DALLAS -- Global warming is hot! -- pun fully intended.

Within the space of a year, a blockbuster action movie and now a sure-to-be best-selling novel have both focused on the perils and political intrigues surrounding the question of whether, or to what extent, humans are causing the planet to overheat with all manner of apocalyptic results .

Though the Fox Studio disaster flick "The Day After Tomorrow" was panned by scientists who pointed out its portrayal of climate science was wildly inaccurate, it won praise from environmentalists and some politicos for "focusing attention on the important topic of human-caused global warming."

Of course, in the movie, global warming was a fact and environmentalists were world-saviors. By contrast, novelist Michael Crichton's latest book, "State of Fear," has raised the ire of environmentalists. Why has he not garnered the same praise for bringing global warming to the world's attention? Perhaps because Crichton portrays global warming as a hoax and the environmental lobbyists pushing the hoax as villains, eager to use bad science to raise money and attain political power.

Never fear, this is not a work of political screed, but rather a deftly crafted action and adventure novel. Like much of the best fiction on TV, in the movie houses and in the bookstores it happens to use a controversial, overly publicized contemporary political and social issue -- human-caused global warming -- as a backdrop for a story filled with attractive heroes and heroines, ingenious, seemingly indestructible secret agents, and villains plotting world domination.

There is enough sex, murder and general mayhem to please any connoisseur of spy novels or the action-adventure genre in general, and Crichton fans in particular.

In "State of Fear" Crichton, as he does with many of his books, deals with scientific issues with a detailed eye stemming from his training as a medical doctor. In the past, Crichton's scientific lens has been trained on topics such as genetic engineering, and environmentalists loved it since the novels were cautionary tales in the vein of "Frankenstein," warning of humanity's overreaching and violating the "laws of nature."

However, now it is Crichton's scientific acumen that seems to be the central cause for the environmentalists' venom. For instance, Crichton exposes serious problems with the climate models that predict warming. The models don't accurately portray past or current temperature reality, so why should their predictions about the future warming be trusted, much less used to inform public policy?

Crichton's research has evidently lead him to be skeptical of the claim that humans are causing catastrophic climate change and to think that at least some environmentalists are pushing the issue for fundraising purposes and to gain political power.

The thriller comes equipped with footnotes, charts and two appendices detailing why the author believes politicized science is dangerous.

Environmentalists find this threatening because there is a lot of truth in his thesis, and they know that he has an audience of millions of readers who might, after reading the novel, turn their own skeptical eyes to claims that the "end is near" due to global warming if we don't fundamentally alter our economy.

Book betrays right-wing bias

WASHINGTON -- Michael Crichton's new novel, "State of Fear," not only unfairly bashes the global environmental movement but represents yet another example of how multinational corporations and their political allies are invading the popular culture to advance fanatic and lunatic right-wing ideas and agendas.

The book demonizes scientists who argue that the world is heading toward cataclysmic weather change unless something is done about the spewing forth of greenhouse gases into Earth's atmosphere.

Crichton develops a story line that has environmentalists and scientists creating weather-making doomsday machines that wreak havoc on the planet.

Killer hurricanes, towering tidal waves and destructive lightning storms are all meant to prove the scientists' point about the deadly effects of global warming. The environmentalists are the villains. The corporate shills who have been paid big bucks to debunk the global warming community are the good guys. According to Crichton, global warming is a myth.

In today's world of increasing corporate control of almost every facet of our public and private lives, Crichton's screed against the environmental movement should come as no great surprise.

After all, the publisher of "State of Fear" is Harper Collins, a wholly owned subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., the same people who feed Americans and people around the world a daily dosage of right-wing propaganda billed as 24-hour news.

Murdoch can wave his big money around and always expect to find some novelist; screenwriter; movie director; journalist; left, center or right-wing magazine editor; cartoonist; or research institute fellow to allow himself or herself to become human versions of coin-operated nickelodeons or Laundromats.

Crichton is no different than crossword puzzle editors who are now paid to include as answers to their clues the names of corporations and brand names as a form of subtle advertising -- a new low in the newspaper business.

It is obvious that Murdoch will eventually have his Fox movie arm put Crichton's global ecoterrorism conspiracy tale on the big screen to counteract the climate change warning conveyed by Roland Emmerich's global disaster flick "The Day After Tomorrow."

Crichton's book, perhaps not coincidentally, comes at a time the Bush administration is blowing off the Arctic meltdown concerns raised in the Arctic Climate Change Assessment initiated by regional Arctic nations and native tribal peoples.

Murdoch and his corporate cronies may want to think twice before using a science-fiction messenger like Crichton, who has suggested in his previous novel, " Jurassic Park," that living dinosaurs can be recreated using 65-million year-old DNA extracted from the blood of mosquitoes encased in amber to launch a tirade against actual and reasoned scientists.

Unlike the "silly science" of Crichton, a group of 300 scientists recently concluded that the Arctic is warming much more rapidly than previously known. Disappearing are the Greenland Ice Sheet and the Arctic icepack. Similar melting is occurring in Antarctica with the largest recorded iceberg now causing devastation to indigenous species and science stations.

Crichton's fictional broadside against environmentalists comes at a time when the right-wing and its corporate masters are stooping to all sorts of chicanery to muddy the waters with regard to global warming.

Some ludicrous right-wingers have even suggested that eminent global warming experts like Rajendra K. Pachauri are somehow irresponsibly focusing the world's attention away from the war on Islamic terrorism.

And then comes along Crichton with his novel about global eco-terrorism. It is pathetic that the neo-conservatives, mega-media perception managers, and multinational corporations have resorted to such McCarthyite tactics to push their sordid and destructive agendas.