Boxing The Glacier - The Blovel

Introduction.

If you thought witnessing global warming equals watching paint dry then bookmark our Boxing the Glacier blovel, wherein a heady brew of murky industrial and political agendas compete with the latest mainstream climate science for public mindshare in a race against time as we hurtle through space towards a catastrophe that not even Michael Crichton could dream of in his wildest fictions.

All in this novel blovel form - blovel being a novel in live-blog format that takes its plot lines and characters from the real world to entertain and inform. It's a total experiment and I take as inspiration Crichton's blends of fiction and pseudo-science in State of Fear. Not just the book, the phenomenon; the guy has been received by the President of the United States as some sort of climate change expert, for god's sake. His scientific credentials extend to writing Jurassic Park, The Great Train Robbery, Westworld, Prey and Rising Sun.

Yet his global warming views have helped shape policy: :::[TNR]

As reported in Rebel-in-Chief, a new book on George W. Bush by Weekly Standard Editor Fred Barnes, soon after State of Fear's December 2004 publication, Crichton was contacted by Karl Rove with word that Bush had read his novel and wanted to meet him. In January 2005, Crichton spent an hour with Bush. The session, Barnes writes, found the men "in near-total agreement."

What is this upside down world we live in? No longer is fiction embargoed from science when developing public policy. And that is acceptable? This new reality slipped in via the same trojan embedded in the public psyche that facilitated the notion of Intelligent Design coming to challenge Darwin in the science class-room. That virus didn't survive the sanitory court rooms, but while the trojan lives anything can and does go wrong. We have a serious problem on our hands with global warming, and the one thing that is going to help is a scientific understanding of climate change. The right information will help us make the right decisions and survive. Yet in an ironic inversion of the classic Crichton plotline of a dystopian scientocracy we have a case where NASA's top climate scientist, James E. Hansen, claims he is censored by the White House. He charges that NASA's scientists are intimidated into withholding scientific findings that run counter to Administration policy.

Throw into that crazy crucible the withering speech of satirist comic Stephen Colbert at the Annual Washington Press Corps Dinner, add the reaction of the President to the blowtorch of truthiness, flavour with the media's pretense that it did not happen, stir, forment, and presto ... Boxing the Glacier.

We have good guys, we have bad guys, we have the fate of humanity hanging in the balance. What more do you want? A plot? It doesn't work that way, this is a blovel where I get my inspiration from the real world. You will just have to wait until I spot one I think I could work with. I think I may have one but I am going to give it the overnight test so, please, watch this space.

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