Global Warming Becoming One-Sided Story
by: Stewart Truelsen, a regular contributor to the Focus on Agriculture series.


Environmental groups undoubtedly were pleased with the box office success of “Ice Age: The Meltdown,” an animated movie about animals trying to escape global climate change. Said Roger Ebert in his movie review, “If kids have been indifferent to global warming up until now, this ‘Ice Age’ sequel will change that forever.”
 
The group Environmental Defense also scored big by teaming up with the Ad Council to launch a series of television and radio public service announcements to create a sense of urgency about global warming. This campaign puts global warming in the same context as buckling your seat belt in the car.
 
But, the environmental community was far less pleased when it was reported that President Bush had an hour-long meeting last year with popular novelist Michael Crichton. His recent best-seller, State of Fear, casts doubt on the theory of global warming and the motives of environmental groups that proclaim it a worldwide catastrophe. Although it is fiction, the novel is backed up with facts.
 
Meeting a favorite writer could be considered one of the perks of being president of the United States. Hasn’t every president done the same with an artist or author if given the opportunity? But environmental groups were hot, not warmed, by the thought that Crichton might influence the president on global warming. 
 
In Crichton’s novel, a fictional group called the National Environmental Resource Fund will stop at nothing to make the public believe global warming is a real and immediate threat, including triggering an underwater avalanche to create a tsunami, causing a flash flood in the Southwest and trying to break loose the world’s largest iceberg.
 
NERF was determined to make the public believe that global warming was responsible for extreme weather events. As one of the ringleaders said, “Global warming creates a crisis, a call to action. A crisis needs to be studied, it needs to be funded, it needs political and bureaucratic structures around the world. And in no time at all, a huge number of meteorologists, geologists, oceanographers suddenly become ‘climate scientists’ engaged in the management of the crisis.”          
                       
To NERF, it mattered little whether the crisis was global warming or something else, it just mattered that there was a crisis, especially one where the data was so complex and incomplete that the issue could be manipulated for media attention with the help of friends in Hollywood and the backing of philanthropic organizations.
But at one point in the dialogue a NERF official anguished over choosing global warming in the first place. “You can’t raise a dime with it, especially in winter.  Every time it snows people forget all about global warming. Or else they decide some warming might be a good thing after all,” he said. 
 
State of Fear did not follow the script that environmental groups like to see from best-selling authors and Hollywood screenwriters. They would prefer one side to the story.             


4/24/06