Members of the scientific community ignored Crichton. He presciently predicted, “The information society will be dominated by the groups and people who are most skilled at manipulating the media for their own ends.” He recommended that science cultivate a single, widely recognized group of media-savvy spokespeople similar to those found in the worlds of “sports, politics, business, law and medicine.” He added, “I recognize that to build a pool of media stars is going to take a minor revolution in professional attitudes. In 1999, Crichton gave a keynote speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in which he warned of what we now call “fake news” and called for a single, agreed-upon voice of science authority. The trend was straight downhill - meaning the more information the IPCC gathered, the worse the communication. correspondent for Nature, reported his use of the Flesch Reading Ease test to analyze SPMs going back to 1990. When he checked their summaries, 84% failed to grasp the science the way the SPM’s authors had intended. In 2008, John Sterman, director of the Systems Dynamics Group in the MIT Sloan School of Management, reported on an experiment he conducted with 212 MIT graduate students where they summarized the basic message of the SPM from the latest report. The concept is good, but the execution has been poor. Every few years the IPCC puts out a report on climate change, accompanied by a Summary for Policymakers, or SPM, intended to be the short, “easy-to-read” version of the report. The nations of the world formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The climate story for Crichton begins in 1975 when, just before leaving the medical world, he published a short paper in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “ Medical Obfuscation: Structure and Function.” His writing was concise and powerful, pointing out how the communication of science suffers from one key word: obfuscation, the practice of making things unclear or confusing.īy the 1990s the issue of global warming was becoming more prominent. By 1995 he was the first person to ever simultaneously have the No. After earning an MD degree from Harvard in 1969 and working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute, he moved to Hollywood. The individual was blockbuster techno-thriller author Michael Crichton. He drifted to the dark side, becoming a bonus for the early climate denial camp. Fed up, he basically became the Darth Vader of the climate crisis. For 25 years he offered communications advice to the science world. JanuOnce upon a time there was an individual with powers so mighty he could have singlehandedly shaped the American climate movement into a permanent voice of world leadership.

Michael crichton climate book