Student gives Crichton more credit, less respect for being sneaky, dubious

As my title suggests, I do give the author more credit than I originally had intended - yes, intended. I had presumed that anyone who was reputedly writing to legitimate one side of a politically-charged war of theories would not be worth my time. But Crichton is anything but dull, and even while I am disappointed that he doesn't put his "only too aware" voice to better (or less 'skeptical for the smug virtue of being skeptical') use, I am glad that he takes the risk of backing himself up in the end matter. This way there is little doubt as to where he stands.

First off, even when characters aren't discussing the realities of their side of overtly polarized arguments, the voice of the author fills our apparent, momentary void of polemics with more subtle jabs at these 'truths.' How? Put simply, through the tone of narration, with little bits of exposition that are on the surface only 'advancing the story:'
"Christ, it was cold..."
"Not bad at all! Quite warm! You are lucky, it's a pleasant August night."
"...Morton was wearing a down vest, a quilted windbreaker, and heavy pants. And he was still cold."
On the one hand, it's Iceland and our philanthropist patsy Morton is supposed to be on a kick of funding research to ease his guilt over inherited wealth while being slightly oblivious to the facts; but I'm seeing, '"Get it? It's DAYTIME in Iceland [the poster place for 'skeptic' groups], and Morton deep down knows it's cold but is blinded by his hunger for altruism [just like everyone who jumps on the global warming bandwagon, and Theodore Roosevelt, and the Rockefeller Foundation]."'

A major red flag in Crichton's 'agenda-less' argument comes a few pages later, when Einarsson cites "climate patterns that are rather specific to Iceland and are unlikely to be related to any global pattern." I would suspect that it is equally unlikely that such a true-science hero would in real life suggest that the world is so disconnected. Case in point: the esteemed Prof. James Lovelock, who in a recent BBC interview said that basically the world is beyond human control of saving - and even went as far as to say that all renewable energy is truly good for at this point is good business tactics, and that scientists no longer practice their craft as a vocation but understand 'only too well' who's paying them (all morsels which I would expect Crichton to eat whole) - was himself the very founder of the widely-accepted Gaia Hypothesis, which frames the earth as a single living organism. http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8594000/8594561.stm

I wish someone with this author's passion and power over rhetoric would take a fictional adventure such as this a step further, and include organizations that are working just as hard as Crichton's environmental terrorist network, but to fund 'skeptic' research (a lobby for fossil fuels or a fictional company representing Exxon Mobil).
Perhaps Bruno Latour will treat us to such a 'no-win with old world polemics' story sometime in the future...
As far as I'm concerned, that is where State of Fear is most offensive: even with it's "great respect for the corrosive influence of bias [etc]," the novel employs a decidedly hostile air, in both its choice of statistical references (a la footnotes) and it's contemptuous tone for those who would act on the premise of a moral warning against human ignorance.

In the story Crichton exposes the potential workings of a conspiratorial black box - of creating false support for a global theory - and in doing so more implicitly reveals his own: that of the Author's mixture of storytelling and pre-legitimated fact (what he wants us to trust as "real," the footnotes) to apply imagination to sensitive topics and put into the public atmosphere 'another way to see' the issues. Yet, the discrepancy between the way he skillfully summarizes his own reasoning (through the appendices and bibliography) and the significantly more one-sided views in the content of the book is troubling. Why doesn't he apply the same circulating reference to both sides of the paradigm of climatology?

The answer, it occurs to me, may be fairly simple.
Crichton suggests on pages 718 and 719 that we are in a place of stasis, scientifically-speaking, and are in need of a "new environmental movement, with new goals and new organizations." Based on this I would say that he himself is stuck in the same at old cold war paradigm he describes: find a buzz topic based on a binary and focus on one side of this and nothing else, to please the public - this is happening all the time: partisanship, ethanol vs. fossil fuels, and global warming are just a few examples where the 'science' or 'reality' of the issues has evolved, while the public eye is held adamantly on the old favorites.
As Michael Crichton doubtlessly knows well, that's where the money's at.