If you'd asked me before Christmas where I stood on the whole global warming deal, I probably would have said something like:

Well, it seems to be real, so we should probably do something about it. After all, we definitely know the symptoms are real, and we need to do something about them anyway.

But for Christmas I received a book. I must confess right from the start that it wasn't a very good book. In fact in terms of literature I would rate it, entertainment-wise, as being somewhere below the interminable Steven King's worse works in the hierarchy of godawfulness.

The book was Michael Crichton's State of Fear. The subject of Crichton's hideous baby was global warming and a fairly mundane plot by global warming advocates to engineer a world crisis through the causing of several rather boring and cliched environmental disasters.

Ho-hum, I hear you say, tell us something that we can't find in practically every book ever expelled from the conga line of arseholes in the publishing industry.

Well, here's the kicker. Interspersed through the turgid prose of this least shocking of books were occasional offhand comments backed up with annoyingly scrupulous footnotes which pointed out the daring lack of material in Imperial fashion this year.

I found myself being poisoned by a book. Oh, not in the conventional sense. The pages weren't covered in strychnine or something. But where before I had certainty on the essential rightness of the global warming advocates, now I had doubts. Where I had faith in the ability of scientists to restore an ecosystem, now I have the deepest suspicion.

For all his failings as a writer Crichton turned out to maddeningly persuasive as a debater.

I had been poisoned, and on the worst topic of them all. There are few cows so sacred in my cliques as the incredibly rotund heifer that is global warming, and now I was more inclined to turn it into shoes and hamburgers than stop so it could pass through traffic.

Now it's not the first book to have this effect on me. My perspective on international politics was quite irretrievably nudged by the amazingly deceptive polemics of Chomsky, Machiavelli, Kautilya and of course the humanist and novelist Pratchett. But it's the first to have an effect which pushes me away from the mainstream, and it's the first to really push home the idea behind Wilde's oft-quoted book from The Picture Of Dorian Grey.

I now know what he means, or at least know what he might have meant if he thought exactly like I do and not like a fop from the 19th century with codpieces on his mind. It's not a moral thing, really. it's not even an ethical thing. It's more a sort of creeping malaise that makes the self-evident questionable in a way that's quite socially unacceptable.

But to close on this seemingly over-long article, it's a change that's not unwelcome. Now when vegetarian friends and lovers turn to me and say, "Stop eating meat" I can now, with total confidence, pull a bogart and tell them those immortal words:

"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

And that is surely worth the price of a little poisoning between friends.