Much criticism – positive and negative – has already been ladled on Ego "James" Cameron's latest film, Dancing with Smurfs, aka Avatar. But one point that has not been discussed is how much Sarah Palin would enjoy it.

On the one hand, considering that this movie features the most simplistic racial stereotypes since Star Wars' Jar Jar Binks did his best Butterfly McQueen impression for George Lucas, Avatar is an obvious winner for Palin. After all, she is the woman who, according to her father, left Hawaii University because there were too many Asians there for her liking: "They were a minority-type thing and it wasn't glamorous, so she came home," said Chuck Heath.

On the other hand, as Avatar comes weighed down with anti-war sentiments, topped with some environmental awareness waffle (if discussions about trees having "energy" count as environmental awareness, as opposed to cod-spiritual ethno-tourism you might expect from Sting and Trudie Styler), this may not be the obvious festive outing for la famille Palin. Sarah, of course, doesn't really believe in silly-billy man-made "climate change", describing it instead as "doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood". Doomsday? Priesthood? Has someone been reading Dan Brown?

All of this dovetails with the most ­ important issue of the week: how to define the past decade. After all, the 80s had bling (according to Jay McInerney), the 90s had grunge (according to Winona Ryder). The noughties, or whatever we end up calling them, were surely defined by fakery: fake celebrities (anyone who came from reality TV); fake "reality" (see previous); faked news stories (Balloon Boy, which has since been compared to Orson Welles's War of the Worlds stunt – although, as far as I know, Orson wasn't trying to regain the power he had when he appeared on Wife Swap, as Balloon Boy's father, Richard Heene, was); fake fashion designers (any celebrity who sewed their name into the back of a badly made dress); fake friends (Facebook); and fake communication ("social" networking sites which tend to involve people sitting at home, alone, and not speaking). Sure, some of these things were around before Millennium New Year. But it was only afterwards that they became so ubiquitous and were given so much leeway.

That this decade should be summed up with the epithet of Fake is not so surprising, though, considering that we entered it with a fake – or "New" – Labour government, and then followed this with the fake election of a fake American president in 2000.

Yet perhaps the most embarrassing, not to mention damaging, fakery has been the rise of "fake science", which stems entirely from a fear of science and leads inexorably to no science at all. We saw this on a terrifying scale when George W Bush banned federal funding for stem cell research, and we see it on a pathetically comical scale with Prince Charles selling Duchy Herbals Detox Tincture. Sales of these kinds of supplements rise exponentially every year, just as stories about acai berries/pomegranates/whatever-the-trendy-fruit-is-this-week curing diseases continue to make headlines in respectable and unrespectable papers every week.

Michael Specter writes about the rise of fake science in his gripping new book, Denialism. Although Specter generally keeps his palpable anger at bay, it breaks through in his chapter about the MMR jab furore, with particular ire reserved for certain well-known names connected to it; namely, the actors Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy, and Tony Blair. Yes, Blair is grouped with Ace Ventura and his girlfriend, the latter of whom has insisted that she knows the MMR jab causes autism because "there is an angry mob on my side". Specter writes (to Britain's shame): "What does it say about the relative roles that denialism and reason play in a society when a man like Blair, one of the democratic world's best-known and most enlightened leaders, refused at first to speak in favour of the MMR vaccine?"

That the MMR jab does not cause autism has been definitively proven by now, despite what McCarthy's angry mob maintains (she is said to be getting her own talk show, produced by that unfortunately frequent promoter of fake science, Oprah Winfrey). But fear of the jab has led to the rise of another illness: there were more cases of measles in 2006 and 2007 in England and Wales than in the previous 10 years combined.

Fake science values naivety over knowledge, as it harks back to a non-existent age of innocence before the so-called corrupting influence of modern medicine. Palin, too, has used this modus operandi: she is qualified to speak precisely because she is unqualified. She is untainted by biased things such as facts and experience. And that is why she would like Avatar: its depiction of "the noble savages" is, no doubt, a well-intended argument against the destruction of rainforests, but add in a couple of orange brush strokes and you have a Gauguin painting. It is patronising, simplistic and offensive, like Palin and fake science.

Last year, incidentally, Palin sneered at the allocation of federal funds to projects such as "fruit fly research". Unfortunately for her these silly fruit fly studies have led to a greater understanding of diseases such as, um, autism. Isn't science annoying?

• This article was amended on 30 December 2009