Science versus Pseudoscience:
a Review of State of Fear

Ten years ago, when Michael Crichton's new book, State of Fear, was published, I was among the first in line to read the new hardcover edition. I hadn't read the author since I was a teenager, and I needed a light read reminiscent of The Great Train Robbery and Sphere.

State of Fear was anything but the fun-loving adventure story I expected. As a voracious reader of climate science, I easily and quickly saw through the book as an error-ridden and poorly written political diatribe on environmental science.

I laughed the book off, but years later, I am surprised to find that many I meet actually use it as their primary source of information for their disbelief in climate change science.

I believe that science is the best tool we have to explain the natural world and is superior to its alternatives: pseudoscience (ideas that claim to be scientific but are incompatible with the scientific method), antiscience (rejection of the scientific method as the best approach to knowledge), and politically motivated fake news.

Throughout my adult life, I have deliberately trained myself to think and communicate in the language of science and to recognize non-scientific claims. But State of Fear reeks of the worst kind of anti-science fraud. Today, we can comprehensively dismantle Michael Crichton's arguments in State of Fear—along with his posthumous intellectual reputation—and consign both to the dustbin of history.

Drawing Climate Change Conclusions from a Thriller

By the time Crichton died in 2008, he had become the world's most famous climate change denier—it all started with the publication of State of Fear.

For anybody who draws their conclusions about climate change from a science fiction thriller, try this: step back for a minute and think about that. Was that really the right way to learn about climate science?

No doubt, we should always learn about anything from multiple sources, challenging any one piece of information before us. But is a work of science fiction as credible as, say, NASA or science journals and scientific academies?

When I read State of Fear in 2004, there were several things I disliked about the book; many of those were themes that were common among America's anti-environmentalists at that time. Let me talk about a few of those:

Michael Crichton Peddled Pseudoscience in the Past

Michael Crichton's 1988 non-fiction book, Travels, shows his interest in pseudoscience. The book is about his fascination with mysticism, out-of-body experiences, astral projection, and fortune-telling. Tellingly, in this book, he shows his disdain for science. I remember one section in which he attacked Carl Sagan as a proponent of real science. I found that quote here:

“Skeptical scientists often point out, as Carl Sagan has, that the wonders of real science far surpass the supposed wonders of fringe science. I think it is possible to invert that idea, and to say that the wonders of real consciousness far surpass what conventional science admits can exist.”

The book Travels sets us up for what Michael Crichton is: somebody who looks down on real science and who is tantalized by its alternatives. Is this really somebody we should trust on a subject of real science?

Michael Crichton’s Depiction of Academics and Environmentalists is Misleading

The bulk of State of Fear is about characters who are archetypes of different forms of environmentalists, scientists, and conservationists. Each of these archetypes is a common straw man in right-wing circles in the United States.

From 2005 to 2015, or one-quarter of my life, I worked with a diverse group of environmentalists, environmental lawyers, and marine scientists. I was able to get to know many of them well. From personal experience, I know that the personality traits of this group of people are very different from the pencil-necked eco-terrorists that Crichton fictionalized to pad his arguments. The problem with using science fiction to attack climate science is that it allowed the author the cheap opportunity to attack climate scientists through the classic logical fallacy of ad hominem (attacking the character) without having to cite the weaknesses in character of actual climate scientists.

I remember working with scientists as a journalist. What struck me was their dedication to rigorous research and their commitment to environmental issues based on empirical evidence. Crichton's portrayal of these global heroes does a disservice to the genuine efforts of those striving to understand and mitigate climate change.

Michael Crichton’s Use of a Large Bibliography is Misleading

Many readers who rely on State of Fear for information about climate change are impressed by the extensive bibliography at the back of Crichton's book. Using a large bibliography is actually a common technique in anti-environmental books because it creates the illusion of authority. It makes it seem as though Crichton thoroughly researched his arguments.

In reality, Crichton's novel rehashes pseudoscientific ideas that were circulating on the internet at the time. Many of the scientists referenced in the bibliography have criticized the book for misinterpreting their work or taking it out of context.

If anyone were to actually follow the sources in Crichton's bibliography, they would find that the authors he referenced almost always arrived at conclusions that directly contradict Crichton's claims.

The clearest case is Peter Doran, the Antarctic researcher whose 2002 paper on the McMurdo Dry Valleys Crichton leaned on to suggest that Antarctica was cooling and its ice was fine. In 2006, Doran wrote in The New York Times that his results had been misused as “evidence” against global warming by Crichton, and that one small, cold corner of the continent said nothing about the ice sheet as a whole. When the scientist you cite has to publicly correct you, the bibliography has stopped being evidence and started being decoration.

Crichton Rewrote James Hansen’s 1988 Testimony

One of the most repeated passages in State of Fear claims that NASA scientist James Hansen’s famous 1988 warning to Congress overstated future warming by 300 percent. It sounds like a knockout. It is a sleight of hand.

Hansen presented three scenarios, A, B and C, built on different assumptions about future emissions, and he told Congress that the middle one, Scenario B, was the most likely. Crichton compared the real world against Scenario A, the high-end case, and left out the scenario Hansen actually expected. Scenario B tracked the warming of the following decades reasonably well. Hansen answered Crichton himself in 2005, pointing out that the “300 percent” figure only works if you quietly swap his most likely scenario for his most extreme one.

Michael Crichton's Main Arguments Were Already Disproven Before State of Fear Was Published

State of Fear presents lots of arguments against climate change and environmentalism, but all of these claims had already been thoroughly debunked by the time State of Fear was published in 2004. Here are a few examples:

Urban Heat Island Effect

One of Crichton's central arguments in State of Fear is that rising global temperatures are exaggerated because cities are naturally warmer than rural areas. He suggests that scientists made an error by basing climate data on urban temperature readings.

However, the Urban Heat Island effect and its influence on temperature measurements had been extensively studied way before State of Fear was published. Scientists had already studied and drawn conclusions about the Urban Heat Island Effect, and had strong evidence that the Heat Island Effect had only minimal impact on global temperature. Crichton's book ignores this well-established research, and he also ignored the fact that climate data comes from many diverse sources, including ocean temperatures, which are clearly far removed from the effects of urban environments.

For a thorough breakdown of the Urban Heat Island effect, Skeptical Science offers an excellent resource.

The evidence has only hardened since. Weeks before the novel came out, David Parker of Britain’s Met Office published a study in Nature comparing warming on calm nights, when urban heat builds up, with warming on windy nights, when it blows away. The trends were the same. Then in 2012, the Berkeley Earth project, led by physicist Richard Muller, a self-described skeptic, and funded in part by a Koch family foundation, rebuilt the global land temperature record from scratch and found the urban heat island effect to be negligible on a global scale. Muller announced in The New York Times that he was a “converted skeptic.” That is how science is supposed to work: a doubter checked the data and changed his mind.

State of Fear and CFCs

Crichton also claims that international bans on chlorofluorocarbons harmed people in places like Africa, because these bans eliminated cheap refrigerants. He made this argument while also incorrectly claiming that CFCs did not actually contribute to ozone depletion.

In reality, global regulations that phased out CFCs are universally understood as one of the most successful environmental initiatives in history. Contrary to Crichton's claim, the transition away from CFCs led to the cost-effective and environmentally safe alternatives to aerosols and polluting refrigerants, without any of the dire consequences to the people of developing nations that he predicted. The scientific consensus on CFCs and ozone depletion had been firmly established before the novel's release, making his argument outdated, misleading and absolutely not credible.

The science behind that consensus earned Mario Molina, F. Sherwood Rowland and Paul Crutzen the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, nine years before State of Fear was published. And the result of acting on it is now measurable. The latest scientific assessment of the ozone layer, released by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme in 2023, found it on track to recover to 1980 levels around 2040 across most of the world, and around 2066 over Antarctica. Crichton treated the CFC phase-out as a cautionary tale. It turned out to be proof that the world can identify an atmospheric threat, act on it, and watch the sky heal.

Debunking Crichton’s Claims of Climate Science Suppression

In State of Fear, Crichton argues that open discussion of climate science is being suppressed, stating that “leading scientific journals have taken strong editorial positions on the side of global warming, which, I argue, they have no business doing.”

His claim misrepresents both the role of science publishing and how scientific consensus is established. Science journals do not “take sides” arbitrarily. Rather, they report on the overwhelming body of evidence. If climate skeptics had compelling data contradicting the consensus, they would be able to publish it—but they don’t, because the evidence does not support their position.

Crichton also claims that “any scientist who has doubts understands clearly that they will be wise to mute their expression.”

This is misleading and continues to be a common tactic among anti-science communicators. Contrary to assertions that scientists are muted, science actually thrives on skepticism and debate. Once a theory is repeatedly tested and confirmed, the debate begins to dissolve.

The reason the climate scientists agree on human-caused global warming is not fear of suppression—it’s because the data in its favor is overwhelming. The few scientists who still deny climate change are not publishing in peer-reviewed journals because their arguments don’t hold up to scientific scrutiny.

Furthermore, Crichton presents the fact that “so many of the outspoken critics of global warming are retired professors” as evidence of suppression. In reality, it is evidence that climate skepticism has long been outdated.

Those old professors can smoke their pipes and tinker with their typewriters all they want, but the fact is that retired scientists are no longer engaged in active research, and many of those who challenge the climate consensus have ties to fossil fuel interests.

The notion that they are silenced is literally the opposite of reality. The fact that dirty fuel industries have spent decades and billions of dollars funding climate misinformation has coincided with working scientists who present climate data facing political attacks, legal harassment, and death threats.

Crichton’s argument that scientific journals should remain neutral on climate change is as flawed as demanding that medical journals remain neutral on whether smoking causes cancer. The role of scientific publishing is to report the best available evidence, not to create false balance — suggesting this is one of Crichton's most clear examples of preference for pseudoscience over real research.

Far from being suppressed, climate skepticism has been given an outsized platform by fossil fuel-backed misinformation (Patrick Moore is a great example of this). If there were a real scientific case against human-caused climate change, it would be debated in journals—not just in the pages of a techno-thriller.

Crichton himself is the best evidence against his own claim. In September 2005, less than a year after the novel was published, Senator James Inhofe invited him to testify on climate science before the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. The following year, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists gave him its journalism award. A novelist with no training in climatology was handed a Senate hearing and an oil industry prize. That is not what suppression looks like.

Meanwhile, the industry that funded so much of the doubt knew better. A 2023 study in Science examined the climate projections that Exxon’s own scientists produced between 1977 and 2003 and found that they accurately predicted the warming that followed, while the company spent those same decades publicly casting doubt on the science. State of Fear landed right in the middle of that campaign.

Debunking Crichton’s Defense of Lomborg

Michael Crichton defends Bjørn Lomborg’s early and outdated anti-climate book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, claiming that “the author has been subjected to relentless ad hominem attacks, which can only mean his conclusions are unobjectionable in any serious scientific way.”

This is a misrepresentation of the overwhelming scientific response to Lomborg’s work. Debunkings of The Skeptical Environmentalist by scientists and science journalists were not personal attacks. Actually, they were well written, data-driven rebuttals highlighting how the book misused statistics, his selective citation of sources, and his misrepresentation of environmental science.

Lomborg, who is a statistician, not a climate scientist, wrote his book on the premise that environmental concerns are overblown. But reviews of his work have consistently demonstrated that his conclusions rely on cherry-picked data and misleading comparisons.

The Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty initially found his work “objectively dishonest,” a ruling that was only overturned on procedural grounds, not scientific merit. Moreover, a 2002 review in Scientific American—which Crichton dismisses as “particularly reprehensible”—featured leading scientists dissecting Lomborg’s claims, showing that he repeatedly misinterpreted or distorted existing research.

Crichton’s assertion that criticism of Lomborg “can only mean his conclusions are unobjectionable” is illogical. In science, scrutiny is a sign that a claim is being taken seriously and tested against the evidence. Lomborg’s work has failed these tests time and again.

If anything, Lomborg’s career shows how climate contrarians are not silenced but can actually thrive and create profitable careers among right-wing media and political interests seeking to cast doubt on climate science. Far from being a victim, Lomborg has received widespread attention and funding, and frankly generated incredible wealth, despite his work being discredited by experts in relevant fields.

Crichton’s attempt to frame this as a “sad episode for science” ignores the real issue: the persistence of misinformation and the willingness of popular writers to defend flawed arguments in the name of false balance.

Debunking Crichton's Support for the Myth of a 1970s Global Cooling Consensus

In State of Fear, Michael Crichton references the 1970s global cooling scare, citing books like Lowell Ponte’s The Cooling (1972). In The Cooling, Ponte warned of a future ice age and wrote, “We simply cannot afford to gamble against this possibility by ignoring it. We cannot risk inaction.” Crichton cites examples like this to suggest that scientists have been inconsistent in predictions of climate change.

But it is definitely a myth. The notion that a scientific consensus existed around global cooling in the 1970s has no basis in reality, and is a popular anti-science talking point. While a handful of papers explored the potential cooling effects of aerosols — that is what science is supposed to do: hypothesize, the majority of climate research in the 1970s was pointing toward warming associated with increasing CO₂ levels. Scientific literature from 1965 to 1979 included only seven studies that suggested a future of cooling, while another 44 predicted warming.

Those numbers come from a 2008 review in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society by Thomas Peterson, William Connolley and John Fleck, who went back through the peer-reviewed literature of the period paper by paper. A few magazine covers and a popular book like Ponte’s are not a scientific consensus, and Crichton, who prided himself on his bibliography, should have known the difference.

Crichton’s argument—that we “do not know what the climate of the planet will be in the future”—ignores the groundswell of improvements in climate modeling and collection of climate data over the past decades. Today, the overwhelming consensus is that human activities, particularly greenhouse gas emissions, are driving significant warming.

Michael Crichton’s State of Fear Attacked Cornerstones of Global Environmentalism, not just Climate Change

Beyond climate change, State of Fear recycles several long-standing arguments from the U.S. anti-environmentalist movement. For example, Crichton claims in the book that "Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler," an assertion strikingly similar to one made by human clickbait Ann Coulter in a book published the year before.

Ironically, one of Crichton's other major points is that climate science is invalid because some academics from a century ago supported eugenics—a flawed argument frequently used by anti-science communicators. The success of modern science demonstrates that past academic mistakes do not invalidate contemporary research.

Crichton makes this case in an appendix titled “Why Politicized Science Is Dangerous,” but the comparison collapses on its own terms. Eugenics was discredited by better science: by genetics, population biology and evidence. Climate science is the product of exactly that kind of testing, repeated for more than a century and a half, from John Tyndall’s laboratory measurements of carbon dioxide in the 1850s to Svante Arrhenius’s first estimate of greenhouse warming in 1896 to the satellites and ocean floats of today.

Blaming the restriction of DDT for malaria deaths is a gross oversimplification. DDT was never fully banned for disease control, and its well-documented environmental and reproductive health risks justified its regulation. Crichton's claim is not just misleading—it's a prime example of anti-environmentalist rhetoric designed to provoke rather than inform.

For a comprehensive look at the myths surrounding DDT, there are excellent summaries available. Here is one example of the DDT myth.

The facts are straightforward. The 1972 U.S. ban applied to agricultural spraying in the United States. The Stockholm Convention, the treaty that restricted DDT worldwide, specifically exempted its use against disease-carrying mosquitoes, and in 2006 the World Health Organization endorsed spraying it indoors for malaria control. The greater threat to DDT’s usefulness was never environmentalists. It was the mosquitoes themselves, which evolved resistance after years of heavy agricultural spraying, exactly as Rachel Carson warned in Silent Spring.

Twenty Years Later, the Thermometer Has the Last Word

A thriller can be forgiven for getting the future wrong. A thriller that asks to be read as nonfiction cannot. In the Author’s Message at the end of State of Fear, Crichton offered his own guess for the coming century: 0.812436 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100. The absurd precision was the point; he was mocking the idea that anyone could forecast climate. Two decades on, the guess itself has become the joke.

In the twenty years since the book was published, the planet has warmed by roughly another 0.4 degrees Celsius, about half of Crichton’s entire century in a fifth of the time. 2023 and 2024 were the two hottest years ever recorded, and 2024 became the first calendar year to average more than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures. Antarctica, which Crichton’s characters held up as proof that the ice was fine, lost roughly 2.7 trillion tons of ice between 1992 and 2017, according to the international IMBIE assessment, and the losses have continued.

Meanwhile, the models Crichton ridiculed have held up. A 2019 study led by Zeke Hausfather looked back at climate models published between 1970 and 2007 and found that most of them projected the warming that followed with impressive accuracy. The scientists were right. The novelist was not.

Baloney Detection

In Travels, Crichton criticizes Carl Sagan as emblematic of science's supposed weaknesses. Yet, Sagan's book The Demon-Haunted World is one of the most effective guides against pseudoscience, offering a well-known "baloney detection kit" to help readers evaluate claims critically.

Sagan's key principles for detecting misinformation include:

• Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the "facts."
• Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
• Arguments from authority carry little weight — "authorities" have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
• Spin more than one hypothesis. If there's something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives.
• Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it's yours. It's only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don't, others will.
• If whatever it is you're explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you'll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations.
• If there's a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.
• Occam's Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.

These principles remain just as relevant today, particularly when evaluating claims like those made in State of Fear or more modern pseudoscientific efforts to dissuade the public about climate change.