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.