The last IPCC report, in 2007, says it is "very likely" that climate is warming abnormally and that we, not natural forces, are to blame. By "very likely" they mean 90% or greater certainty -- and the great majority of all earth scientists agree. As with evolution, you can choose to accept, or find reasons not to.
The stars of Merchants of Doubt have worked hard to persuade the public not to accept. According to the authors, many of the same people, using the same strategies, backed by the same interests, have worked for decades to undercut scientific warnings about the dangers of smoking, acid rain, atmospheric ozone depletion, even nuclear proliferation.
The book's main protagonists are Frederick Seitz and S. Fred Singer -- prominent, extremely hawkish cold war physicists who, respectively, helped build the atomic bomb and develop space satellites. These were not fringe figures or guns for hire; Seitz was once science adviser to NATO and president of the National Academy of Sciences. Other interconnected characters include PR man Steven Milloy, an old-time defender of tobacco who is now behind the anti-climate-change Web site junkscience.com; William Nierenberg, science adviser to a series of presidents into the 1990s; and the Heartland Institute, which in 2008 brought us a convention in New York declaring modern climate science a fraud.
All of these people took or distributed money from corporations with vested interests, but that wasn't their core motivation, say the authors. Instead, they view many of their characters as outmoded cold warriors who misguidedly sought out, and tried to save the world from, new perceived threats after the death of Russian Communism.
Starting in the 1970s, various of these figures began churning out propaganda -- at first funded by tens of millions of dollars in tobacco money -- suggesting that the link between cancer and smoking was unproven. Later, funded by a shifting web of big corporations and conservative think tanks, they claimed acid rain and the ozone hole were caused by volcanoes, not pollution; promoted Ronald Reagan's Star Wars fantasy; and fought restrictions on secondhand tobacco smoke.
On every issue they opposed a strong scientific consensus from the start. How? By sowing doubt: all these things were just "theories."
Any study that did not have 100% "proof" was declared invalid; any study that introduced even 1% of doubt was touted as gospel. "This was the tobacco industry's key insight," say Oreskes and Conway, "that you could use normal scientific uncertainty to undermine the status of actual scientific knowledge." People like Seitz and Singer did it well and got away with it because they were scientists. Finally, they entered the currently most pressing debate: climate change.
The book dates the campaign against climate science from 1989, right after lawmakers started listening to people like Hansen and the IPCC. By cherry-picking data, Nierenberg, Seitz, and Singer first suggested that the world was not warming; it was
cooling. This was a quarter-truth at best: the world cooled from 1940 to 1975, but the long-term temperature trend was, and is, undeniably upward. Several cool years in the 1990s and early 2000s have since been used to perpetuate the lie, but the 1990s were the warmest decade on record, and the years from 2000 to 2009 were warmer yet.
When pressed, Singer, Seitz et al. have said, okay, maybe things are warming -- but not that much and not in direct proportion to the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. In any case, they argue, if the planet
is warming it's caused 100% by natural cyclic variations in, say, solar radiation. Never mind that the warming
is substantial; that the overwhelming majority of scientists say solar and other natural variations come nowhere close to accounting for it; that few scientists expect CO2 and temperature to increase in lockstep; and that the idea of greenhouse warming rests on the most basic, long-tested premises of physics.
