A giant wave envelops a tropical island. Victims scramble for survival. The world watches in horror. Michael Crichton has a knack for novels that are of the moment, but never has his fiction collided so savagely and swiftly with reality. Until now, with State of Fear, the Jurassic Park author’s latest blockbuster.

As befits one of the world’s top-selling authors, there is a monster twist in the book. So while the real tsunami was a product of nature, Crichton’s fictional one was started secretly by obsessive environmentalists trying to frighten the world into believing that global warming is about to cause the apocalypse.

For after three years of painstaking research, the father of the techno-thriller believes he has reached a shocking conclusion: global warming is hot air.

We met before the 603-page tree trunk of a novel had lumbered into bookshops, but the internet was already crackling with condemnation. “I have only done one talk show (to promote State of Fear) and people are clearly quite confused. One lady (caller) wanted to know why I wasn’t showing concern for earthquakes being caused by pollution. I said, actually there is no evidence about that.”

Boy, will the green types be hot under the collar. As Britain sweats over missing its carbon dioxide emission targets, Crichton sends a simple message: chill. And if your heart aches for Third World suffering, divert the “trillions of dollars wasted on Kyoto to the 850m people who don’t have clean water, 20,000 of whom die each day”.

If you doubt Crichton’s research, he offers enough footnotes citing scientific journals to fill a hefty volume of their own. As a Harvard physician and at the age of 22 a visiting anthropology lecturer at Cambridge, he is in nobody’s intellectual slipstream. It is not so much that Crichton is being reactionary; rather, his view offends our almost religious veneration of green issues, a faith in mother earth which holds that driving to the bottle bank in a belching 4x4 is a profound act of worship.

Crichton admits his Hollywood cronies express horror at dinner parties as he expounds his theory. In response, he has made the prize chump in State of Fear a Hollywood star who dribbles on about saving the planet. Forget limousine liberals, Crichton’s new target is “Gulfstream environmentalists”.

“I am asked to discuss it — the kind of ‘Why are you a heretic?’ conversation,” he says. “Often they are in the entertainment industry and on the boards of environmental groups. It soon becomes clear they have no information, only attitudes.”

Two developments persuaded Crichton to abandon his Californian liberal world view. One was in 2002 having a gun held to his head by burglars, who tied up Taylor, his daughter, then aged 13. “They told me not to move and I figured it was best not to argue,” he says. It convinced him we must be tougher on bad guys, be they cat burglars or Saddam Hussein.

His second awakening was seeing that scientists had become so cowed by environmental activists and the media that they dared not proclaim what their research showed: that, so far, it appears global warming is hardly happening.

“The global change in temperature that everyone is so excited about is one-third of a degree,” he asserts. “The UK is doing better than most targets. It is extremely hard. In America, where we have had two of the coldest summers in the past century, they are underwhelmed by distressing notions of it getting warmer.”

This is quite unlike your usual Hollywood interview, but perhaps that is because Crichton is not your usual tinseltown personality.

He started studying English at Harvard but switched to anthropology and, after graduating, enrolled at Harvard medical school. As a student he wrote thrillers under assumed names. In 1969 he hit the big time with The Andromeda Strain, written under his own name. He is, simply, a workaholic who remains a scientist more than a wordsmith. His plots always race; only his prose sometimes sags.