GETTING WARMER.(The Talk of the Town)

Halfway through Michael Crichton's new thriller, "State of Fear," the hero, John Kenner, finds himself trapped with a comely blonde, dodging bolts of artificial lightning. Fortunately, Kenner, an agent for the government's National Security Intelligence Agency, has the presence of mind to advise the blonde to strip down to her underwear, and, as a result, the two survive long enough to save the world from a diabolical plot. Environmentalists are conspiring to blow off a piece of Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf, swamp California with a tidal wave, and engineer flash floods in the American Southwest (this is where the artificial lightning comes in), all by way of convincing the public that global warming is an actual danger, when, as Kenner knows, the whole thing is really just a shrug.

"Remember African killer bees?" Kenner asks at one point. "There was talk of them for years. They're here now, and apparently there's no problem."

If you judge disasters by the art they inspire, then global warming is shaping up to be a pretty big disappointment: instead of "Dr. Strangelove" and "On the Beach," we've got "Waterworld" and "The Day After Tomorrow." And although, technically speaking, Crichton's new book isn't about the threat of global warming--it's about the threat of believing in the threat of global warming--it still manages to go awry in predictable ways. A good deal of the novel is given over to temperature graphs and to monologues on subjects like the Pleistocene ice ages. It concludes with an "author's message," two appendices, and a twenty-page bibliography. Blondes with lightning burns aside, "State of Fear" wants, weirdly enough, to be taken seriously.

As it happens, the book's release coincides with genuinely significant events in the realm of climate policy. When the Kyoto Protocol was drawn up, in 1997, it included a complex ratification mechanism: to take effect, the treaty would have to be approved by at least fifty-five nations, and that number would have to include countries accounting for at least fifty-five per cent of the industrialized world's carbon-dioxide emissions. With Russia's ratification of Kyoto, this past November, those conditions were finally met. We are now in a ninety-day "countdown" period, and on February 16th the protocol will become binding on the hundred and thirty-two nations that have signed on to it.

Kyoto represents a small but critical step forward. It is the first global agreement to set numerical targets for emissions reductions. (These targets apply only to so-called Annex 1, or ...