“Is global warming a myth?” So begins the blurb for the French translation of Michael Crichton’s State of Fear (New York: Avon Books, 2004), recently published by Robert Laffont. This is not the first time that climate change has been the subject of controversies – Futuribles has already covered the debates several times. What is more disturbing, according to André Lebeau, is when the author who sets out to challenge the phenomenon is a writer of bestsellers, and therefore benefits from a very large audience including many who do not necessarily have the scientific knowledge needed to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Alas, there is little wheat in this book, says André Lebeau. The pseudo-scientific demonstrations of the knight on the white charger battling the environmental extremists are extremely poor. André Lebeau points a few of the many errors that pepper the text and warns potential readers that the book should be read as pure fiction (if at all).
Is Climate Change a Deception? Review of Michael Crichton, State of Fear
This article is published in Futuribles journal ,
