Is global warming a myth?

There are times when people are just unwilling to accept the truth. Imaginary issues are systematically driven into their mind till they come to be accepted as the gospel truth.

And those championing the "cause" acquire the status of a demigod. Such is the wave of public opinion that nobody dares to utter a word against it.

Take the Y2K scare. Was it real? Some might still argue that it was a genuine problem which was fixed in time because of the public opinion generated by some well-meaning people and organisations.

The fact is, not a single computer crashed. The dreaded midnight hour came and went and nothing happened. Of course, some people made big time money running into billions of dollars by making the computers of the world Y2K-ready.

What about environmental activists? Many of them are truly concerned about the health of the earth, but everybody knows there are some of them who can definitely be called eco-terrorists. Except there isn't enough evidence to nail them.

That is why none of them has ever got exposed. But writers, with their fertile imagination, have always found a way out to say what cannot be said in a news report.

Michael Crichton's work of fiction with "real footnotes" looks like such an attempt. It is a racy novel with all the elements of a thriller""gunfights, romance, fast cars, beautiful people, cannibals, etc.

Yet, the message as you turn the last page is clear: there are people around who think of environmental activism as a good way of making money and they will stop at nothing. They need to be stopped.

Which is difficult because they have mastered the art of creating public scares. Politicians and journalists become a party to it without even knowing it.

Politicians support them because they want to be seen as championing the common good. Journalists of course fall prey to the sensationalism dished out at them.

A bunch of lawyers ropes in an unsuspecting Beverly Hills billionaire to donate $50 million to them as they want to fight large corporates that have caused global warming.

To help him make up his mind, they need to engineer some natural calamities: huge icebergs breaking off mainland Antarctica, flash floods in a park in the US, and giant tsunami waves crashing on San Francisco.

The lawyers want to generate the tsunami by triggering huge landslides on the seabed. Of course, all their attempts are thwarted by a handful of heroes. One of them is a death-defying Nepalese called Sanjong Thapa""perhaps the first time somebody from the forgotten country has featured in a novel set in Beverly Hills.

More important, characters in the book carry out a lively debate on global warming. The hero of the book argues very convincingly that there is no large-scale global warming caused by industrial activity and there is no evidence to suggest that thousands of islands will get inundated by the rising seas.

Crichton, who has authored bestsellers like The Great Train Robbery and Jurassic Park, himself subscribes to the view. In a message at the end of the novel, he says that the existing knowledge of the earth's climate and the factors that cause changes in it is so poor that nothing can be said with firm conviction.

The earth, he says, is in the grip of a warm spell which started around the middle of the 19th century after almost 400 years of cold called The Little Ice Age.

Of course, Crichton is also aware of the North-South angle to the debate: environmental activists have often blamed poor countries for causing the depletion in the ozone layer by emitting in large measure the so-called greenhouse gases.

What is often forgotten is that the West has gone through the same learning curve during its years of industrialisation. To demand developing countries jettison the drive to industrialise and modernise is nothing but a form of neo-imperialism.

"The current near-hysterical preoccupation with safety is at best a waste of resources and a crimp on the human spirit, and at worst an invitation to totalitarianism. Public education is desperately needed," he says. Is anybody listening?

State of Fear

Michael Crichton
HarperCollins Price: Rs 250;
Pages: x+603