Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change

I came across this book after reading two books on the science of climate change. I, therefore, was familiar with the denial movement's efforts to quash the science in that case. Merchants of Doubt showed me just how this phenomenon was not just an issue with climate science but with many other facets of science. Oreskes and Conway summed it up nicely saying, "Doubt is crucial to science - in the version we call curiosity or healthy skepticism, it drives science forward - but it also makes science vulnerable to misrepresentation, because it is easy to take uncertainties out of context and create the impression that everything is unresolved." This is their culmination of five years of research.The authors begin, by explaining the doubt that was sowed by the tobacco industry. I think we are all familiar with the manner in which the industry tried to persuade the public that smoking and second hand smoke were not dangerous. This continued on with the Strategic Defense Initiative during the Regan administration where a coordinated attack was made on the concept of a nuclear winter as proposed by Carl Sagan and others. This marked a period where "the right-wing turn against science had begun." The attack on nuclear winter was a prelude to the fights that were to come. Continuing to the subject of acid rain, the authors noted a familiar pattern emerging, and that was that scientific facts were published in peer review scientific journals - where few non-scientists would see them - while all the claims that acid rain was not a problem pushed by the deniers ended up in the mainstream media for all to see.The next topic was the fight over the ozone hole. The authors explained in detail the counter narrative proposed by the ozone hole deniers despite all the scientific evidence to the contrary - that the ozone depletion was a natural variation "that was being cynically exploited by a corrupt, self-interested, and extremist scientific community to get more money for their research." Really? - no, of course not. This was to be the narrative to be used by the global warming deniers as well. During the 1980s, "an anti-environmentalism had taken root in a network of conservative and libertarian think tanks in Washington," such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Marshall Institute, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. These institutes derived their support from businessmen, corporations, and conservative foundations. What the deniers were afraid of was anything that impeded the free markets and the capitalist system, or that caused the government to produce any kind of regulation that might affect business interests according to Fred Singer, a prominent individual in the denier movement.I particularly liked the section on global warming, having just read two books previously on this "seemingly" controversial subject. The authors show that there is, in fact, no controversy; the climate scientists are correct in their assessments - yes, really! It was the small number of key people, such as Seitz, Jastrow, Nierenberg, and Singer who engaged in a campaign of misinformation, and these people, along with others, can "have large, negative impacts, especially if they are organized, determined, and have access to power." These men had the power by virtue of positions as physicists during the cold war era. This movement has turned into a stealthy financed, powerful, conglomerate of various organizations bent on attacking the science in order to achieve various political and industry goals.And now we turn our attention to Rachel Carson and her book Silent Spring. This book was written in 1962. I have heard the harsh criticism - bordering on contempt - against her by various right-wing media outlets, and I wondered what in the world this woman did over fifty years ago, and why is this decades old debate being reopened. The authors brilliantly cleared up my questions. You might know that Carson brought attention to the indiscriminate use of pesticides in the environment. Eventually, about ten years later, a ban was implemented by Richard Nixon. This turned out to be an example of regulation done well, based on several national level science assessments that confirmed the dangers of the persistent chemical DDT. Well, as the authors point out, "free marketers realized that if you could convince people that an example of successful government regulation wasn't, in fact, successful - that it was actually a mistake - you could strengthen the argument against regulation in general." Also noted is that the environmental movement was shifting from an aesthetic environmentalism towards one more oriented in favor of legal regulation. Ah, now we know why this matter is in the news, and why the attack on Carson. Carson's input was fundamental to this reorientation. If Carson could be proved wrong, then perhaps this reorientation could be shown to be based on a fallacy, and the anti-regulatory powers that be could be vindicated. I don't want to leave out that the authors make a very compelling case showing why DDT failed and why it did not lead to "millions of deaths" as claimed by people such as Steve Milloy (founder of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition for Philip Morris) and J. Gordon Edwards (entomologist at San Jose State University) - a phrase that is now repeated by right-wing media outlets. This was a riveting chapter. It read like an intriguing suspense novel!I found the next chapter on free speech and free markets to be just as riveting. Many of these deniers believe in something that has been called "free market fundamentalism." This basically says the free markets are the only way to run an economic system that will not ultimately destroy our freedoms. However, the authors note that this belief system is uncannily similar to its bête noir - Marxism. They say that like Marxism, laissez-faire economics claimed to be scientific, based upon immutable laws of nature, and also like Marxism, it has not stood the test of experience. If it were a scientific theory, it would have long ago been rejected." They conclude that this fundamentalism is just an article of faith. But it is this "faith" that has resulted in these "fundamentalists" coming to the unbelievable notion that environmentalism is the next great threat to freedom, that it is a slippery path to socialism, that environmentalists are closet socialists, that people in the United Nations are connected to the International Socialist Party and they are the ones in the UN environmental program. I read this and said to myself: Wow, really! It appears that the Cold War Warriors (Jastrow, Seitz, Nierenberg, and others) needed a new threat and found it in environmentalism. But as a more in depth analysis shows, it is all about government regulation; anything that promotes more regulation, even if necessary, is anathema to these people, and, I might add, to the businesses that fund them. The sad part is the nature of the attacks on scientists doing good science. Some have become reluctant to make strong claims or err on the side of conservatism because of fear of attack. It seems that intimidation works. I could go on, but you'll just have to read the book to get the full story.I highly recommend this book. It does an excellent job of clearing the fog of misinformation that seems so pervasive today. If you have any lingering doubts on any of these subjects or if you wonder what the truth of the matter is in each case, please read the book.

It is well known and undeniable that over the years there has been a strong political element to public debate about many scientific issues, including the chlorination of domestic water supplies, the harmfulness of smoking and of second-hand exposure to cigarette smoke, to the harmfulness of acid rain and the existence of global warming, to mention a few. It is certainly not distressing that there be debate over public policy dealing with such social problems, but it is indeed distressing that the scientific evidence is manipulated by political advocates rather than simply accepting the scientific consensus and debating policy issues on moral grounds.What is not well known, but it proved with a barrage of statistics and historical data by Oreskes and Conway, is that the science-deniers have been a quite small but extremely influential scientists who moved from one policy to another in support of right-wing political positions favoring the unimpeded operation of competitive markets and consistently oppose state intervention to solve social problems. This right-wing philosophy has major social philosophers and policy analysts among its supporters, and the intellectual debate surrounding the proper role of government is on-going and important. But the simple fact is that the vast majority of citizens and voters in all the liberal democratic market economies have historically demanded that the state intervene in correcting the negative social effects of competitive markets. Indeed, it is hard to see how modern capitalism could have survived without the decisive intervention of the state in such areas as the welfare state, occupational safety and health, social security, regulating trade, finance, and pharmaceuticals, as well as setting standards for consumer safety.Given the popular support for state intervention, the fundamentalist right-wing market libertarians appear to have required the obfuscation of scientific evidence to slow down the pace of state intervention. Prevention of such intervention in the long run has proven impossible, and probably will continue to do so in the future.What is puzzling to me is why the same set of people became involved in so many different areas of economic regulation. Of course, these men had great prestige. Frederick Seitz, whom Oreskes and Conway single out repeatedly, is a solid state physicist who had worked on the Manhattan project, is an ex-president of the National Academy of Sciences and has worked with the President's Science Advisory Committee. He and a few others of similar stature have been at the center of virtually every major science-denial initiative. Why is there not more diversity in the leaders of the Merchants of Doubt, and why, after being defeated on one initiative (e.g., denying the harmfulness of tobacco) are the same men considered credible in dealing with a different issue?This book is a major contribution to resource material on science policy dynamics. I am not sure there isn't a reasonable reply defending the actions of the Merchants of Doubt. These obfuscators never denied the importance of scientific evidence, and they played the game of policy analysis pretty fairly. How many times have "scientists" unanimously, or close to unanimously, offered a solution to a social problem in situations where they were just wrong. Consider, for instance, eugenics, scientific racism, psychoanalytic theories of mental illness, and the repressed memories movement. It is also important to recognize that in virtually every case, scientific truth triumphed in the end. The future is likely to be more of the same, provided liberal democratic institutions provide a level playing field for expressing public controversy.

Lo raccomanderei a chiunque vuole capire i motivi dei lobbies per alimentare il climato scetticismo. È un libro che ha profondamente cambiato la mia comprensione del mondo di oggi

This is the truth

:)

I have read this book as a climate skeptic and it has helped me to clarify and contextualise my thoughts. I would say we are in a new phase now as the book is a little dated, and the new phase is one of blatant hyperbole. The facts are that the doubling of CO2 in the air will lead to an anthropogenic world wide average temperature increase of 3 degrees and that thus will take about 100 years at the rate of 0.3 degrees per decade. However this has been hyped to mean catastrophe and this in turn is not science it is politics. Environmentalists live in the belief that any anthropogenic change must be bad and have convinced the majority that this is a crisis. This book is very factual but is couched in the true belief that climate change is innately dangerous and must not be ignored. In the urgency of selling the message this camp will not give credence to natural climate variation and have convinced the younger generation that the climate is broken however this is far from the truth. The book is mired in Malthusian thought and now our children think they must not have children of their own. The whole situation has spiralled to a very unfortunate place.

In "Merchants of Doubt", Oreskes & Conway argues that for a number of scientific topics, an aggressive minority, financed by industrial companies and free-market think tanks, have used disinformation and smear campaigns to obstruct the scientific procedure and discredit scientific consensus. The topics span the link between cancer and smoking, acid rain, the ozone hole, global warming and pesticides: The authors argue that both the public and the government have been misled about these issues, and that the consequence has been lackluster responses to these problems. The book is not only about documenting these episodes, but also discusses the relationship between science and the media, and how science should be discussed publicly and how it should be used by government bodies.The book appears very meticulously researched, and is well-written. The authors in general do not appear unduly biased against the "merchants of doubt" such as Frederick Seitz and Fred Singer et cetera, for the most part keeping the debate at a fair level and explicitly acknowledging the scientific accolades of those scientists whom they accuse of obstructing the dissemination of proper science. One exception is that they repeatedly explain the motivations of several of the obstructive scientists as coming from their cold war anti-communism and free-market fundamentalism: Given the political opinions and affiliations of these scientists, this is a fair hypothesis, but to some degree remains a hypothesis and not a fact on level with most of the remainder of the book. Also, the authors occasionally make a few mediocre arguments, for example when defending the use of 90% confidence intervals instead of 95% confidence intervals (p. 156-157) or when criticizing Lomborg's focus on resource allocation (p. 228, p. 259). However, these issues are few and far between.When all is said and done, Oreskes & Conway very convincingly argues that a minority of industry captains and right-wing think tanks and scientists have conducted a well-funded and extensive disinformation campaign against several health and environmental issues, a campaign which in hindsight was based on patently false claims, which have cost real human lives, and which will continue to cost human lives in the future. With governments and laypeople still often not being aware of the long-existing scientific consensus about the seriousness of for example global warming, this book is as important as ever: As long as people keep listening to this disinformation campaign, progress on combating global warming will keep stalling, and our children (well, particularly the children of third-world countries, probably) will pay the price.