On the anniversary of Chernobyl.
Some of you know I have written a book that many people find controversial. It is called State of Fear, and I want to tell you how I came to write it. Because up until five years ago, I had very conventional ideas about the environment and the success of the environmental movement.
The book really began in 1998, when I set out to write a novel about a global disaster. In the course of my preparation, I rather casually reviewed what had happened in Chernobyl, since that was the worst manmade disaster in recent times that I knew about.
What I discovered stunned me. Chernobyl was a tragic event, but nothing remotely close to the global catastrophe I imagined. About 50 people had died in Chernobyl, roughly the number of Americans that die every day in traffic accidents. I don’t mean to be gruesome, but it was a setback for me. You can’t write a novel about a global disaster in which only 50 people die.
Undaunted, I began to research other kinds of disasters that might fulfill my novelistic requirements. That’s when I began to realize how big our planet really is, and how resilient its systems seem to be. Even though I wanted to create a fictional catastrophe of global proportions, I found it hard to come up with a credible example. In the end, I set the book aside, and wrote Prey instead.
But the shock that I had experienced reverberated within me for a while. Because what I had been led to believe about Chernobyl was not merely wrong—it was astonishingly wrong. Let’s review the data.
this is and article that some in here will benefit from, COLON and unDork read and comprehend, read twice if you must!!!!!
Excellent and amusing article! Essentially, the world is complex, stuff happens, try not to do “stupid stuff” yourself.
AS to the “population bomb”, it has always been my belief that educating girls and women reduces the population. The more education a young girl receives, generally makes her a better mother of fewer children. We all have seen this in the Western world and the second world, hopefully it will eventually trickle down to the third world.
Oops. You just introduced a complex variable that the “scientist” Ehrlich missed. Let me add another complex variable which pairs somewhat uncomfortably with yours. “Aid For Dependent Children”. “SNAP Food Programs”. And a bevy of government welfare funding to protect vulnerable children in America born to poor, undereducated, girls. Which has created an incentive for poor, undereducated girls in America to give birth to litters of children … thus radically expanding the dependent class of Americans. Oops. Just like Yellowstone, we are letting the Elk-children populations swell beyond the available resources … so soon, we will have school shootings and riots in the streets … won’t we?
BTW … Kate, I don’t know how you do it, but I am so, so, grateful for the material you bring to SDA. I learn so much from a “rube like you living in flyover country”. This Crichton article is so timely and relevant. I laughed at the reference of cytokine storms and the chemical complexity of hemoglobin. How relevant is THAT!? I love Crichton. What a fabulous lecture.
Very good article Kate, thanks.
Context.
The media is always schilling trying to instill fear and they do it be removing context.
Michael Crichton was always one of my favourite authors. He was a genius as noted in Wikipedia: “In 1994, Crichton achieved the unique distinction of having a No. 1 movie, Jurassic Park, a No. 1 TV show, ER, and a No. 1 book, Disclosure”
I remember reading about the premise of his book State of Fear in 2004 and his “controversial” dismissal of climate-alarmism. He would have been a nice antidote to Greta if he hadn’t died in 2008.
He also spoke about Environmentalism as Religion: It was “his view that religious approaches to the environment are inappropriate and cause damage to the natural world they intend to protect.” I guess Michael Moore’s latest documentary proves he was right on the mark.
The reality of Chernobyl and its effects were outlined in the very thorough report by UNSCEAR in 2000. It showed exactly the kind of minimal effects indicated by Crichton. Naturally, the press ignored what the real experts had to say about Chernobyl, just as they ignored the very good preliminary work of the International Chernobyl Project in 1991.
https://www.iaea.org/publications/3757/the-international-chernobyl-project
http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/publications/2000_1.html
They preferred to go with the catastrophist claims of Greenpeace which was at the time claiming 100,000+ casualties from the accident.
https://www.greenpeace.org/archive-international/en/news/features/chernobyl-deaths-180406/
I loved State of Fear. Great book. I didn’t know it’s origins. Crazy to see the similarities of the Chernobyl disaster and whats happening now with the CCP Virus. Fear is being used to manipulate us.
There were actually a bunch of people living in the region of Chernobyl whose health improved as a result. The low-to-moderate dose of radiation they received actually stimulated their immune systems and caused it to repair damage/repel other infectious agents and nascent cancer cells etc.
That’s known as “hormesis” which happens with many other toxins as well.
That’s the word I was looking for…
Old, but brilliant. Thanks for the link, I have seen parts of this before, but the Yellowstone management alone is well worth a read! He ties everything together very well.
Here’s the lecture video. It’s better than the transcript.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDCCvOv3qZY
Thanks for the link Dirtman. Crichton looked so young and healthy, and he died about three years later, with his wife six months pregnant.
At the end of his lecture Crichton says ” If we want to manage complexity, WE MUST ELIMINATE FEAR. Fear may draw a television audience. It may generate cash for an advocacy group. It may support the legal profession. But FEAR PARALYZES US… And we need to be flexible in our responses, as we move into a new era of managing complexity”.
Michael Moore’s new film goes in the opposite direction – it’s good old fashioned fear mongering… A typical response from progressives.
“WE MUST ELIMINATE FEAR.”
Duuude, where are the clicks and votes in that?
we are living in a state of fear and it is irrational. No where to go folks. I think I will just watch my fellow Canadians get to the end of their freedom and then laugh my ass off at them.
Its interesting that Creighton had a comment on second hand smoke, that it was not what the “experts” said it was.
He was a smoker and died of cancer.
Don’t have a position on it one way or another.
Thanks, Kate.
I’ve passed this one on.
Thanks Kate. State of Fear is my favorite Crichton novel,picked it up at a bargain bin for 50 cents, most enjoyable fictional book I’d read in years.
Crichton’s absolutely correct in his statements about taking the FEAR out of an issue, but governments, media, and whores like Moore and Gore make SO much money off of it, not to even mention certain governments and their blessed carbon taxes.
I very much appreciate his explanations of complex systems and man’s response to them, always wrong,always harmful. It is a damned shame he and other sensible skeptics have passed on and are no longer available to fight the overwhelming tsunami of bullshit, psuedo science and outright fear mongering.
There were natural disasters in the early historical and pre-historic eras that have not been duplicated in modern times. Those present us with some idea of the worst case scenario of natural disasters that could occur in our world. I suppose the upper limit might be a major asteroid strike, but explosion of the Yellowstone super-volcano ranks up there and would be orders of magnitude greater than anything we’ve witnessed in the modern age. The Carrington event (major solar flare in 1859) would be a crippler too if repeated at our current technological levels.
Mount Rainier going to major eruption would also be a disaster for that region on a scale that we can only imagine.
But it has not been all that long in geological time since comparable events. Little is known about the global events before 1000 AD, but we do have a fairly good reconstruction of events in the eastern Mediterranean from a volcanic eruption around 1650 BC. Anything on that scale would have major impacts today although our modern technology would reduce the potential death toll by alerting some coastal residents to impending large tsunamis. However that volcano blew itself apart and is not likely to repeat for a long time to come. Somewhat more possible as a repeat might be Vesuvius which still looms over a highly populated region.
The Younger Dryas dwarfs everything mentioned. Probable source of the flood in Gilgamesh and the Bible. But met by scoffs by millenials, because they know better.
Chrichton was vilified vehemently for writing “State of Fear”, which was very well researched and written. He dared speak against the High Priests of Climate. I’ll be shocked if anyone tries to adapt it for a motion picture.
The climate started changing the moment the Earth acquired an atmosphere. Man started exploiting climate change to exert power over other men the moment it was decided that someone should be in charge. There is nothing new about what the socialist governments and NGO’s around the world are doing. To maintain power, tyrants need to keep people off balance. When there is peace and no war, an enemy is needed just the same. Buck up against the High Priests or the King, you or a loved one might be next for the sacrifice.
These people weren’t blighted by radiation so much as by terrifying but false information. We ought to ponder, for a minute, exactly what that implies.
Now do coronavirus.
State of Fear was the first book I have read where ENGOs were accurately depicted. They are nothing more than hysteria pimping enemies of freedom and prosperity.
Think of ALL THE WORKS by Crichton that have been made into blockbuster movies and television series. It’s staggering. But where is the “State of Fear” film? I’ve read the book, and it’s laid out as a wonderfully engaging THRILLER with plot twists and turns. It would be a marvelous film … but … Hollywood. They won’t touch it with their 4” misshapen appendages. Pathetic bunch … the filthy rich Hollyweird elites.
The book isn’t written as some dull lecture. It’s a typical Crichton work of fiction with the science education embedded within. Hollywood makes me sick with their constant revisionist history lessons … and yet … no interest in TRUTH or opposing opinions.
Well, I’ve been to South Africa and Namibia a couple of times and the well paid, hard working and educated blacks I met all were on the ‘lets have a lot of children’ bandwagon. It’s cultural. To a person, they all said small families were a way for ‘whites to keep us down’. Smaller families is not a simple thing related only to money and education. Like everything, nothing is simple.
Lets start putting the Enviromentalists on the Next Forest Fire lets send them to Australia and help douse those Fires
The firefighters who were on the roof hosing off the fire in the exposed core were pretty much toast. The critical
slag is extremely radioactive and can kill at a single glance, but apart from that, the elevated radiation levels have
done no damage to flora and fauna in the “exclusion zone. There was no China Syndrome scenario where millions
of people died. The hot core meltdown did not bore its way into the earth’s core and the overall effects were nil.
This was covered by Dr. Dixie Lee Ray (former director of the Atomic Energy Commission) in one of her two books.
We have become victims of technology. In an age when we can resolve to a single part per billion, an uptick of a
handful of pico rads in background levels in America after the Chernobyl disaster is a piss in the Pacific Ocean!
I was a science geek at age 14 with a passion for Astronomy who understood numbers and scale. The average
American cannot comprehend a liter from a quart. The Jihad against atomic energy is causing people to crap their
pants over minute numbers that could not even be measured just a few decades ago.