American scientists' share of scientific papers published in journals of the American Chemical Society have fallen from 64 percent in 1988 to 39 percent in 2005. I wasn't going to write about this report until a friend told me the following story today.

The story unfolds over a Thanksgiving feast, when my friend, his wife, and a couple of their close friends, begin to talk about global warming. My friend works with issues surrounding climate change. He describes his friends as liberal, educated and successful, having graduated from a university that has an affiliation in common with, but is not Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, Penn or Brown.

We'll call my friend's friend John, because I do not know his actual name. I will call my friend "my friend." John suggested casually at dinner that the global-warming issue is overblown, chicken-little nonsense. He says that he recently read Michael Crichton's book about global warming, and that the writer explains in a compelling manner, with footnotes and everything, why the climate-doomsayers are wrong. Michael Crichton has a Ph.D., John says, assuring my friend that Crichton is a reputable source...

My friend, flabbergasted, isn't sure what to say. Never mind the borderline impoliteness of John's statement. You would never tell an accountant that his profession is a sham because he works in base-10 numerals, when everyone knows that you can compute in base-7 or base-17, if you wanted. You would never say this because it would make you look like an arrogant dumbass, a paradoxical feat accomplished by many.

It's Thanksgiving. My friend suggests that they instead talk about something less combustible, such as politics or religion. John and his wife are good humored about it, and really recommend, as if they are saving my friend from an eternity in ever-warming Hell, that he read this good book. "Michael Crichton?" my friend asks. "The guy who wrote Jurassic Park?" He also wrote the reactionary anti-Japanese screed Rising Sun, a book which has aged about as tastefully as Michael Jackson.

How is it possible that Harvard University could graduate a liberally minded adult, who can not differentiate a novel--clunked together by a poor writer who has made a career on distorting science--from reality? How could an effete, northeastern liberal snob willingly swallow the fruit of a propaganda campaign that Exxon Mobil based page-for-page on the tobacco industry's public-disinformation campaign of decades past? There is plenty of documentation about the tobacco-climate playbook.

No need to talk about the science of climate here. There is a vast literature on the Web to tide you over until my book comes out. What is so frustrating about this tale is that until recently, Harvard University could graduate students so easily duped about science. Certainly, it always will, but at least now it is less the school's fault.

For starters, let's look at John's decision to make Michael Crichton his chosen authority on climate. Anyone trained to think scientifically about the world, however superficially, should know that authority has little place in science. The notion that John would pick one book--forget for a moment that it is a work of fiction--to settle any dispute on the most complicated issue in science other than consciousness does not speak well of the educational institutions that trained him, or frankly his own curiosity.

Science is a discipline of skepticism and doubt, of thinking about new ways to ask old questions, and to test even the truest facts, looking for flaws. The best example, perhaps ever, of science in action occurred one day in 1974, when Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina reported to a national chemistry conference that CFCs in industrial and commercial products destroy ozone--the same day the inventor of these compounds received a special achievement award.

Second, John appears to be convinced that because Michael Crichton holds a PhD, has read an enormous amount of scientific literature, and uses footnotes, he must be an authority. Anyone with enough money can attain a PhD in the United States. Having spent some time in a graduate program, I would suggest that a PhD is a greater indicator of wealth and pain-tolerance than intelligence or moral authority. Other writers have used footnotes much more artfully, namely David Foster Wallace, whose novels I can't get through because he is so pretentious.

Linking back, finally, to the opening of this post, there must be a correlation between the erosion of U.S. strength in the sciences, evidenced this week by the study of scientific journals, and John's ability to graduate from Harvard and become an adult and believe one book--forget that it's a novel--can tell you something about the world. It takes a village to make a fact. That's what peer review is for, and what makes science the exhilarating roller coaster that it often is.

Last point. Harvard is aware of what a problem John is, and in recent years has taken great steps to prevent his likes from reappearing. Harvard College has instituted an aggressive science requirement that insures students will have some exposure to how human discovery about the physical world takes place. A university report came out this summer. Columbia University now requires all freshmen to take its Scientific habits of mind class.

John is a good friend of my friend, and dinner ended amiably, with good cheer. So too did the 2006 midterm elections in this sense: James Inhofe, who was Michael Crichton's political patron and the most retrograde antiscientist in Washington, DC, will never again be in a position to body-slam the nation's basic information about how science, let alone the planet, works.