S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery
Unstoppable Global Warming,
Every 1,500 Years
Rowman & Littlefield, 2007
The basic questions of the current climate change debate are sufficiently known and well structured:
- Do we live in an era of a statistically significant, nonaccidental and noncyclical climate change?
- If so, is it dominantly man-made?
- If so, should such a moderate temperature increase bother us more than many other pressing problems we face and should it receive our extraordinary attention?
- If we want to change the climate, can it be done? Are current attempts to do so the best allocation of our scare resources?
My answer to all these questions is NO, but with a difference in emphasis. I don't aspire to measure the global temperature, nor to estimate the importance of factors which make it. This is not the area of my comparative advantages. But to argue, as it's done by many contemporary environmentalists, that these questions have already been answered with a consensual "yes" and that there is an unchallenged scientific consensus about this is unjustified. It is also morally and intellectually deceptive.
Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, Wall Street Journal, 30 May 2008
Editorial Note, 2008:
Singer and Avery's book, which I review below, has just come out in a new 2008 edition, "updated and expanded," as the subtitle says. It is also extensively rewritten and reorganized, to its great material improvement. I have also learned in the meantime something of the place of Fred Singer in the history of the global warming debate.
The original inspiration for Al Gore's involvement with the global warming issue was one of his professors at Harvard, Roger Revelle. In 1957 Revelle had published data showing increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In 1965 he helped attribute this increase to human burning of fossil fuels, and in 1982 he predicted that global warming could result from this increase. This made him "the father of the greenhouse effect." However, Revelle was not an alarmist and tended to recommend caution. In 1991, he coauthored an article with Fred Singer, saying, among other things, "Drastic, precipitous, and especially, unilateral steps to delay the putative greenhouse impacts can cost jobs and prosperity and increase the human costs of global poverty, without being effective." This was not what Al Gore and his friends wanted to hear. In the 1992 Presidential campaign, claims were floated that Revelle had become senile before his death (of a heart attack, later in 1991). Singer was publicly accused by Justin Lancaster, who was a science advisor to Gore, of taking advantage of Revelle's mental incapacity and putting his name on the article without his consent. Singer sued. Lancaster settled, with a public retraction (which he has subsequently tried to take back, though all the details and evidence of the case are on the public record).
I learned of this ugly footnote to Gore's moral environmental crusade from The Deniers, The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud* (*And those who are too fearful to do so), by Lawrence Solomon [Richard Vigilante Books, 2008]. Solomon is a Canadian environmentalist who got interested and began writing newspaper articles about global warming "deniers," curious if the claims of Gore et al. were true that such people were marginal crackpots, unqualified, or tools of Big Oil. It didn't look like any of these charges were true; and Solomon became concerned that Gore's "scientific consensus" on climate was fraudulent. Of course, after such a discovery, it is unlikely that Solomon (like Bjorn Lomborg) would any longer be described as an "environmentalist" by the community of politically active environmentalists. Such heresy in itself discredits one's environmental bona fides.
But Canadians have done yeoman work in this area (perhaps because they wouldn't mind a bit of warming up there). Solomon's own first case features the Canadians Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. They discredited the infamous "hockey stick" graph of temperatures created by Michael Mann, which showed that 1998 had been the hottest year of the millennium, after a few years of alarming and unprecedented temperature increases. It seems that Mann had, intentionally or unintentionally, misused his statistical methods. His graph could have been generated with noise. McIntyre now has his own website, Climate Audit, and McKitrick has his own book, Taken By Storm, The Troubled Science, Policy, and Politics of Global Warming [with Christopher Essex, Key Porter Books Limited, Toronto, 2002, 2007]. This is one of the most impressive examinations ever of both the science and politics of global warming. Meanwhile, Bjorn Lomborg has his own relevant book, Cool It, The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming [Knopf, 2008]. Of course, being a "Skeptic" on climate is now becoming a Thought Crime, and we will all end up at Al Gore's version of the Nuremberg Trials.
In the two years [2007] since the publication of Michael Crichton's State of Fear [2005], reviewed below, it has received little public notice and the drumbeat of propaganda about global warming not only continued but increased. Al Gore turned his PowerPoint presentation on the issue into a movie, An Inconvenient Truth [2006], which did reasonably well at the box office. U.S. Senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe have written an open letter to Exxon-Mobil threatening some kind of action because the oil company has been funding some anti-warming research at a think tank. They apparently think that free speech has now been suspended and that denying global warming should have the same legal prohibition as Holocaust denial in France. Joseph Kennedy II has called global warming skeptics "bastards" -- something I have never noticed anyone calling Albert Einstein because of his skepticism over quantum mechanics. They also seem to think that the source of research funding always determines the results that are to be expected -- a principle that also discredits, of course, research funded by the federal government, which uniformly serves the interests of the federal government in implying that it, including Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe, should have more power. Unfortunately for Al Gore, the convenient nature of his truth, which is for unlimited government and command economics, meaning money and power for him and his friends, emerged in the 2006 campaign for Proposition 87 in California. This was to tax oil companies to fund research into "alternative energy." Gore was to endure two levels of humiliation in the campaign: (1) that his own campaign ad for the proposition was pulled to run a series of ads featuring only Bill Clinton; and (2) that the proposition went down to decisive defeat. As it happened, a week after the election The Economist mentioned that about 10% of venture capital is already going into research on alternative fuels and energy. However, since there has been steady research in such things since the 70's, with limited results, how much more is to be expected any time soon is a good question.
With very little in the way of skeptical comment from the media bandwagon for Gore, et al., Unstoppable Global Warming, Every 1,500 Years, by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery finally is a bit of fresh air. They are not as skeptical as Crichton about warming as such, but they go after the thesis that it has anything to do with human activities and is something that we should, or can, do something about. one aspect of their approach involves the natural rhythms of warming and cooling in Earth's history. Another is the role of carbon dioxide in relation to a greenhouse effect of warming. With both, some eye opening information comes from an article published by the Geological Society of America in the GSA Today of July 2003 [Vol.13, No.7], "Celestial Driver of Phanerozoic Climate?" by Nir J. Shaviv, of Hebrew University, and Ján Veizer of the University of Ottawa and the Ruhr Universität. The whole article is available in text or pdf format on line.
A key bit of data from Veizer and Shaviv's article I have added to the following chart, whose original form, showing the transgressions and regressions of the oceans, can be examined at "The Pulse of the Earth" webpage. The full chart in "Celestial Driver of Phanerozoic Climate?" can be seen in a footnote, along with some other climate history information. 
Here we can see North America, in brown and orange, standing dry during the regressions, and the ocean, in blue, lapping over the Transcontinental Arch during the transgressions. What I have added, also in blue, is an indication of when the earth has had polar caps. This is shown when blue bars extend at each end of the chart -- the "Icehouse" conditions for the Earth. In Phanerozoic time, i.e. geological history since the beginning of the Cambrian, something under the last 600 millions years, there have been four "Icehouses." In the Paleozoic Era, from the Cambrian to the Permian, this involved glaciation. Veizer and Shaviv note the presence of "ice rafted debris" and "glacial deposits" in the icehouse periods. During the Mesozoic, the time of the dinosaurs, from the Triassic to the Cretaceous, the icehouse is indicated with a different tint of blue because, as Veizer and Shaviv say, "true polar ice caps have not been documented for this time interval." There is some "ice rafted debris" but no evidence of glaciation. Finally, we are in an icehouse ourselves, which has persisted most of the Cenozoic Era, with glaciation since the Pleistocene and icecaps and many glaciers persisting. I have added a fifth icehouse before the Cambrian because this is now a popular theory about why life only became abundant and varied in the "Cambrian Revolution" -- before then we had a "snowball Earth," with all the oceans frozen and life limited by the darkness of unfrozen, subsurface water. Given the rhythm of the icehouses, it is reasonable that there should be a Precambrian episode anyway.
The temperature of the Earth over geological time follows the succession of icehouse and "greenhouses," i.e. the warmer intermediate periods. The highest temperatures of all were after the end of the Permian icehouse. This produces a cycle of about 135 million years. Veizer, a geologist, did not know what periodic event, if any, could account for this cycle. There have been four icehouses in Phanerozoic time and, for instance, six transgressions. The Tippecanoe and Absaroka transgressions center nicely in icehouses, but we do not otherwise get a match. The Zuñi transgression neatly straddles the Jurassic-Cretaceous icehouse and the following greenhouse. Then Veizer discovered that Shaviv, an astrophysicist, did know what could match the cycles. That was when the earth, in its orbit around the Milky Way Galaxy, passes through spiral arms of the galaxy -- right now we are in the Orion Arm of the Galaxy (home of M42, the Great Orion Nebula). Their article is mainly about the effect this could have on weather. It turns out that while in a spiral arm, the Earth receives more in the way of radiation from cosmic rays. This ionizes atoms in the air, which provide better nuclei for cloud formation. The icehouses are thus characterized by greater cloud cover, which increases the Earth's albedo and reflects more sunlight back into space. The Earth cools. A purely geophysical process would seem to be responsible for the transgressions, and the warming effect we might expect from water covering the continents is apparently offset by the cooling effect. The Jurassic-Cretaceous icehouse appears to be the exception, where the arrangement of the contingents, with open ocean at the poles, prevented glaciation and the formation, as Veizer and Shaviv say, of "true polar ice caps."
What the record of temperature, icehouses, and transgressions really doesn't match up with is the history of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. Veizer and Shaviv cite three different studies on CO2 levels. The studies do not agree very well, but they do agree on two things: (1) the rise and fall of CO2 is unrelated to the rise and fall of temperature, and (2) the concentration of CO2 right now is at a historic low. I had seen this mentioned a year or so ago on just one television documentary, on something like the Science Channel, but they had not given a reference and nothing else I have seen has mentioned anything of the sort. one study (the GEOCARB III, by Berner and Kothavala, 2001) actually shows very high CO2 levels in a couple of the coldest periods, during the Ordovician and near the Jurassic Cretaceous boundary. The effect of this, of course, is to show that CO2 levels don't have very much to do with the temperature of the Earth. This is bad news for global warming enthusiasts, who want a direct link between warming and the evils of automobiles, oil companies, and American consumerism.
Singer and Avery, of course, have a great deal more in their book than an examination of Veizer and Shaviv's information. I lead with the latter because it is so devastating, and because public discussions of global warming still usually fail to note that the Earth has been much warmer in the past than now, and that for much of Phanerozoic time the Earth had no glaciers or polar caps. The impression the public would get is that any warming will kill coral reefs and then the whole planet, so we better give up modern energy production right away. The title of Unstoppable Global Warming, Every 1,500 Years refers to cycles of warming and cooling on a much smaller scale than Phanerozoic time, indeed, just since the end of the last Glacial, about 10,000 years ago. For several thousand years after that, the Earth was relatively much warmer than it is now -- the Climatic Optimum, which Singer and Avery, unlike Al Gore, have no reason not to mention. Since then, the cycles of climate change are reasonably evident for about the last 2000 years. Thus, we go from the Roman Warming of the early years AD, to the Dark Ages Cooling, to the Mediaeval Warming -- the Little Climatic Optimum -- to the Little Ice Age, and finally to the warming trend that has continued since around 1850. Recent periods of cooling seem to involve droughts in key places, and the overall cooling since the Climatic Optimum has meant gradual desiccation, for instance, of the Sahara. The Dark Ages Cooling can have added to the problems of the Roman Empire and may even have knocked out Mayan Civilization, which was entirely dependant on rainfall for water. Similarly, the theory is that an earlier cooling led to a drought in Egypt, so that the evils of the First Intermediate Period are linked to climate -- the great Faiyum lake, later beloved of XII Dynasty Kings, appears to have dried up during this period.
Although they don't seem to discuss it in the book, the "1,500 years" in Singer and Avery's title may refer to a climate cycle that has been discerned in Pleistocene data, the "Bond Cycle," of between 1100 and 1500 years. Their thesis is apparently that the Bond Cycle has simply continued into post-glacial times. What drove or drives the Bond Cycle is a good question. It may be a cycle of solar activity, or other things may be involved. All we know is that it is a periodicity event in the sedimentary record.
Things like the Climatic Optimum and the Little Ice Age used to be non-controversial, but since they are not helpful for global warming scare-mongering, there are cases examined by Singer and Avery where attempts have been made to explain them away or manipulate the data. The most infamous of these may have been the "Hockey Stick" graph of Michael Mann, which eliminated most of the variations in temperature for the last 1000 years and posited a steep and unprecedented rise (the hockey stick blade) in temperatures in the 20th century [pp.68-69]. Other attempts to explain away historic variations involve claiming that the Mediaeval Warming or the Little Ice Age only occurred in Europe or nearby and were not global phenomena. Singer and Avery go over all the evidence, from all over the world, against these revisionist efforts.
Singer and Avery nicely sum up the "strongest allies" of the theory of human-caused (anthropogenic) global warming:
- "Computer models that cannot explain past temperature, let alone accurately forecast future ones, and whose funding depends on the public's fear of radical warming.
- "Activists who oppose modern technology, abhor expanding human populations, and especially hate the low-cost energy that alleviates human poverty and misery. They say we must...renounce attractive lifestyles, give up high-yield farming, shorten millions of lives, and put more pressure on Third World forests for fuelwood.
- "European politicians.
- "Journalists looking for scary headlines.
- "Various national and international bureaucracies and UN-appointed members and staff of the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change." [p.198]
This list, of course, is short on science and evidence and long on politics, both that of activists with a moral axe to grind and that of politicians and bureaucrats whose rent-seeking interest is in their own power. Since the scare-mongering enthusiasts like to blame evils on the oil companies or the American consumer, targets they already seemed to dislike anyway, as part of the general agenda and ideology of the 
Left, they deserve at least as much in terms of ad hominem attacks as they dish out. But this is not a minor point. The public is constantly told that skepticism or counter-evidence against anthropogenic global-warming is simply part of disinformation from self-interested oil companies or related corporations, who are preventing us from using or developing the alternative energy sources that would Save the Earth and lead to "sustainable" growth. There are many who may sincerely believe 
this scenario, but with far too many activists it is a smoke-screen for an "agenda" (as they like to say) for something very different: for a virtuous eco-poverty (as in Cuba) and a government that will make the "hard choices" of forcing people into that poverty (as in Cuba). They may know that "alterative energy" is not available (or is nuclear, which is also objectionable) and that the oil companies are simply truthfully doing their job. It is the job, cheap energy, that they don't like. Capitalism, freedom, prosperity, and America are the enemy, as they have been for many years. While press has done its best to ignore Michael Crichton on this, and will certainly ignore Singer and Avery (and Veizer and Shaviv), we also see that when the public realizes what the real agenda and consequences of the business are, as with Proposition 87, the likes of Al Gore come out on the short end. Even better, the developing world, including India and China, have little patience for wealthy westerners (which is what the ecological activists generally are) telling them they should remain in poverty. China will probably have the largest economy in the world by 2020; and even without democracy, the Chinese government is looking forward to the power that this will give their country. If the United States should hobble its own economy with energy restrictions, so much the better. It is instructive on the way the press works these days that the stories about global warming often contain emphasis that sea levels and droughts will affect poor Third World countries the most, without mentioning that suggested restrictions on energy production condemn the very same countries to continued poverty. Fortunately, the countries themselves, mainly African, know what the most immediately threat to their welfare is, and it is wealthy and comfortable Western do-gooding eco-activists, not global warming.
Michael Crichton, State of Fear, HarperCollins, 2004
UN Climate Summary Designed to Dupe, Critics Say
Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence
Copyright (c) 2007, 2008 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved
Unstoppable Global Warming, Note
) ) |
The most important features of this are (1) the dark black line on the lower part of the chart, which are the mean temperatures at 10/50 resolution, as explained in the legend, since the end of the Cambrian Period, and (2) the red, green, and blue lines at the top of the chart, which are different reconstructions (with spread of uncertainty for two of them) for concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
 Figure 2--Long-term trends in 20-year d18O ratios measured on the GISP2 Greenland ice core. A = Trend since start of Holocene, 10,000 b.p. Slope = -0.000024**. B = Trend since start of Christian era, 2000 b.p. Slope = -0.000196**. C = Trend since start of Little Ice Age, 700 b.p. Slope = -0.000067 NS. D = Trend since start of industrial revolution, 100 b.p. Slope = +0.003518 NS. Positive slope indicates rising temperatures. ** = highly significant (p=0.01), NS = not significant. |
Michael Crichton will probably be best known for his novel Jurassic Park [1990], which became a blockbuster movie, pioneering the use of digitally created characters. His novels The Andromeda Strain, Congo, and The Lost World also became movies. In all of these there has been an element of science fiction and science fact. With State of Fear we get just a little bit of science fiction, with mystery fiction, and a great deal of science fact, whose nature, however, is a matter of intense controversy and politicization. Indeed, the novel is as much about politics and political disputes mixed in with science as anything else. Thus, State of Fear is a most unusual novel in having footnotes and a bibliography, which the reader is warned are real and serious. At the end we also get an "Author's Message" and an appendix, "Why Politicizing Science Is Dangerous," which discusses historical cases of pseudo-scientific fads like eugenics and Lysenko's biology.
The political and scientific dispute in this case is over the theory and As a story, State of Fear has some drawbacks. Although the investigation is in the hands of federal anti-terrorism agents, who have no difficulty getting the cooperation of local law enforcement, we never see more than two agents in on the operations, they move around by borrowing a corporate jet, and anti-terrorist strikes that reasonably would call for SWAT teams and military cooperation are carried out by just these two agents, with the help of a private millionaire, one of his lawyers, one of his staffers, and one of the agent's nieces. Failures and setbacks plague the operations, usually because the small team, with a majority of amateurs, are outnumbered, outgunned, and often outsmarted by the bad guys. Disaster is avoided mainly by good luck. This is ridiculous. Versions of such teams are common in stories where authorities don't believe in the bad guys, or are in league with them, and an oddball group of private individuals must save the day. In State of Fear, however, where the good guys are directed by federal agents, the oddball group approach doesn't make any sense. When the bad guys are driving around Arizona in large moving vans, plainly labeled, and the Arizona police are cooperating, it is incredible that the whole ELF team, with its equipment, could not have scooped up. Crichton really should have given all this a little more thought.
On the other hand, the story is just a framework on which to hang the scientific and political issues. This works rather better. The global warming debate involves several layers of questions. (1) Are average global temperatures rising? (2) Do human activities have anything to do with this? (3) Could such warming occur without any human involvement? (4) Does it matter? (5) Could such warming, if it is happening, be, on the whole, desirable? The short answers here are (1) perhaps, (2) perhaps, (3) yes, (4) perhaps not, and (5) possibly. In more detail:
Why glaciation occurred in the distant Paleozoic and the recent Pleistocene is a matter of debate and conjecture (there is also theory that the entire planet was frozen just before the Cambrian Era). The shape and size of the Earth's orbit, the inclination of the Earth on its axis, and the sun's own cycles of energy output all may contribute. Most obviously, however, is the arrangement of the continents. In the Paleozoic, where evidence of glaciation is on the southern continents, the South Pole was covered and ringed with land. Land cools easily and prevents moderating ocean currents from approaching the pole. Today, a large continent covers the South Pole again, and the North Pole is almost entirely ringed by the northern continents, limiting ocean circulation. Large ice caps figure on northern and southern lands, and the North Pole itself is covered by sea ice. Over millions of years this arrangement of continents will be changed, and the Earth will again enter a period when open ocean is at the poles and ice caps don't exist.
While a warmer Earth may indeed be something we might not desire to artificially produce, it is worth noting that the planet did just fine in its warmer periods and that there was nothing catastrophic or threatening to life about such climates. The idea that the Earth must be "saved" from warming, which would endanger life itself, is thus farcical. If the evidence is against global warming, or ambiguous, or irrelevant, why has it become such an issue? The answer seems to be a moral and political one. We are trashing the planet with human civilization, foolishly wasting "natural resources," and hoarding wealth in the advanced countries that should be shared with the underdeveloped ones. This approach seems to be equal parts moralistic asceticism, that the virtuous embrace poverty, and the remnants of "lumpen Marxism" and the kind of half-baked socialism that is the best that the Left can do these days. The asceticism goes down well with the "chattering classes" of the press, politics, and academia, though few members of these groups practice any kind of asceticism themselves -- a point well illustrated by Crichton (the maids drive the hybrids). The socialism still sounds good in the same circles, even though all its forms are now so incoherent and discredited that they can withstand neither a moment of critical reflection nor the slightest comparison with historical experience. Nothing "trashes" the planet like even a small asteroid, or a large volcano, and human activities are pinpricks in comparison. Wealth, on the other hand, comes from human activity, not piles of "resources." Poor countries are poor, not because they lack natural resources (often they have an abundance, far more than the second largest economy on Earth, Japan), but because they lack capital, especially human capital. Human capital, indeed, consists of the kinds of skills, habits, and striving that are always bitterly resented when only ethnic minorities possess them -- minorities like the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Indians in East Africa, or Jews in Eastern Europe. They are then damned, while robbed or expelled, with all the bogus principles used to belabor capitalism -- leaving behind, of course, continuing poverty. Human capital, indeed, can generate wealth while beginning with very little of other kinds of capital. A Japan that was all but flattened by bombing, including atomic bombing, in World War II, rebuilt itself and surpassed all its former foes (except one) and allies in not much more than thirty years.
Crichton's attitude seems to have changed a bit since Jurassic Park. There we had a cautionary tale of human arrogance, with gems like, "Discovery is always a rape of the natural world," pronounced by the prophet mathematician Ian Malcolm, whose understanding of Chaos Theory seems to boil down principally to a restatement of Murphy's Law. The moral of the approach seems to be that, as Nature cannot be controlled, modern science is a fraud, a mistake, a sin, or something of the sort. Since Malcolm himself, however, says that mathematics "is just an arbitrary game," it is not clear why this, as he asserts, describes reality more fully than any other "arbitrary game." Since he doesn't advocate giving up civilization and going back to the Pleistocene (though he does seem to say that human life was just as good 30,000 years ago as now), the upshot is that we are not told what we should do instead -- and the Malcolm of the book dies, unlike the Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) of the movie. on the other hand, Malcolm also denies that the planet, or life in general, are in any kind of trouble from our activities. It is only ourselves, not the planet, that we endanger.
Although the popularity of Jurassic Park is probably due in great measure to the theme of human arrogance and "rape of the natural world" (with the irony that the embodiments of the sin, the revived dinosaurs, are as much the draw for the movie as they would have been for the fictional Jurassic Park), the Crichton of State of Fear seems to have taken the later insight, that the planet will do just fine, more to heart, to the cost of the former. At the same time, Malcolm was quite right that Nature cannot be controlled. The problem with that is just the ideology with which it is always coupled, i.e. that human beings can and should be controlled. No one complains about the human treatment of nature without wanting to stop it, to leave Nature alone, apparently because Nature is better off without us. We see the affinity of militant ecology to the Left in the desire to suppress freedom and control people, or at least people's economic activities (though the forced abortions in China are also popular in some circles). The very idea that Nature can be "preserved" is refuted by Crichton with a fine example, how Yellowstone National Park was intended, through all its history, to be a preserve of natural life, but instead was changed repeatedly by the very measures expected to preserve it. Withdrawing humans from wilderness and then believing that Nature will there simply continue unchanged is itself a form of control, one as unlikely to work as expected as any other intervention. Militant ecology indeed assumes the very principle it uses to belabor human arrogance, that human life is different and distinct from Nature. Human arrogance, of course, supposes that human life is better than Nature, while militant ecology supposes that human life is worse than Nature.
The truth is that neither Nature nor human life can or should be controlled. Human cultural, intellectual, and scientific evolution simply continues the process by which evolution produces life in the first place -- human civilization embodies more of the forms of spontaneous order that are embodied in the structures of matter, the universe, and life. Despite the popularity of ecological ideas and the moralistic condemnations in books like Jurassic Park, it is also noteworthy that political measures with significant economic costs (at least obvious ones) are commonly losers in politics. A good example of that was the "BTU" (British Thermal Unit) tax that was proposed by the Clinton Administration when it assumed office in 1993. The idea behind such a tax was to make all forms of energy more expensive, which would discourage energy use and promote the development of "alternative" sources of cheap energy. This had in particular been a campaign theme of Bill Clinton's Vice President, Al Gore, who published an eco-doomsday book for the campaign (Earth in the Balance). With solid majorities in Congress, there was nothing to stand in the way of such a proposal by the Democratic Party. Nevertheless, the tax failed and was never revived (although other taxes were increased). Despite it being a constant theme of ecological complaint that gasoline in the United States is too cheap, and should be more like the $5 a gallon common in Europe, it does not escape notice that any serious rise in gasoline prices is greeted with howls of protest. The Democratic Party knew that it is better that such protests be directed at the oil companies and the market, rather than at a Democratic Congress.
A similar political dislocation occurred in 2004 with the movie The Day After Tomorrow. This was a heavy handed tale of ecological doom, based on the idea that Artic melting would lower the salinity of the North Atlantic, stop the Gulf Stream, and plunge Europe, at least (North America too, in the movie), into a new Ice Age. This is a real theory, and of some interest. Its catastrophism suffers from the difficulty that the Gulf Stream does not simply flow north and then sink (as heavy salt water) and return south at depth, but that the circulation on the surface is a clockwise pattern, driven by wind, all around the North Atlantic basin. Either way, the extrapolations in the movie are preposterous. What we see are several gigantic storms in the northern hemisphere that return the Pleistocene ice caps to their full size in the course of just a few days. Storms, however, require a lot of energy, and Arctic cold, however warmed from the past, cannot provide it. Hurricanes, or the moisture for a New England "Nor'easter" snowstorm, comes from the tropics. This impossible storm over North America then generates a huge storm surge that buries New York City in water. Unfortunately, storm surges are generated by storms at sea, which is where this storm isn't. The clincher, though, is that the giant storms draw down super cold air from the stratosphere into their centers, which flash freezes everything, including the water that is to reconstitute the Pleistocene glaciers. The producers, writers, or advisors to the movie, however, failed to recollect that storms form around low pressure centers and that in low pressure centers air is rising, not falling. High pressure, where air descends, commonly brings the coldest temperatures, with clear skies. A comparable problem occurs with the portrayal of an outbreak of tornadoes in Los Angeles. Now, small tornadoes have been spotted in the Los Angeles Basin, and waterspouts have been filmed off the coast, but outbreaks of tornadoes have rather more to do with geography than with anything else. Flat terrain between a dry continental north and the warm, humid Gulf of Mexico makes central North America the tornado capital of the world. Mountains, of whatever size, break up airflow and disrupt tornado formation. This is evident anywhere, but is particularly conspicuous in the genuinely mountainous environs of Los Angeles.
So it must be asked why the movie takes these liberties with the truth. First, it could simply be a traditional Hollywood "disaster" movie, where truth and science are suspended for purposes of entertainment. This is "poetic license." The movie succeeds on that basis and was very successful at the boxoffice. Second, however, the movie could be a dishonest bit of political propaganda. This is more what it looks like. The political dimension of the movie is obvious, first because it begins at an environmental conference, attended by the Vice President of the United States -- an obvious version of actual Vice President Dick Cheney. A nastier political edge runs through the film when we see that the Vice President is the one really in charge and that the President, a George Bush clone, is uninvolved and ineffectual. The President gets killed, and the Vice President, who has fled to the American Embassy in Mexico, finds eco-Religion, confessing his sins and undertaking to Save the Earth.
If the producers had reason to be encouraged by the performance of the movie for their political goals (like Michael Moore with his own dishonest "documentary" propaganda films), they cannot have been pleased with the political result, which was the reelection of George Bush. The movie as a political instrument thus failed badly, and a more astute propagandist (like Moore) might have told them that the war in Iraq, not the environment, would be the pivotal campaign issue -- though even that didn't quite do the trick. Perhaps it was a bad sign that The Passion of the Christ made more money in 2004 than The Day After Tomorrow and Fahrenheit 911 combined.
While State of Fear, like other Crichton books, would make a good or at least serviceable movie (we cannot say that Congo, for instance, was all that great), it remains to be seen whether it will appear as the counterpoint to The Day After Tomorrow. Indeed, we might see this as a test case of political bias in Hollywood, where political activists are pleased to deny political bias. The expository sections of the book are worked in quite nicely, and could survive to some extent in a movie, but there is also the fact that such things, however attenuated, are deadly for pace and plot. Previously the bane of science fiction, expository sections were brilliantly eliminated by George Lucas in Star Wars, in part because he realized that foreign movies he liked, like Japanese movies, worked even though the audience, lacking the cultural background, didn't always understand what was going on. So Lucas decided to treat science fiction as a kind of foreign language medium. This approach is not available for State of Fear, where the background is much of the point of the story. But if this problem could be successfully overcome in The Day After Tomorrow, it probably can be in State of Fear. The willingness of Hollywood money to back an enviro-skeptic film is what is in real doubt.
Song from Tampopo, Juzo Itami, 1986.
Michael Crichton,
State of Fear, a Novel
HarperCollins, 2004
evidence for global warming. The general thrust of the novel we can gather from the circumstance that the story is about a conspiracy of eco-terrorists to generate several catastrophic events, which will include a large number of deaths, just to publicize an ecology conference on "abrupt climate change." In the course of it we also get a strong swipe at political activists in Hollywood. one such character, Ted Bradley, is said to have played the President in a long running television series. This would be a reference to Martin Sheen, a leftist activist who plays the President on The West Wing -- though the name and the personality of Ted Bradley both evoke Ted Baxter, the pompous and foolish news anchor on the old Mary Tyler Moore Show. Bradley ends up literally getting eaten by cannibals -- after heatedly affirming that cannibalism is a myth used to disparage Third World peoples. For harshness, this is in competition with the treatment of Hollywood activists in Team America, World Police (where they merely get their heads blown off or are consumed by flame). The eco-terrorists themselves are identified as the "Environmental Liberation Front," ELF, which is a very thinly disguised reference to the "Earth Liberation Front," also ELF, which has engaged in just the kinds of arson and vandalism initially described in the book. The real ELF, however, has so far avoided any loss of life in its acts (except for animals, ironically), while the ELF of the novel commits a murder within the first few pages and attempts many others thereafter.
Copyright (c) 2005 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved
Reviews
How precious [are] our teacher's teachings.
Time flies swiftly in this garden of learning.
So swiftly [/soon] after all these years
We must part. Goodbye.
The Ranking System for Reviews [6.8K]
Amazon.com for books and videos
Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved
Review Note to Home Page
I find a bias in this respect in a recent book written for a popular presentation of the history of philosophy, The Examined Life, A Tour of Western Philosophy, edited by Stanley Rosen [Quality Paperback Book Club, New York, 2000]. The book consists of selections from the history of philosophy with brief introductions by selected scholars. Rosen writes a general introduction. The selections tell the story. Under "Social and Political Philosophy," the only modern political thinkers are Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau. Locke comes in for some mention in the sectional introduction by Paul A. Rahe, along with brief nods to Hume, Adam Smith, and James Madison, but after this Rahe quickly moves on to those, like Rousseau, "who came to regard commercial society as repulsive" [pp.21-22]. This sour and typical inspiration leads to a miserable "Philosophy's End" with Martin Heidegger, "the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century," and Wittgenstein, "Heidegger's only serious rival," of whom "neither developed a philosophical teaching concerning politics and morality, for neither believed this possible" [p.25] -- Rahe apparently does not believe it possible either.
Unfortunately, Heidegger did develop a political philosophy. Rahe wrongly and apologetically dismisses Heidegger's membership in the Nazi Party as unrelated to his overall philosophy. A very different view is that of James Ceaser:
Heidegger's political views are commonly deplored today on account of his early and open support of Nazism. Because of this connection, many like to suppose that his influence on subsequent political thought (as distinct from general intellectual thought) in Europe has been meager. Yet nothing could be farther from the truth. Heidegger's major ideas were sufficiently protean that with a bit of tinkering they could easily be adopted by the left, which they were [indeed, being anti-liberal, all anti-liberals, like leftists, could adapt them easily -- ed.]... In the writings of numerous thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, "Heideggerianism" was married to communism, and this odd coupling became the core of the intellectual left for the next generation. ["The Philosophical Origins of Anti-Americanism in Europe," in Understanding Anti-Americanism, Its Origins and Impact at Home and Abroad, ed. Paul Hollander, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, 2004, p.58]
In Rahe we hear nothing of modern political philosophers like Leo Strauss or Francis Fukuyama, let alone Karl Popper or F.A. Hayek. one might expect some representation of Marxists, considering their influence, but the option is apparently for nihilism and philosophical obscurantism rather than for historically important political philosophy.
The selective bias is also evident elsewhere. The philosophy of religion selections progress no further than Hegel and Kierkegaard. Since Hegel has no insight into actual religions (and doesn't mention any in the selection), he is probably there just because he has something called "philosophy of religion." That Rudolf Otto isn't represented is the conspicuous oversight, though nowhere near as appalling as leaving Popper himself out of the philosophy of science section. The height of philosophy of science appears to be the mathematician Henri Poincaré, and the section ends with a fairly specialized discussion of "logic and mathematics" by Stephen Simpson, who is listed as a "contributor," along with the authors of the introductory sections, rather than as a historical philosopher. Passing over the most important modern philosopher of science, Popper, the philosopher of science who figures in the most popular discussions of the subject, Thomas Kuhn, is included, but out of sequence. Why Poincaré is given after Kuhn is unclear. Since the editors of the section (Rota and Crants) disagree and argue back and forth in their introduction, the disorder may reflect the disagreements. Apparently, the debate over cognitivism and realism in science is important, while nothing said after the middle of the 19th century about religion is noteworthy.
That figures like Locke, Popper, and Otto are left out of The Examined Life, A Tour of Western Philosophy is an excellent clue that its vision of philosophy, like that indeed of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, offers little hope for the future of philosophy.
Similar political bias can be see in a series of lectures on political philosophy, Power Over People: Classical and Modern Political Theory, delivered by Dennis G. Dalton, Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, and put out on tape by The Teaching Company. Dalton's sixteen lectures begin with Hinduism and end with Gandhi. In between we get Thucydides, Sophocles, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Marx, Freud, Thoreau, Dostoyevsky, Emma Goldman's Anarchism, and Hitler. In comparison to The Examined Life, we have lost Hobbes and gained Marx but are still innocent of any of the political philosophy underlying the American Revolution, the United States Constitution, Classical Liberalism, or Capitalism. Dalton must think that Indian political philosophy, culminating in Gandhi (with a nod to Thoreau), is the alpha and omega of the subject. This probably is better than Hobbesian statism, but it is also sure to be entirely unrealistic, if not a naive idealization of India, and of Gandhi.
While such a book and such lectures may mainly display their bias by editorial selection and by the occasional open statement, other recent books display their Hobbesian approach more boldly. The Costs of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes, by Stephen Holmes and Cass R. Sunstein [W.W. Norton & Company, 1999], and The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice, by Thomas Nagel and Liam Murphy [Oxford, 2002], both depend on the thesis that, since we need the state to protect rights, such rights therefore do not exist without the state. Nagel and Murphy go so far as to say that individuals actually have no rights over their property or earnings, except what the state doesn't need to use in order to effect "social justice," i.e. entitlements to income, health care, education, etc. Holmes and Sunstein are slightly more modest, that there are no "negative rights," i.e. immunities from state action, because all rights are due to the positive action of the state, which means that all rights are positive grants from the state. None of these people, of course, would give even the time of day to the statement of the Declaration of Independence, "That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men." The premise of all their thought is a Hobbesian statism, rejecting natural rights, together with more recent collectivist and socialist elements [which makes it especially shocking that Sunstein has an appointment in the Obama Administration -- a sure sign of the statism and authoritarianism of the modern Democrat]. Nagel and Murphy seem to have the more open socialism, with collective entitlements rendering private liberties, especially economic ones, superfluous. Altogether, we simply have more evidence that the Left lives, still working tirelessly against freedom and in behalf of an authoritarian, if not a totalitarian, regime.
Review Note to Home Page
An October 1998 flyer from the State University of New York (SUNY) Press contains an interesting notice about one of their books, Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy -- Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Hartshorne, by David Ray Griffin, John B. Cobb Jr., Marcus P. Ford, Pete A.Y. Gunter, and Peter Ochs:
In presenting Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Hartshorne as members of a common and distinctively postmodern trajectory, this book casts the thought of each of them in a new light. It also suggests a new direction for the philosophical community as a whole, now that the various forms of modern philosophy, and even the deconstructive form of postmodern philosophy, are widely perceived to be dead-ends. This new option offers the possibility that philosophy may recover its role as critic and guide within the more general culture, a recovery that is desperately needed in these perilous times.
This is of interest for parallels to the approach and project of the Friesian School. Thus, the current state of philosophy is found to be unsatisfactory, a "dead-end," and an alternative tradition is proposed, drawing together a number of philosophers, a group with some affinities but whose members are not always seen as belonging together (like Otto and Popper as Friesians). The differences, however, are significant. The principles of the Friesian School are by no stretch of the imagination "post-modern." Instead, the Kantian tradition through Nelson is a side of modern philosophy that most academic philosophers are probably unaware of -- it is not going to be "widely perceived" as anything. The authors Griffin et al. may be at pains to accept the basic validity of the "post-modern" (i.e. deconstructive) move, while claiming that they can productively go "beyond" it.
Interestingly, however, their group of philosophers contains none from the real post-modernist tradition. Peirce and James are the originals of the American Pragmatist school, whose affinities to deconstruction have been trumpeted by Richard Rorty, but dismissed by Susan Haack. Whitehead and Hartshorne, on the other hand, are revivalists of full blown speculative metaphysics. Bergson may be taken as an antecedent of Whitehead's "process" philosophy. In my own academic experience at the University of Texas, where Hartshorne was Professor Emeritus, in the 1970's (he was alive until 2000), I encountered many people with particular regard for both Peirce and Whitehead, so this juxtaposition seems to have been brewing up for a while. From a Friesian perspective, however, Pragmatism is not an epistemologically or ethically sound doctrine, while Whitehead is innocent of the fundamentals of Kantian Critique. So, while it is nice to see attempts to move beyond "post-modernism," this will not ultimately help if the false premises of "post-modernism" itself continue to be accepted.
Philosophy of Science
A few miles farther on, we came to a big, gravelly roadcut that looked like an ashfall,a mudflow, glacial till, and fresh oatmeal, imperfectly blended. "I don't know what this glop is," [Kenneth Deffeyes] said, in final capitulation. "You need a new geologist. You need a Californian."
John McPhee, Assembling California, p. 11 [The Noonday Press; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993]
BILL MURRAY: "Ray, for a moment, pretend that I don't know anything about metallurgy, engineering, or physics, and just tell me what the hell is going on."
DAN AYKROYD: "You never studied."
Ghostbusters, 1984, Columbia Pictures
Contributed Works
Editorial Essays
- A Summary of Modern Cosmology [57.5K]
- The Pulse of the Earth, Orogenies & Transgressions [10.1K]
- The "Sin" of Galileo [12.1K]
- Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994) [7.6K]
- Childhood's End, the Mystery of Order [29.7K]
Hippolytus, Refutation of all Heresies, G.S. Kirk & J.E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers, Cambridge, 1957, 1964, p.177
Richard P. Feynman, QED, The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, p. 77 [Princeton University Press, 1985]
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section IV, Part I, p. 26 [L.A. Shelby-Bigge, editor, Oxford University Press, 1902, 1972, p. 30]
Xenophanes [of Colophon] thinks that a mixture of the earth with the sea is going on, and that in time the earth is dissolved by the moist. He says that he has demonstrations of the following kind: shells are found inland, and in the mountains, and in the quarries in Syracuse he says that an impression of a fish and of seaweed has been found, while an impression of a bayleaf was found in Paros in the depth of the rock, and in Malta flat shapes of all marine objects. These, he says, were produced when everything was long ago covered with mud, and the impression was dried in the mud. All mankind is destroyed whenever the earth is carried down into the sea and becomes mud; then there is another beginning of coming-to-be [genesis], and this foundation happens for all the worlds.
Geology & Astronomy
This is the third of four lectures on a rather difficult subject -- the theory of quantum electrodynamics -- and since there are obviously more people here tonight than there were before, some of you haven't heard the other two lectures and will find this lecture incomprehensible. Those of you who have heard the other two lectures will also find this lecture incomprehensible, but you know that that's all right: as I explained in the first lecture, the way we have to describe Nature is generally incomprehensible to us.
A Summary of Modern Cosmology [57.5K]
These ultimate springs and principles are totally shut up from human curiosity and enquiry. Elasticity, gravity, cohesion of parts, communication of motion by impulse [sic]; these are probably the ultimate causes and principles which we shall ever discover in nature.
Book Reviews
Letters
Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved
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