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

Description

Reviews

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-09-01
Summary: "Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury Press)"

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.

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-08-29
Summary: "This is an important book, especially for Americans who don't read books"

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.

Rating: 1 / 5
Date: 2010-08-19
Summary: "Overfishing, aquifer depletion, topsoil erosion - let's get priorities straight"

Let's pretend that worldwide, there's a grand total of 1 trillion dollars a year available to save our planet. That's 10 hundred-biliion-dollar chunks.

Here are some things we could spend that money on. For each, I have listed the degree of scientific consensus that this is a real problem, the impact of doing nothing more, the timeframe before the impact arrives, and the current amount spent on the problem per year:

________________________Certainty_______Impact__________Timeframe_______Current spend
a. overfishing________________99%_______devastating_________6 years________.5 chunks
b. aquifer_depletion___________99%_______devastating________20 years________.5 chunks.
c. topsoil_erosion:____________99%_______serious____________50years________.5 chunks.
d. climate_&_CO2:____________70%_______serious____________50 years______8.0 chunks.

It doesn't matter if you disagree with these numbers in detail. That fact that climate-related expenditures are many multiples of all other environmental spending is simply undeniable. We are too focused on climate change --- to the exclusion of other, more pressing environmental issues about which the evidence & science is much clearer.

How did this overemphasis on CO2 & Climate come to pass? Most efforts to save the planet are money sinks (don't get me wrong --- most of that is money well spent). But CO2/Climate change is different: it is a potential money producer --- the carbon trading market is worth trillions of us dollars annually. That alone is sufficient reason to be skeptical. The Tobacco and Pesticide firms had powerful lobbies ---- but the entire tobacco industry grossed less than 25 billion a year --- chump change to the carbon traders.

This book accuses a few honorable men (I am personally acquainted with one) of selling their integrity to a cabal of industrial interests. The authors moan about specks of sawdust in their subjects' eyes --- while ignoring the plank in their own. They have ignored the biggest cabal of all --- Wall & Threadneedle streets, plus several national governments, plus a big chunk of the UN --- none of whom are famous for their integrity or forthrightness. This is not historical scholarship --- it is poorly-researched, one-sided, and woefully ignorant of most of the science it preaches about.

If you want the truth, follow the money. This book is not the place to start.

Rating: 1 / 5
Date: 2010-08-19
Summary: "Another error-laden hatchet job"

Unfortunately I wasted the time reading this book, time I could have used to do something productive. So let me try to recoup this lost time by alerting Amazon readers to what they are in for in "Merchants of Doubt."

This book seeks to identify and expose the "Zelligs" of the standard-issue grand conspiracy agenda. The evil characters, who are the subject of this error-laden hatchet job, are out there scurrying around and plotting to defeat all the well intentioned, public-protecting catastrophe gigs we have been fed for decades. Tobacco is the number one enemy, and guilt by association is a well honed tool of the authors, along with twist and distort. So Fred Seitz, former president of the National Academy of Sciences, makes an evil pact with the arch destroyer of human life -- big tobacco. But the authors don't tell you that Seitz was instrumental in developing an advisory committee for research that produced a Nobel Prize in medicine relating to cardiovascular disease. The research was independent of the tobacco industry and involved a number of first rate scientists.

We pass through another favorite whipping boy of these "science historians." The crime of the 20th century, after tobacco and global warming, was the Reagan SDI intiative. I frankly don't know whether this system was practical or not, or whether its development hastened the downfall of the Soviet Union as is often claimed. But I do know that Seitz, Jastrow, and Nirenberg cannot be judged evil conspirators against humanity for taking the position that SDI was worth a look versus simply doing nothing to protect Amercians from nuclear attack.

Then there is the global warming business. Here we have the usual dreary business; the attack dogs are unleashed against anyone who seriously questions the catastrophe dogma we have been fed for decades. And Fred Seitz and Fred Singer rank at the top of these enemies of humanity. Seitz's sin was to note that the 1996 IPCC Summary for Policy Makers had been edited at the last minute so as to insert a component proclaiming humans responsibel for climate change. He writes in a 1996 Wall Street Journal OpEd, "A comparison between the report approved by the contributing scientists and the published version reveals that key changes were made after the scientists had met and accepted what they thought was the final peer-reviewed version. The scientists were assuming that the IPCC would obey the IPCC Rules--a body of regulations that is supposed to govern the panel's actions. Nothing in the IPCC Rules permits anyone to change a scientific report after it has been accepted by the panel of scientific contributors and the full IPCC." Does this sound like an enemy of humanity? We now know that this event was the beginning of a pattern of deception and corruption that was to become habit.

The authors, and other defenders of the grand plans and economic interventions that will save the planet by "stabilizing climate," never actually engage in a debate over the science. However, we are presented with the persistent mantra, "The science is settled," and anyone who questions this must be guilty of slandering climate scientists, an oil company shill, or worse. Never mind that the past year has seen exposure of the wholesale deception, witholding of data, and conspiracy to block opposing views from being published that have characterized much of the scientific activities held up as "the science." Never mind that the world hasn't warmed for more about 15 years. Never mind that a stream of recent empirical scientific findings point to a climate that is very insensitive to additional greenhouse gas concentrations.

Anyone seeking to understand the tactics and methods of those who stand against scientific debate and the scientific method itself will do well to read this book. Otherwise you are better off doing something else, almost anything else.

Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2010-08-17
Summary: "Really eye-opening and engaging historical material"

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.