHIE, but a recent paper published in Nature has shown that the effects are minimal or even nonexistent.

Another point that RealClimate brings to the table is Crichton’s claim that, since we do not know everything about climate change, we actually know nothing. Just because we do not know everything, this does not mean that we do not know something about climate change. We do know enough to act, and make a difference in carbon emissions. Some of the scenarios involve changes in human activities, such as carbon emission. This is one of the reasons the scenarios differ so much—they account for all kinds of variables. So, if these scenarios and predictions are right, we really can make a difference by reducing emissions.

Summary and My Opinion

Crichton’s website states that he will no longer be discussing issues regarding State of Fear and related themes—this includes the topic of global climate change—in the future. However, in the time that Crichton has dedicated to discussing the issue, he has laid a foundation for skepticism against the majority scientific consensus. In his numerous interviews, speeches, books, and publications, he has given very clear reasons for his skepticism. He believes that there simply is not enough evidence to show that global warming is derived anthropogenically through carbon emissions.

Crichton believes that humans are likely the cause of global greenhouse gas increase. He also believes that the earth is warming, although he believes it is nearly impossible to tell what an “average” might be with something as varying as climate. He does not believe that there is enough evidence to demonstrate a solitary correlation between greenhouse gas increase and temperature increase, because there are other factors actively involved in climate change. Humans cannot be solely to blame when other elements are considered.

For the most part, I agree with nearly all Crichton has to say. I do not believe that six tenths of a degree temperature change in either direction is enough for cause for concern. I think that there are many things that we do not know, and the simple fact that there is a consensus says nothing of the validity of a claim. In fact, the consensus may fight to actively perpetuate something that is not there.

I think we have more important things to worry about than miniscule climate change. We have people going to bed hungry, people without electricity or access to health care services. It makes more sense to me to develop the world economically and not worry about warming of a couple of degrees. A couple of degrees are nothing. We have more of a variation between city and country due to the heat island effect. If the earth does warm, we can—and will—survive just fine. I suspect we will probably also be glad we did not waste our time keeping it a couple of degrees cooler. The newly developed world can afford air conditioning.

Sources

A conversation with Michael Crichton. Rose, Charlie. PBS. 19 February 2007. Link.
“Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis, Summary for Policymakers.” 21 October 2007. Link.
Crichton, Michael. State of Fear. New York: HarperCollins Publisher, 2004.
Hansen, James. “Michael Crichton’s ‘Scientific Method’.” 02 November 2007. Link.
Kalnay, Eugenia and Ming, Cai. “Impact of Urbanization and Land use on Climate”. Nature. 423 (29 May 2003): 528-31.
Malakoff, David. “Global Warming is Not a Crisis.” 22 March 2007. Online sound. NPR. 31 October 2007.
“Michael Crichton’s State of Confusion”. 30 October 2007. Link.
Parker, David E. “Large-scale warming is not urban”. Nature. 432 (2004): 290
“Separating Fact from Fiction in Crichton’s ‘State of Fear‘.” 30 October 2007. Link.
Solanki, Sami K. “Solar Variability and Climate Change.” Astronomy and Geophysics 43 (2002): 5.9-5:13.
“The Case for Skepticism on Global Warming.” 20 October 2007. Link.

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