Michael Crichton has written that rarest of books, an ­intellectually dishonest novel. Crichton has made a fortune exploiting the public's fears: Prey (fear of nanotechnology), Rising Sun (fear of Japanese technological supremacy), and Jurassic Park (fear of biotechnology). These books attack the hubris of those who use technology without wisdom. In Prey, he warns, "The total system we call the biosphere is so complicated that we cannot know in advance the consequences of anything that we do." Given the author's past, one might expect that a Crichton book on global warming would warn about the risk of catastrophic climate change -- the unintended consequences of ­humanity's reckless, irreversible experiment on the biosphere.

But State of Fear takes the reverse view. Crichton argues that the environmental and scientific communities have fabricated the threat. He wants readers to fear those who argue that climate change is real, caused by human technologies, and dangerous. In the novel, a mainstream environmental group plots to create extreme weather events that will cause the deaths of thousands of people in order to trick the public into accepting global warming as truth. They try to create a killer seismic tsunami timed to coincide with a conference on abrupt climate change. That's a major mistake by Crichton: seismic tsunamis aren't caused by global warming, as any climate scientist, even an evil one, knows.