Article 58

State Of Fear.

Having published my book, The Rational Trinity: Imagination, Belief and Knowledge on the print on demand basis, because I had anticipated problems in otherwise obtaining a commercial publisher for its revolutionary differentiation of the knowledge/belief dichotomy, I have had these anticipated problems confirmed by my recent awareness of commercially published books by authors who have chosen to express beliefs counter to those currently accepable, through the mouths of fictitious characters in what are clearly novels, and thus commercially publishable as such. The first of these to come to my attention in this way was ‘State of Fear’ by Michael Crichton, published in paperback by Harper Collins in 2005, at which point I recalled having previously read ‘Hypocrites’ Isle’by Ken McClure, ‘the master of the thriller’ who adopted this approach in exposing ‘the desperate paradoxes of the medical research industry, the corruption of academia, the hidden politics of drug manufacture, and the chilling human tragedy of a system in which the cost of doing the right thing is sometimes too high’, and which was judged ‘scrupulously observed and completely persuasive’ by The Telegraph, while The Scotsman commented that ‘the most frightening thing is that he makes it all so believable’. At this point, I ask, how much more convincing would such books be, were their beliefs and counter-beliefs to be reality-evaluated for compliance or non-compliance with the experiential reality common to all, and which would thus convert them indisputably to positive or negative knowledge as explained and exemplified in my third book and in this website.

However, Michael Crichton’s clever mixture of fiction and fact, opens with an introduction which fictionalises that ‘in late 2003, at the Sustainable Earth Summit conference in Johannesburg, the Pacific island nation of Vanutu announced that it was preparing a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency of the United States over global warming; that ‘Vanutu stood only a few metres above sea level, and the island’s eight thousand inhabitants were in danger of having to evacuate their country because of rising sea levels caused by global warming’; that ‘the United States, the largest economy in the world, was also the largest emitter of carbon dioxide and therefore the largest contributor to global warming’; that ‘the National Environmental Resource Fund, (NERF) an American activist group, announced that it would join forces with Vanutu in the lawsuit which was expected to be filed in the summer of 2004’; that ‘it was rumoured that wealthy philanthropist George Morton, who frequently backed environmental causes, would personally finance the suit, at an expected cost $8 million’; and that ‘since the suit would ultimately be heard by the sympathetic Ninth Syndicate in San Francisco, the litigation was awaited with some anticipation’. The book is thus a fictional account of how a major financial supporter of the NERF wishes to withdraw his support because he disapproves of an undercover/illegal plan of the Organisation of which he has become aware, which remains unknown to the reader until the closing stages of the book, and which, were I to reveal it here, would destroy a very good read for those who have yet to read it.

My purpose at present is to suggest that Michael Crichton, now deceased, probably did not believe in anthropogenic global warming. As to facts counter this belief, he cites them as appropriate to the development of his story with actual references to to scientific journals which appear as footnotes to the appropriate pages of the book, and he reproduces these references with his comments on each one, in a Bibliography at the end of the book. However, for what I assume to be the requirements of publishers in general, these comments treat these references as counter-contributions to a debate which has already concluded in favour of the now prevalent belief in anthropogenic global warming. Thus, while I conclude that he was a disbeliever in AGW and sought to encourage this disbelief in his readers, the book is a terrific read whatever the individual reader believes or disbelieves, and whatever the publishers believed or disbelieved when they accepted this book for publication in a form which permits the reader to believe or disbelieve in anthropogenic global warming, without committing the publisher one way or the other. 10/6/21.