State of Fear
by Michael Crichton
HarperCollins, 603 pp., $27.95

IT'S ALL SO IMPROBABLE. A stray group of unprepared people suddenly joined together to save the planet from catastrophe in a matter of days? A world of pre-September 11 airports, through which they can make hassle-free sprints from Iceland to Los Angeles to the Solomon Islands? A much-married philanthropist, a left-leaning actor with a disturbing resemblance to Martin Sheen, and all the other endlessly beautiful and smart people who invariably inhabit a Michael Crichton novel? I'm hooked instantly. Michael Crichton is, well, Michael Crichton. There's no one else like him, thank God, and the improbabilities combine--as they always do in his books--to make his latest, State of Fear, a fast, fun read.

Be forewarned: State of Fear is a novel about orthodox thinking on global warming, complete with footnotes on climate change. The book's dialogue doesn't exactly make for a fair fight: Crichton pits a knowledgeable scientist against uninformed and brainwashed amateurs, who can only question their opponents' motives, laud their own intentions (they may be wrong but they mean well), and repeat mindless environmental mantras.

So, for instance, a character named Ted Bradley--an actor who played the president on a television series--warns that global warming will result in crop failures, spreading deserts, diseases, species extinction, a rise in sea level, and extreme weather. But John Kenner, a scientist on leave from MIT, makes quick work of the hapless Bradley. "Actually," he dryly notes, "scientific studies do not support your claims. For example, crop failure--if anything, increased carbon dioxide stimulates plant growth. There is some evidence that this is happening. And the most recent satellite studies show the Sahara has shrunk since 1980.* As for new diseases--not true. The rate of emergence of new diseases has not changed since 1960." (The asterisk refers readers to a footnote that cites an article in the September 2002 New Scientist.)

For global warming skeptics, there is satisfaction in watching the book's heroes puncture environmentalism and let out the hot air that inflates the movement's true believers. The informative monologue is a perpetual Crichton trademark. Has anyone had a run like his? So many huge bestsellers, each a major movie, from The Andromeda Strain in 1969 and The Great Train Robbery in 1975, to Jurassic Park in 1990 and The Lost World in 1995. And in every one of them, long discussions of whatever has caught the author's eye. In State of Fear, we get not only global warming, but also the advantages of civilized societies over primitive cultures, alarmism in the mainstream media, and how the witless do-gooders who banned the pesticide DDT have been responsible for millions of malaria deaths in third-world countries.

Much of his protagonist's argument can be found in a speech Crichton made last year at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, in which he took on "the disinformation age." Challenging the belief that this is "a secular society in which many people--the best people, the most enlightened people--do not believe in any religion," he argued that the religion to which they in fact give themselves is "environmentalism," a faith-based fact-lite creed. State of Fear is that 2003 speech in a novel.