The number of Americans who believe [sic] that our climate is changing has dropped 20 percentage points to 57% in the past two years. This figure should be a clarion call that we, as environmental scientists, are not effectively communicating with the public. Here is a book that addresses the problem with excellent suggestions on how to improve our communication skills. The book might be viewed by some established ocean scientists as overly critical of them and supportive of our students becoming inaccurate emotional environmental advocates. This should not be the case. Over the past two decades, I have seen increasing numbers of prospective graduate students who were passionate about environmental problems and wanted to “save the world.” In our traditional academic training, we tend to squelch this passion in favor of developing quiet, objective, incremental researchers. In the end, our trainees become like us; if they speak out in public at all, it is with guarded, qualified statements. They appear to the more cynical public to be boring “talking heads.”

Sharp, J.H. 2009. Review of Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance In An Age of Style, by R. Olson. Oceanography 22(4):255–257, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2009.120.

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.