Merchants of Doubt

cover of Merchants of DoubtMerchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway (Bloomsbury, 2010)

Merchants of Doubt tells the story of ‘How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming,’ as its subtitle says. It is a very strange and disturbing story of collusion between scientists, science administrators, right-wing politicians and big business in pursuit of an agenda which was ostensibly libertarian but in fact unscrupulously pro-business. One of its strangest, saddest aspects is that their programme gradually became a broadside attack on all science.

Anyone with any interest in the politics and sociology of climate change soon becomes aware that there is a very vocal but very small group which denies the overwhelming expert evidence that climate change is real, that is happening now and that it is man-made. They are today’s merchants of doubt: Bolt, Carter and Plimer in Australia, and Monckton, Lindzen, the Pielkes (father and son), Curry, Spencer, Lomborg, Watts and a few others overseas, mostly in the US. Most of the scientists on that list are not climate scientists, and some of the most vocal deniers are not scientists at all.

Origins

Oreskes and Conway show how this situation developed from the US politics of the Cold War era. First, the hard-science establishment was identified with the war effort; second, its already-hawkish leaders were promoted into science policy-making; third, some of them convinced themselves that any regulation of the free market was equivalent to creeping communism; and fourth, industry tacticians began recruiting scientists willing to cast doubt on any science which led to government policies which would cost them money.

The industries concerned were tobacco, agricultural and industrial chemicals (opposing bans on DDT and CFCs) and most recently fossil fuels – fighting, of course, the idea that global warming is a problem. In each case they funnelled money to scientists and opinion-makers through lobby groups, ‘philanthropic’ foundations and so on – bodies with names like ‘Heartland Institute,’ ‘Freedom of Expression Foundation’ and ‘Hudson Institute.’ Names are named and evidence is methodically documented.

The original merchants of doubt, Frederick Seitz, S. Fred Singer, William Nierenberg and Robert Jastrow, were all scientists but (to quote from the book’s introduction) ‘for more than twenty years, these men did almost no original scientific research on any of the issues on which they weighed in. … In fact, on every issue, they were on the wrong side of the scientific consensus. … [They] fought the scientific evidence and spread confusion on many of the most important issues of our time.’

The book

Merchants of Doubt is peculiar in my life in that I commended it to others long before I read it myself. It emerged to great acclaim from people and publications I trusted, reviews showed that it told a very important story and Oreskes’ interviews convinced me it would be well told. It is pleasing to know now that I was right to recommend it and it has been satisfying to read the whole morbidly fascinating story at last.

More information

28 thoughts on “Merchants of Doubt”

  1. Pingback: Discussion of "i can change your mind about climate" (ABC)

  3. The story continues: “a group of climate scientists sent a letter to President Obama, his science advisor John Holdren, and Attorney General Lynch, calling for an investigation “of corporations and other organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall America’s response to climate change.”
    In 1999, the Justice Department filed a civil Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) lawsuit against the major tobacco companies and their associated industry groups. In 2006, US District Court Judge Gladys Kessler ruled that the tobacco industry’s campaign to “maximize industry profits by preserving and expanding the market for cigarettes through a scheme to deceive the public” about the health hazards of smoking amounted to a racketeering enterprise.
    Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has noted that the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to cast doubt on climate science closely mirror those by the tobacco industry. ”
    More: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/sep/29/is-the-fossil-fuel-industry-like-the-tobacco-industry-guilty-of-racketeering

  5. The dirty tricks continue. Here, DeSmog details the fossil-fuel industry’s support for anti-solar candidates for the board of the Arizona utility regulator, ACC. The ACC is now totally corrupted and, in response to outcry about it, the (Republican) Arizona legislature has just passed a bill making political nonprofits’ election activity essentially invisible and eliminating criminal enforcement for violations of campaign finance law. http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/07/08/how-arizona-corporation-commission-turned-anti-solar-just-few-years

  8. Shell knew!
    …Bill McKibben, a leading US environmentalist, said: “The fact that Shell understood all this in 1991, and that a quarter-century later it was trying to open up the Arctic to oil-drilling, tells you all you’ll ever need to know about the corporate ethic of the fossil fuel industry. Shell made a big difference in the world – a difference for the worse.”
    Prof Tom Wigley, the climate scientist who was head of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia when it helped Shell with the 1991 film, said: “It’s one of the best little films that I have seen on climate change ever. One could show this today and almost all would still be relevant.” He said Shell’s actions since 1991 had “absolutely not” been consistent with the film’s warning.
    More: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/feb/28/shell-knew-oil-giants-1991-film-warned-climate-change-danger

    1. Monsanto also corrupted academic papers to “prove” that glyphosate was not harmful.

      The papers in question were published by CRT in September 2016 as an “Independent Review” of the carcinogenic potential of the weed-killing agent glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide and other brands. The five papers published as part of the review directly contradicted the findings of the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which in 2015 found glyphosate to be a probable human carcinogen. The 16 authors of the papers concluded that the weight of evidence showed the weed killer was unlikely to pose any carcinogenic risk to people.
      At the end of the papers the authors stated that their conclusions were free of Monsanto’s intervention. Underscoring the supposed independence of the work, the declaration of interest section stated: “Neither any Monsanto company employees nor any attorneys reviewed any of the Expert Panel’s manuscripts prior to submission to the journal.”
      That statement was proven false in the fall of 2017 after internal Monsanto records came to light showing extensive involvement by Monsanto scientists in the drafting and editing of the papers as well as company involvement in selecting the authors. Additionally, internal records showed direct payments to at least two of the so-called independent authors. Monsanto had a contract with author Larry Kier, for instance, paying him $27,400 to work on the papers.

      The whole story is here.

  12. This article in The Conversation covers much of the same ground but extends it both backwards, to the 1880s, and forwards to today. Their conclusion:

    Many on the right, including the current and past prime ministers, parrot the lies and PR language of the industry – energy poverty, coal is cheap, clean coal is possible, 10,000 jobs, etc. It’s a tale as old as tobacco, lead, timber wars and DDT. It’s as old as industries that know their products do public harm, but lie to keep them in use.
    The point here is simply to acknowledge what many have argued about the whole idea of “post-truth” – it’s not anything new, but just more of the same.
    Environmentalists have long seen the propagation of lies, piles of bullshit, the dismissal of science, and the creation of mythologies as a consistent core of corporate misbehaviour – and, unfortunately, conservative ideology.

  14. The same tactics are now being used by the IPA and their allies to discredit reef science:

    An expert panel led by the former chief scientist Ian Chubb has warned ministers that controversial scientist Peter Ridd is misrepresenting robust science about the plight of the Great Barrier Reef, and compared his claims to the strategy used by the tobacco industry to raise doubt about the impact of smoking.
    The warning, in a letter to the federal environment minister, Sussan Ley, and the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, follows Ridd launching a lecture tour in which he has repeated his claim that farmland pollution does not significantly damage the natural wonder.
    Ridd’s tour has been supported by rightwing commentators and sugarcane industry managers campaigning against proposed state regulations limiting sediment and chemical runoff on the reef coast.
    Signed by Chubb, the head of the independent expert panel advising on plans to protect the reef, the letter says the group did not have a view on the regulations but it had chosen “not to sit by and watch” while the science was disputed and sometimes misrepresented. …
    Ridd’s speaking tour has been hosted by regional branches of the sugarcane growers peak body, Canegrowers, and the Australian Environment Foundation, a charity set up by the rightwing thinktank the Institute of Public Affairs, with strong links to the agriculture and fossil fuel industries.

    More at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/28/great-barrier-reef-expert-panel-says-peter-ridd-misrepresenting-science

  15. Coal knew too.

    In August, Chris Cherry, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, salvaged a large volume from a stack of vintage journals that a fellow faculty member was about to toss out. He was drawn to a 1966 copy of the industry publication Mining Congress Journal;his father-in-law had been in the industry and he thought it might be an interesting memento.
    Cherry flipped it open to a passage from James R. Garvey, who was the president of Bituminous Coal Research Inc., a now-defunct coal mining and processing research organization.
    “There is evidence that the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is increasing rapidly as a result of the combustion of fossil fuels,” wrote Garvey. “If the future rate of increase continues as it is at the present, it has been predicted that, because the CO2 envelope reduces radiation, the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere will increase and that vast changes in the climates of the earth will result.”
    “Such changes in temperature will cause melting of the polar icecaps, which, in turn, would result in the inundation of many coastal cities, including New York and London,” he continued.
    Cherry was floored.
    “It pretty well described a version of what we know today as climate change,” said Cherry. “Increases in average air temperatures, melting of polar ice caps, rising of sea levels. It’s all in there.”

    https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/coal-industry-climate-change_n_5dd6bbebe4b0e29d7280984f

  16. An exposé of the IPA and its influence on Australian politics and climate policies. https://www.crikey.com.au/2019/01/29/institute-of-public-affairs-climate-change-denialism/

    From anti-vaxxers to climate deniers to a general simmering scepticism of science, denialism in all its forms is everywhere. Crikey is presenting a four-part series on how the seeds of doubt are planted and how they blossom through media and politics. Read the first three parts here.

    In the 1980s, long before there was widespread public awareness of the proximity of imminent environmental apocalypse, before climate change became a wedge issue that toppled Australian prime ministers and divided politics, free market think tanks like the Institute of Public Affairs were busy sowing the seeds of doubt.

    Today, those seeds have grown into vast tendrils which have a stranglehold on politics. The IPA exists as a conduit between the respectable mainstream right, represented by the Liberal Party, and fringe climate deniers, whose marginal views are largely rejected by the rest of the scientific community. Their greatest success, mirroring that of other free market think tanks in the United States, has been to stitch climate denialism into the very fabric of the conservative political identity.

  17. The usual suspects also chose to downplay the coronavirus threat: https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/03/16/climate-science-deniers-downplayed-covid-19-cato-acsh-aei

    On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the outbreak of novel coronavirus 2019, which causes the disease COVID-19, was officially a “public health emergency of international concern.” At the time, there were cases confirmed in 19 countries and deaths in China had reached 170.

    The very next day, the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) published an article titled, “Coronavirus in the U.S.: How Bad Will It Be?”

    “Is coronavirus worse than the flu?” it began. “No, not even close.”

    “It already has spread from person-to-person in the U.S., but it probably won’t go far,” ACSH added. “And the American healthcare system is excellent at dealing with this sort of problem.”

    ACSH is one of several organizations promoting climate science denial that are now spreading misinformation on the coronavirus, with potentially deadly consequences…

    1. And again: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/15/recycling-plastics-producers-report

      Plastic producers have known for more than 30 years that recycling is not an economically or technically feasible plastic waste management solution. That has not stopped them from promoting it, according to a new report.
      “The companies lied,” said Richard Wiles, president of fossil-fuel accountability advocacy group the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), which published the report. “It’s time to hold them accountable for the damage they’ve caused.”

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