Twenty Years of Michael Crichton’s State of Denial
Did author and Hollywood screenwriter Michael Crichton launch the term “climate change denier” and pretend it was a reference to Holocaust deniers to stir up faux outrage against climate scientists?
On January 17, 2003, Michael Crichton gave an evening lecture at Caltech in which he attacked climate scientists and made many absurd claims including the false accusation that Scientific American had compared Bjorn Lomborg (the "skeptical environmentalist") to a Holocaust denier. I had left Caltech twenty years earlier as a newly-minted PhD, and only learned about it after the fact when I read the transcript, “Aliens Cause Global Warming.” But I didn’t recognize the effect this lecture had had on subsequent vitriolic attacks on scientists until a couple years ago, when I was doing research for my critical review of Steven Koonin’s book “Unsettled.”
In going through Koonin’s book, I was surprised and disappointed that a scientist of his ability would stoop to the use of obvious logical fallacies in an effort to influence gullible readers. One of the examples I highlighted was this passage: “I find it particularly abhorrent to have a call for open scientific discussion equated with Holocaust denial, especially since the Nazis killed more than two hundred of my relatives in Eastern Europe.”
I had always known that such performative rage over the use the word “deny” in any of its forms in the context of climate change was a clever and successful tactic in the toolkit of climate change deniers and their enablers. I decided I wanted to know who was the first to actually use it. The historical record suggests that it was Crichton, twenty years ago today, at Beckman Auditorium. I do not know if Koonin was in the audience, but he was Caltech’s provost at the time
The word “denier” literally means “one that denies” and has been used this way since the 1400s. The term Holocaust denier didn’t come into widespread use until the 1980s. By the early 1990s “denier” was starting to be used to describe those who deny the science of climate change, but nobody seemed to object.
The passage that triggered Crichton’s sensibilities came from a critical review by John Rennie of Bjorn Lomborg’s book “Skeptical Environmentalist,” in the January 2002 issue of Scientific American. Rennie wrote, “A dispassionate analysis, which Lomborg pretends to offer, of how far we have come and how far we have yet to go would have been a great contribution. Instead we see a pattern of denial.” That’s it. That final 7-word sentence is what precipitated the last twenty years of outrage, led by Crichton and dutifully repeated by Koonin, about the use of the d-word.
According to Crichton,
“We can take as an example of the scientific reception accorded a Danish statistician, Bjorn Lomborg, who wrote a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist. The scientific community responded in a way that can only be described as disgraceful… Worst of all was the behavior of the Scientific American… It was a poor display, featuring vicious ad hominem attacks, including comparing him to a Holocaust denier.”
Only the fertile imagination of a blockbuster movie writer could make such a leap from Rennie’s sober and accurate observation, “we see a pattern of denial.” Crichton’s next move, in an apparent attempt to retaliate against scientists for this imaginary attack, made climate researchers into the bad guys in his 2004 thriller “State of Fear.” In an unusual addition to a work of fiction, he included an appendix in which he directly equated climate scientists to the eugenicists who had a role in “killing of ten million undesirables” in Nazi Germany. So there!
Was Michael Crichton responsible for popularizing the term “climate change denier” that has generated so much fake grievance and anguish among science-hating Republicans for the last 20 years? Here’s the data. You decide.
Google Ngram graph of the frequency of use of the term “climate change denier”
According to Merriam-Webster, the first known use of “climate change denier” was 2003