Merchants of Doubt

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues

by Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway

Main Points:

• Context of Book: In 2001, the IPCC had said that "human activities are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents."In fact, a Yale Climate Gallup poll said 72% of Americans completely or mostly convinced that global warming is happen, so F. Luntz decided to rephrase it as "climate change" in a 2003 memo and take the stance that there is "no consensus" about global warming in the scientific community. Naomi Oreskes' wrote a seminal paper which reviewed peer-reviewed scientific literature in Science in 2004: she analyzed the literature from 1990 to 2000 to see how many papers disagreed or tried to refute climate change, it was none.  George H.W. Bush signed the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change which committed the U.S. and 192 other signatories to prevent anthropogenic interference in the climate system. The book asks, why didn't we take the concrete steps to prevent climate change? This is the central theme of Merchants of Doubt.
• Background on Climate Change Research- In the 1850s, John Tyndall, the Irish experimentalist, who first established the concept of a greenhouse gas (CO2 and H2O). In the 1900's, Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist, realized that when you burned fossil fuels, you release carbon dioxide that could change the heat balance of the planet- which he believed would be a good thing. Guy Stuart Callendar published the first peer-reviewed article (Quarterly J. Royal Meteorological Society) in 1938 on global warming and warned against its effects. In the 1950's there was doubt about the competing effects of water vapor and carbon dioxide. Gilbert Plans resolved the absorption bands of water vapor and CO2, and found that they did not overlap, and so additional CO2 will impact the increase the temperature of the planet. Plass's work influenced Han Suess and Roger Revelle who did systematic observations of carbon dioxide. Charles Keeling began this systematic observation in 1958, and by 1965 he noticed a small increase in CO2 (315 to 320 ppm... today we are around 400 ppm)- a curve that would be known as the Keeling curve. In the 1965 President's Science Advisory Committee they wrote "by the year 2000 there will be about 25% more CO2 in our atmosphere than at present [and] this will modify the heat balance of the atmosphere to such an extent that marked changes in climate... could occur." That year Lyndon Johnson made a special message to Congress in 1965, "this generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through... a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels." In the 1960's and 1970's, the rise of computer modeling simulations had several policy implications and papers written by the DOE, National Academy of Sciences, etc. The key event occurred in 1985 when James Hansen, NASA climate modeler, concluded that the human signal was now detectable and testified in 1988 before Congress. It was this result that created the IPCC and led a politically motivated campaign to cast doubt on the science.
• Merchants of Doubt- the most important sources of disinformation on climate change in 1988 was a D.C. think tank called the George C. Marshall Institute. So where did the Marshall institute come from? It was founded in 1984 by three physicists who had built their careers in the Cold War: Robert Jastrow (astrophysicists, Head of Goddard Institute for Space Studies), William Nierenburg (nuclear physicist and Director of Scripps Institute of Oceanography), and Frederick Seitz (President of the National Academy of Sciences and consultant to R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, student of famous nuclear bomb scientists Wigner). In the early 1980's they found themselves working together on an advisory committee to the Reagan administration for the Strategic Defense Initiative called "Star Wars." The vast majority of scientific experts argued against it - it was costly, wouldn't work, and would destabilize the peace. Jastrow, Seitz, and Nierenburg disagreed with the 6500 scientists boycotted SDI funds and founded the Marshall Institute to defend SDI and promote importance of scientific strength and anxiety of weakness. Frederick Seitz retired from Rockefeller University and worked as a consultant for R.J. Reynolds company to challenge consensus or do "doubt mongering" on tobacco causing cancer. In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and Soviet Union disintegrated, but instead of going away they found a new enemy: the environmental extremism. They applied the 'tobacco strategy' against climate change, harms of tobacco, threat of nuclear winter, reality of acid rain, the severity of the ozone hole, and DDT pesticides. 

"Doubt is our product," ran the infamous memo written by one tobacco industry executive in 1969, "since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public." - Smoking and Health Proposal, 1969, Legacy Tobacco Documents Library. This document was used by the DOJ to criminalize the tobacco industry under the RICO act. 

• Why did they do it? Why would distinguished scientists go against their own science? The short answer: free market fundamentalism. It is an end member belief of modern neo-liberalism- deregulation and unleashing the magic of the marketplace. This was created in the 1980's by Margaret Thatcher and promoted in the 1990's by Bill Clinton and UK labor leader Tony Blair, and by Alan Greenspan as well. The intellectual roots are found by Milton Freedman's 'Capitalism and Freedom'- if you look at cases like the Soviet Union and China, for states to control markets, they must also control the people in the markets.  The attack on environmentalists was articulated by Fred Singer (a Cold War physicists) who engaged in campaigns against ozone hole, acid rain, and global warming. In the early 1990's, Singer was working with the Phillip Morris Tobacco company to fight against the EPA on the impacts of second hand smoke. In 1993, Singer and Kent Jeffries (Competitive Enterprise Institute) to write "EPA and the Science of Second Hand Smoke." Who is the de Tocqueville Institute? They are funded by the Tobacco Institute and attacked the EPA which said second hand smoke is a Class A carcinogen, which was based on thousands of peer-reviewed studies. Why would Singer do this? Singer said, 'If we do not carefully delineate the government's role in regulating dangers, there is essentially no limit in how much government can control in our lives." In 1993, Fred Seitz attacks the IPCC in the Wall Street Journal- fighting against carbon taxes and economic restraint.  The irony is that the origins of the US environmental movement can be found in progressive republicanism of Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot (Yale alumni who endowed Yale School of Forestry), and John D. Rockefeller. In fact the EPA was created by President Richard Nixon in the 1970s. Environmental damage is the textbook example of a negative externality that is not reflected in the cost of a product. The other irony is that the energy sector is not a free market- every single year we pay $700 billion (same amount of money as the bank bailout) to subsidize fossil fuels. 

'The Industrial Revolution brought the developed world 150 years of unprecedented prosperity- a free lunch of historic proportions," said Naomi Oreskes, "and by and large that prosperity has been a good thing for those of us who have part taken of it. But what we have learned now, what we have learned from scientific work, is that that lunch was not actually free. Global warming is the bill and it is a bill that has now come due. And as the writer Kim Stanley Robinson has pointed out 'The Invisible Hand never picks up the check.'"

Watch Professor Naomi Oreskes talk about Merchants of Doubt and the history behind the physicists of the George C. Marshall Institute and the free market fundamentalist movement. 

Listen to Professor Naomi Oreskes' Ted Talk on "Why we should trust scientists?" and the problems with the deductive-nomological model: (1) False theories can make true predictions (2) Assumptions that scientists make when developing hypothesis (3) Much of science is not deductive, it is inductive.