The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. Our scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. But at the same time, a small yet potent subset of this community leads the world in vehement denial of these dangers.
Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly—some of the same figures who have claimed that the science of global warming is "not settled" denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. "Doubt is our product," wrote one tobacco executive. These "experts" supplied it.
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science, roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how ideology and corporate interests, aided by a too-compliant media, have skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era.
Price: $17.82
User Reviews about Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
While not strictly a global warming book, "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming" (Bloomsbury Press) examines the growth of `junk science' from its creation to its implementation in a thoroughly detailed and fact-filled expose of the continuing pattern of industry to (often secretly) fund high-level, scientific studies to `disprove' established research on the negative effects of harmful products. Their powerful re-assembly of the history of such programs over the last fifty years covers issues ranging from tobacco safety to DDT to Acid Rain and of course, global warming. The details of their reporting are far too vast to elucidate here, but suffice to say that many of the same players - some of the top ranked hawkish scientists of the 20th century - have been involved in many, if not all, of these campaigns. "Merchants of Doubt" explores everything from the motivation of such projects, the key players and funders, the methods of dissemination and media manipulation ("equal time") and the ultimate refutation of such programs (SDI: Star Wars) over time. The vast detail and scope of Oreskes' and Conway's well written work makes "Merchants" one of the most important books of the year and a volume well worth reading. -- Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury Press)
This author and book deserve to be widely read by the
gullible, manipulated mainstream media. Maybe then,
they can do the job their protected place in our
country requires them to do: tell the American
people, especially those of the Tea Party persuasion,
that they've "been had" by a handful of billionaires. -- This is an important book, especially for Americans who don't read books
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.
-- Really eye-opening and engaging historical material