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His legacy will be that he was one of the most impactful climate deniers who influenced so many, including politicians and presidents, to ignore the issue of global warming precisely when there was still time to fix it.

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There's a good chance those climate deniers would've gotten to the same point without Crichton. You can probably train a machine learning algorithm and see that there are traits that are highly correlated with climate denialism. If some person has (some of) these traits, then reading Crichton is only a trigger, but absent that there will be plenty of other triggers that will lead to the same conclusion.

yeah, it's called actually taking science seriously, but not being stuck in a false paradigm

> traits that are highly correlated with climate denialism

Sure. Since it is socially so much easier to be a secretly skeptic climate congregationist than an open climate denier, I'd bet one such correlated trait would be extreme honesty.

I wonder if he would still be a denier today. A lot has changed since he died, and I think the evidence is much clearer now. It’s easy to forget that.

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