Al Gore has seen global warming as a crucial issue since his earliest days in politics thirty years ago. In 1992 he published a book on it which became a best-seller, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit . His recent book, An Inconvenient Truth , has met with similar success along with a film of the same name.
The film, directed by David Guggenheim, won an Academy Award for best documentary film. It had its premiere in 2006 at the Sundance experimental film festival and received three standing ovations. It was also screened at the Cannes Film Festival of that same year, the Durban International Film Festival, and the Brisbane International Film Festival. The book appeared at about the same time and was written as a companion to the film. It swiftly reached the New York Times paperback nonfiction best-seller list, rising to become number one on the list within a month. The film became one of the highest-grossing documentaries in the United States
and has had great popular impact, to an extent unusual for documentary films. It won the 2006 Academy Award for best documentary film, received good reviews and has had a widely popular reception.
The structure of the film is non linear. There is no consecutive narrative, but a set of images and ideas tied together by a loose central thread. The central plot shows Gore giving a slide show on global warming to an audience, showing them graphs as well as photographs and cartoons.
This is interspersed with shots of him walking, or riding in a car, while his voice is heard expressing his private thoughts. There are glimpses into his past and his personal life – his son’s accident, his loss of the presidency, childhood summers on a farm, his sister. The background music is haunting, and in fact the film also won an Academy Award for best original song.
Gore has a politician’s relaxed charm and probably intentional awkwardness; he begins “I used to be the next president of the United States” and the audience at the slide show laughs at his mistake. But his sincerity and conviction are inescapable. His lecture begins with stunningly beautiful images of the earth as seen from outer space. He goes on to explain the greenhouse effect very simply and clearly, and uses cartoon images to bring home the ideas. Further clarification of the scientific evidence of global warming is given with very clear, understandable graphs, which he explains without condescension but with plain and accessible simplicity. He shows dazzling, frightening photographs of changes in the world: glaciers retreating in Peru and Argentina, of increasing natural disasters, floods and drought.
All the science is at the average man’s level of understanding, with the simplest graphs of temperature change over time, of CO2 emissions over time, of changes in ocean temperature. The explanations are friendly; the photographs are both beautiful and terrifying.
Interspersed with the descriptions and explanations are personal recollections. Gore tells his audience how he became caught up by the subject. He had a teacher in college, over thirty years ago, named Roger Revelle, who thought of measuring the CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere, and showed Gore’s class his results. The teacher himself was startled, and drew connections between changes in civilization and in the atmosphere, and projected future changes. In the 70’s when Gore was in Congress he invited Professor Revelle to hearings on the subject, and in the 80’s he wrote his first book about it. It is evident that he has been involved in the subject for a long time.
He tells of his six year old son’s automobile accident. The child and his parents were in the hospital for a month. “Just turned my whole world upside down, and then shook it till everything fell out.” That is when he decided to spend his time trying to learn more about these changes that seemed to be dangerous to the future of our children. The use of this story might be considered emotionally manipulative if not for Gore’s obvious sincerity and conviction. True, he is a politician and they are supposed to convince you they are sincere. But this politician invested, it seems, a considerable amount of time and effort in this issue. He is a layman and not a scientist, but his exposition of the science shows that he has learned the subject thoroughly. He traveled to Antarctica, to the North Pole, to China to find out about coal mines there. He has spent hours upon hours talking to scientists. Obviously the simple drawling farm boy image is an act; in order to present the subject with such clarity and precision he must have profound command of the details.
The nonlinear structure of the film prevents it from becoming annoyingly didactic. It is more like a person talking, with the associative processes of everyday conversation. Gore slides from talk of his childhood on a farm to weather patterns, jumps to talking of a coal mine, of “drunken trees” whose roots had been anchored in permafrost which now thaws so that the trees bend every which way. There is poetry in the descriptions and beauty in the photographs, so that the viewer as he becomes alarmed by the science is caught up anew in the love of nature, and thus his motivation is increased to do something about it.
For this is the main point of the film: that something must be done, and that it can’t wait. Another personal episode deals with his sister. She was ten years older than he, started smoking as a teenager and never stopped, and died of lung cancer. Only then did his father stop growing tobacco, after doing so all his life. It takes human nature time to connect the dots, Gore explains, but “there can be a day of reckoning when you wish you had…connected the dots more quickly!”
He also offers a view of the other side, the opinion that global warming is a hoax, but says that in fact scientists do
not disagree: out of a massive sample of peer reviewed scientific articles 928 validated global warming and NONE said no. It is only the popular press, he claims, which said it might not be a problem. He has seen scientists who were persecuted and deprived of their jobs “because the facts they discovered led them to an inconvenient truth”, because they worked for the American oil industry for example.
He ends by saying we already know how to solve the problem. We
know what to do: more energy efficient appliances, higher mileage cars, carbon capture and sequestration. We have everything we need except political will – and in America people can change that. This film is an impassioned plea for urgent change, and presents a clear program for doing so. Gore has pulled out all possible ammunition: his own charm and intelligence, his personal life, breath-taking photographs of beauty of nature, terrifying glimpses of impending catastrophe and an admirably clear and accessible description of the problem and its proposed solution. Though not a film artist himself he has exploited the medium in a thorough and effective way with every possible filmic technique: the visual, the personal, the poetic and the didactic, in order to try and get his point across.
State of Fear
Michael Crichton’s book
State of Fear is very different. Unlike Al Gore, he does not make it clear from the first that he is out to make a point. The book is presented as a classic Crichton mystery, written in his tough, factual style and at first appears to be a fast moving thriller. It gradually is transformed into a sermonizing polemic.
In previous books Crichton has taken pleasure in debunking popularly accepted ideas, or at least in attempting to illuminate them from contrary angles. For example, in
Disclosure he pointed out that sexual harassment could as well be inflicted by women.
Rising Sun took the position that the Japanese are gradually taking over the American economy and should be regarded as a threat. There is a faint impression of conscious sneering at the politically correct liberal opinions in these works, but it is buried deep beneath the vivid characters and fast moving plots.
In
State of Fear Crichton debunks the “global warming myth”, not by means of the plot itself but in Socratic fashion, through arguments placed in the mouths of the characters. The plot itself is episodic and diffuse. The book begins with fast paced episodes which do not, in the end, contribute much to the plot: in Paris a rather appealing graduate student is murdered with graphic detail by a mysterious terrorist group, in London another such murder takes place after equipment is delivered, and so on. After fifty pages we meet the main character of the book, Peter Evans, lawyer to a millionaire environmental philanthropist named George Morton. Morton supports NERF, (National Environmental Resource Fund), who are now suing the United States government on behalf of an island nation which has been damaged by rising sea level due to global warming. But Morton is having reservations about NERF and its leader, and suddenly withdraws all his funding from them, and is then apparently killed in a car crash. He reappears near the end of the book, and the real mystery of the book to me is how this old man suddenly becomes physically fit enough to race through the jungle under fire like a heroic Marine.
The other major character of the book is Dr. John Kenner, a thirty-nine year old scientist (not forty, thirty-nine; just young enough to be a dynamic Crichton hero) who has a doctorate in civil engineering, a law degree and a spectacular record both as an academic and as mountain climber. Kenner's character has been said to be based on MIT professor of meteorology Richard Lindzen
, a firm critic of global warming theories. Kenner is Crichton’s mouthpiece in the book; it is he who drives home the point that global warming is simply another attempt by those in power to keep people in a state of fear so that they may be more easily controlled.
There are other characters, including two equally spectacular women, beautiful and capable; one of them kills enemies in moments of crisis as well as any male Crichton hero. The plot continues its dynamic leaps from place to place and from event to event, but it is episodic and confusing. The main idea is that terrorist groups are helping to cause catastrophes in order to drive home the idea of global warming. The ending of the novel is not satisfactory in purely literary terms: there is no sense of conflict resolved, of drama coming to a close. It appears that Crichton has used a framework he knows well in order to try and make his point, but has not bothered to exploit his customary superb craftsmanship. His missionary zeal displaced his literary skill; he did not realize that in order to drive home his ideas he needed to write more carefully than ever, not less. The reader expecting an exciting novel puts it down severely disappointed and disgruntled.
The book is full of many speeches, explanations and graphs attempting to show that the whole idea of global warming is a hoax. The reader is expected to believe them because the characters expounding them are Crichton heroes, brusque macho types, and there is an authoritativeness to the persona which intimidates you into believing what they say. It is as if John Wayne, Clark Gable, Bruce Willis, all of America's tough movie star heroes brusquely snorted at the oversensitive liberal types and represented the nitty gritty truth. This fits neatly into Crichton’s tradition of debunking.
In his final attack on the over-gentle liberal, represented in the book by an actor who believes in the inner good of man, Crichton inserts a graphic description of the way that actor feels as he is being eaten alive by cannibals in whose good he believed. This is gratuitous and almost pornographic, in that it was inserted in order to add to impact and cater to the reader’s need for strong and innovative sensation. It contributes to the “hard hitting” image of the book, and mocks the blind optimism of the do-gooders with images which remain like permanent poison in the memory long after the book is forgotten.
The science in the book has met with criticism more than acclaim
. On superficial reading the graphs and the resulting arguments are reasonable. But single graphs and arguments scattered through a book cannot be taken to present a full picture. Crichton does not take one single point and follow it through consistently, but attacks on all fronts without logical progression and occasionally without logic at all. For example he says extremes of weather have not increased in recent years. Then he says that in fact global warming predicts
less extreme weather. This would actually seem to weaken his point!
At the end of the book there is a note from the author claiming he has been reading on this subject for three years. This is followed by an essay on politicized science – not global warming, but eugenics! This was a racist philosophy later associated with Nazism, and Crichton draws parallels between this and global warming because they both met with government support! There is also an appendix of sources for the many graphs which appear in the book, and a 20-page bibliography on global warming.
A detailed critique of the science in the book is beyond the scope of this article, but the science itself is beyond the scope of the book. There is no way of understanding from a novel whether the scientific claims are valid or not. Their validity is based on the dramatic character of the people who voice them, and on 20 pages of bibliography which the author claims have led him to these conclusions. But there is no systematic presentation of any single point with detailed data, arguments and conclusions. Naturally not; this is a novel and not a scientific paper. The problem is that such a work can be powerfully convincing to the layman. For example, Kenner argues with Evans about global warming. Evans is immediately convinced when Kenner refers him to papers claiming the contrary, and he finds out the references are not bogus. The reader of fiction may not know that references can generally be found arguing
either side of an issue; their existence proves nothing except that somebody took that side. There is a real danger that people will be convinced by Crichton’s authoritativeness because they themselves do not have the time or expertise to research the issue, and the Crichton persona with its all-American brusque toughness is easy to believe.
Fortunately the book is not well enough written to have this power; it is too long and the plot is too diffuse. It is interesting to compare this with
An Inconvenient Truth. Al Gore did not make the film himself: it was directed, photographed, and edited by professional film makers. Michael Crichton, on the other hand, had full control of his own medium, and despite his proven brilliance at his craft, the end result is not very successful as a novel. Perhaps it is damaging to the end result if the person who wants to get the ideas across has full control of the medium of their transmission.
Which to believe?
Al Gore's film and Michael Crichton's books are both are popular works, and the level of science is geared to the general public. But Gore's film deals primarily with the science and therefore it is presented in more coherent a fashion. On the other hand in Crichton's book the impact may be greater just because it is not presented as a lecture. It is impossible to judge the accuracy of the claims in either: real conclusions cannot be drawn from a scattering of graphs and convincing arguments – particularly as both men, the politician and the writer, have demonstrated remarkable success at the manipulation of words. What remains (aside from personal enjoyment of the works) is to compare the credibility of the authors. Gore represents nice people, Americans with strong values and morality, kind and strong and interested in the good. (Crichton would probably have him eaten up by cannibals as well!) Crichton represents the American blunt persona, the macho strong-man (though woman too behave this way in his book!) cutting through effeminate do-gooding, not afraid to show the bare truth. The choice between them is a matter of taste.
It appears to me that on practical grounds Gore has had more opportunity than Crichton to get at facts. In his capacity as Vice President Gore has traveled as far as Antarctica and talked with a multitude of scientists; presumably his position gave him more opportunity than Crichton to gather information and listen to informed explanations. Crichton claims he has been reading papers for three years and presents thirty of these in his bibliography. But Gore has been involved in this issue since his college days, thirty years ago. To me it seems that his perspective and information must be broader. But that might be because I prefer nice do-gooders myself.
Further relevant websites:
[] Gore, Al, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, 1992, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA
[] Gore, Al, An Inconvenient Truth, 2006, Rodale Press, Penn.
[] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Truth
[] Crichton, Michael, State of Fear, 2004, Harper Collins
[] Crichton, Michael, Disclosure, 1994, Alfred A. Knopf
[] Crichton, Michael, Rising Sun, 1992, Alfred A. Knopf
[] See
http://www.csicop.org/doubtandabout/crichton/, as well as private gossip
[] See
http://www.wunderground.com/education/stateoffear.asp?MR=1,
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=74,
http://www.csicop.org/doubtandabout/crichton/ and many more.
