Synopsis
Philanthropist George Morton cares about the environment and will sacrifice any amount of money to save it — until he is alerted to the fact that NERF, the activist group he’s been funding, might be misusing his funds. And so, tailed by his assistant Sarah Jones and his attorney Peter Evans, he sets out to find out where the money has gone... and stumbles onto a secret that costs him his life. Peter and Sarah find themselves following in Morton’s footsteps, aiding government agent John Kenner in thwarting the sinister plans of some very twisted environmentalists who seek to use modern technology to create natural disasters of horrific magnitude. And at the bottom of all of this is NERF’s pending law-suit against the United States government for causing global warming.
Evaluation
I’ve read quite a few of Michael Crichton’s novels in the past and I must admit that this is the one that I’ve like the best so far. And it doesn’t have to do with the fact that I’ve always been a little mistrustful of the environmentalist movement. That part of the story makes for a good yarn, but it’s the underlying facts that really make this book worth reading. Crichton documents everything that he alleges about the lack of global warming, the fact that sea levels aren’t rising, Antarctica is cooling rather than warming, glaciers are growing, etc.
What struck me the most is a short passage in the book where a mad professor sits down with Peter Evans during the Conference for Abrupt Climate Change and discourses on how governments and other organizations use fear to control the populace and that most of the discussion on global warming and the deteriorating environment are simply a tool to keep us all scared and thus control us. This rings very true for me, as I realize that fear is one of Satan’s greatest tools against humanity. And the one thing that counteracts fear is faith. This book is worth buying, if just for that short passage. The rest is exciting, but it only leads up to this passage, which is arguably the reason for the title and the whole book itself.
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