April 30, 2007
BOOK REVIEW: ‘Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism’ Takes on ‘State of Fear’ Driven Scientists, Politicians, Al Gore’s Documentary
By David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic
“…Modern people live in abject fear….They are in a particular panic over things they can’t even see – germs, chemicals, additives, pollutants….And even more amazingly, they are convinced the environment of the entire planet is being destroyed around them….Like the belief in witchcraft, it’s an extraordinary delusion – a global fantasy worthy of the Middle Ages. Everything is going to hell, and we must all live in fear.”
-- A character in Michael Crichton’s novel “State of Fear” (HarperCollins, 2004).
When I reviewed Michael Crichton’s technonovel “State of Fear” just over two years ago, I took some flak for even reviewing a novel that questioned the received wisdom that the world is going to hell and the U.S. is to blame for all of it.
Here are a few paragraphs from my April 2005 review:
“’State of Fear,’ which has an eco-terrorist-generated tsunami at the end of the huge novel, ironically came out just before the Indian Ocean tsunami, which as far as anyone knows, wasn’t caused by big corporations or S.U.V. drivers. I recommend ‘State of Fear’ to anyone who firmly believes in global warming as proven fact rather than a politically-driven theory; the novel is based on three years of research by one of our best writers and contains documentation rivaling the best of fact-based science literature. One of the characters everyone will be able to decipher in ‘State of Fear’ is Ted Bradley, who plays the president of the U.S. in a popular TV series. His fate at book’s end on an island in the South Pacific is horrific; why do I find it so hilarious?
“In an appendix to ‘State of Fear’, Crichton cautions against combining science and politics by using case studies of eugenics and of Lysenko’s revival of Lamarckian genetics, as opposed to the Mendelian kind that is generally accepted. Trofim D. Lysenko was a Soviet pseudo-scientist whose theories about acquired characteristics being inherited were put into practice by Stalin and resulted in millions dying from famine. Lysenko (1898-1976) was the leading proponent of Michurianism during the Lenin/Stalin years. I. V. Michurin, in turn, was a proponent of Lamarckism. Lamarck was an 18th century French scientist who argued for a theory of evolution decades before Darwin.
“Eugenics, wildly popular a century ago with people as diverse as George Bernard Shaw and Theodore Roosevelt, led to the German/Nazi destruction of millions of people in gas chambers and killing fields. Crichton points out that ‘progressive’ California led the nation in forced sterilization of ‘feeble-minded’ people well into the 1930s. He doesn’t have to remind us – or does he? – that the Golden State, home to more crackpots per square mile than any other state, still has the death penalty, something that often derided West Virginia abandoned in the 1960s.”
Exactly what does this all this have to do with Christopher C. Horner’s book “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism" (Regnery, $19.95, 350 pages) and my review thereof. Well, I’m a little nervous, for fear that just by reviewing this provocative book, I’ll be considered the environmental equivalent of a Holocaust denier!
If I got a little taste of that from the feedback to my review of “State of Fear” – which is after all, a novel -- imagine what will be the flak from criticizing Al Gore’s Oscar-Award-Winning documentary (directed by Davis Guggenheim, the son of brilliant documentary director Charles Guggenheim) “An Inconvenient Truth”?
I’ve seen Gore’s film -- twice -- taking copious notes and comparing statements made in the film with refutations by Horner, like Al Gore, a lawyer, and I’ve got to state that Gore often plays fast and loose with the facts.
This is especially true with the notorious “Hockey Stick” graph of temperatures, with a spike in the last couple of decades – the business end of the “Hockey Stick.” In the film, Gore dismisses the Medieval Warming period of about 500 years ago and the Little Ice Age with a wave of his hand. Neither period shows up in proper scale on the graph in the film, Horner points out – and Horner’s book is filled to the rim with graphs and charts, too.
Maybe this would be a good time to cue up the “Dueling Banjos” theme from the 1972 John Boorman-helmed film “Deliverance,” filmed in Gore’s home state of Tennessee. Gore’s movie was accompanied by a book, so we could call this debate dueling environmental books.
Horner says that much of the discussion of global warming and environmentalism is all about politics, with a lot of junk science, fabrications, conveniently omitted data and alarmism. You can guess what kind of politics he's referring to when -- at the front of the book -- he has a chapter entitled “Green is the New Red.”
Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, says that for decades environmentalism has been the Left's best excuse for increasing government control over our actions in ways both large and small. I detect a libertarian viewpoint in Horner's scorn for both the Left and Big Energy that takes advantage of environmentalism to sell more energy at a higher price.
What about the professor that Gore remembers so fondly in “An Inconvenient Truth”, Professor Roger Revelle of Harvard University?
Revelle, Horner notes on Page 95 and pages following, was not an alarmist, and was constantly debunking alarmism about global cooling and warming. Horner provides notes to scientific papers by Revelle and says that the fondly remembered Harvard professor (Revelle) was depicted as a “drooling old fool” when he dared to disagree with Gore and his followers.
What are we to believe, if a slickly presented and entertaining documentary – “An Inconvenient Truth” is all that – comes with built-in errors and false conclusions, not to mention something called “concensus science”?
Rebutting Horner, Gore and others could say, “Well he’s in the camp of big business and his book is published by the right-wingers at Regnery.”
They could be right. In fact Horner discloses that he worked as a lobbyist for Enron in the late 1990s, when Enron lobbied for the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol! Yes, the energy giant that later collapsed was in favor of Kyoto because it would drive up the price of energy and make more money for the Houston-based company. Enron CEO Ken Lay himself visited Clinton and personally argued for the U.S. to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol.
But, you ask, didn’t President George W. Bush refuse to sign Kyoto. Horner says Bush didn’t have to sign it because President Bill Clinton did so in 1997 and sat on his hands for the next four years. Gore neglects to mention this in his documentary, Horner notes, because voices of moderation in the Clinton Administration considered Gore to be a “radical environmentalist” – and Horner supplies a memo that says just that in 1992, the year the team of Clinton-Gore was elected.
Horner concedes that there is warming, but he doesn’t blame it all on CO2. In the movie, Gore says the 10 hottest years on record were in the last 14 years and the hottest was 2005 – the year of Katrina. In fact, 1998 was the hottest on record, Horner says.
Sure, the U.S. produces the largest amount of CO2 – but China and India, exempted from Kyoto at their request – are close on our heels, Horner says. I read in the Wall Street Journal the other day that China, blessed (or cursed, depending on your point of view) with abundant coal, is building one coal-fired electrical generating plant each and every week.
(Cue up that banjo theme, again).
If you’ve seen “An Inconvenient Truth” you’ll remember the slide sequence with before and after maps when Gore says imagine the impact of 100 million refugees when the seas rise and flood Calcutta, San Francisco, Shanghai, Beijing – and Manhattan. “The area where the World Trade Center memorial is to be located would be under water,” Gore says in the film.
As the late, great Kurt Vonnegut might say, “And so it goes.” Of course, I’m guessing the brilliant Hoosier native would be closer to Gore than to Horner.
In the interest of obtaining and discussing all the facts, I recommend that everybody see “An Inconvenient Truth” – and everybody read Horner’s book. It can’t hurt and it might help. As a network that Gore hates says, “We report, You decide.”
Publisher’s web site: www.regnery.com
