Michael Crichton

At a January 28 AEI-Brookings Joint Center event, bestselling author, medical doctor, and Emmy and Oscar recipient Michael Crichton addressed the quality of science employed in environmental policy--a topic he explores in his latest novel, State of Fear.

Crichton discussed how to ensure that unbiased information reaches those responsible for environmental policymaking. He recalled the use of a 1998 study as the foundation for the third environmental assessment by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, despite a lack of independent review. This study estimated temperatures from 1000 A.D. to the present, yet Crichton pointed out that it omitted the so-called medieval warm period and the “little ice age that occurred during the sixteenth century,” among other flaws. The public mistakenly perceives that studies of this sort are independently verified. To help ensure better quality information, Crichton recommended that competing theories be openly debated, that multiple laboratories perform research to ensure a range of opinions, and that scientists be held accountable for their research.

Because of the uncertainties of current climate science, Crichton urged makers of environmental policy to pay greater attention to epidemiological studies. Crichton also noted that policymakers must judge the efficiency of preventative methods versus methods of adaptation, arguing that there are cases such as oil slicks, radiation leaks, and exposure to pathogens when prevention works better but that that is not necessarily always the case.

He also highlighted the failures of policymakers to promote desirable technologies, arguing that only two major government-sponsored pushes for technology have proven successful in the United States: the Manhattan Project and efforts to land on the moon. Using California as an example, he contended that, rather than adopting the very expensive goal of making electric cars constitute 10 percent of all new cars by 2004, taxpayers would have been better served by policies to raise the price of gasoline, force older cars from the road, or formulate land policies that discourage long commutes.
 
Crichton also considered the methods for managing complex natural systems that are inherently resistant to control. He noted that many scientists promoted the now-discredited “balance of nature” theory, which held that natural spaces could only be preserved by preventing human intrusion whenever possible. This is not always the case, however, as he predicted that “if you leave a forest alone, probably what’ll happen is, it’ll decay, become filled with pests, and burn down.” Historically, native peoples in the New World set portions of the plains and entire old-growth forests ablaze, yet today California contains more old-growth forests than in 1850, thereby demonstrating that human contact did not destroy forests and that “imposing intellectual notions on a landscape that, by the way, doesn’t care what we think,” is often untenable.

Today, according to Crichton, we need to continue gathering information and considering unexpected consequences rather than locking into theories with little or questionable scientific basis. After all, he spoke of science as “a process of discovery that goes on for a very long period of time, over the course of which we should adapt to new information. Ultimately,” he declared, “I would really like to get the political psychodrama out of decision making.”