Book Review by Dave Freedman. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming By Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway Bloomsbury Press, New York, 2010
Published in 2010, Merchants of Doubt tracks the relentless, ideologically driven (and industry-funded) efforts of physicists Frederick Seitz, S. Fred Singer, Bill Nierenberg, Robert Jastrow, and a “handful” of other scientists (none of them climate or atmospheric scientists) to discredit well-established scientific consensus on the anthropogenic causes of climate change. To accomplish this mission, they did very little original scientific research. They mainly cherry-picked, distorted, and falsified existing research. In addition to clouding up the field of climate science, they tried to deceive the public about the health hazards of tobacco smoke and the environmental damage caused by acid rain and CFCs. In the process, this handful of men shamelessly attempted to tarnish the reputations of esteemed climate scientists like Benjamin D. Santer, an atmospheric scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and F. Sherwood Rowland, who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry. (See an excerpt from Merchants of Doubt, describing the "relentless attack" on Santer.)
The underlying objective of these “merchants of doubt” was to insulate certain industries — tobacco, pesticide manufacturers, carbon-based energy producers, etc. — from regulations that might dent their profits. The authors Oreskes and Conway, science historians, show in detail how politically motivated scientists can create an illusion of two-sided debate in a fairly settled area of science, and then compel the news media to present “both sides of the debate” as though it were in the interest of fairness. Toward the end of their book, Oreskes and Conway get a little preachy: “Rome may not be burning, but Greenland is melting, and we are still fiddling.”
The last couple of chapters include a superficial discussion of free-market capitalism, free-market fundamentalism, and Cornucopianism (the opposite of Malthusian economics) as they relate to science and science denial. This raises a few questions in my mind:
Can we depend on technological innovation to solve potentially catastrophic problems related to global climate change, as the Cornucopians hope?
Will there always be a technological solution to every problem?
Can technological innovation thrive in a judiciously regulated economy, or must we deny and discredit any scientific discovery that might lead to new regulatory restrictions on exploitation, production, and emission?
The film Merchants of Doubt, based on the book and directed by Robert Kenner, was released in 2014. "Kenner’s documentary examines the history of corporate-financed public relations efforts to sow confusion and skepticism about scientific research," wrote A.O. Scott in the New York Times.
About the reviewer David M. Freedman has worked as a financial and legal journalist since 1978. He earned a bachelor’s degree in geography from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Mastodon: @Freedman@newsie.social or https://www.verifiedjournalist.org/people/@Freedman@newsie.social