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

Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have produced a powerful book that starkly reveals just what its title promises. The central argument, delivered in clear prose and buttressed by extensive footnotes, is that the scientific consensus in a range of fields with critical importance to modern society has been challenged by a small number of individuals with political axes to grind. Many readers will be familiar with the term “watermelon”—a modern green with a communist red core. The authors demonstrate that old hawks and radical free-marketers—some of those most fond of deploying the slur—pose the real threat through their attempts to discredit science that conflicts with their rigid ideological positions. The “merchants of doubt” are men, such as William Nierenberg, Frederick Seitz, Fred Singer, and Robert Jastrow, who used their impressive scientific credentials to attack science (and scientists) that contradicted their political worldviews.

The book is divided into seven chapters and an epilogue. Oreskes and Conway begin with what they term the “tobacco strategy,” the cigarette industry’s concerted effort to manufacture doubt over the dangers of its product and create the illusion of scientific controversy. The chapters that follow deal, respectively, with the Strategic Defense Initiative (the “Star Wars” program), acid rain, the ozone hole, secondhand smoke, global warming, and DDT. The structure of dividing the chapters thematically, while providing a common thread through the actors and their tactics, succeeds in allowing individual case studies to be examined in considerable detail. Thus the authors are able to painstakingly demonstrate how individuals were able to doctor collectively compiled scientific reports, how questions about the effect of technologies on the atmosphere (aerospace as well as industrial) became questions about economic and political systems, and how attacks on scientists became part of an organized campaign to attack scientific findings. No wonder the late Stephen Schneider described climate science as a contact sport.

Technology features at various points in the book, from the 1980s controversy over the Strategic Defense Initiative to the role of satellites in atmospheric science. Noting that states have been either the originators or the developers of major inventions such as machine tools and the Internet, Oreskes and Conway argue that the history of technology in no way bears out the essential superiority of the unfettered free market. Indeed, the ban on production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) is a powerful example of the capacity for government regulation to stimulate market-based technological innovation. Coining the term “technofideism” to describe “a blind faith in technology that isn’t borne out by the historical evidence” (p. 261) feels a little superfluous, especially coming toward the end of the book. But it does ram home an important point: unthinking belief in the power of technology is just as unwarranted as the economist Milton Friedman’s belief in the supremacy of unregulated markets or in an axiomatic connection between free markets and freedom. The authors deal particularly well with the issue of negative externalities, nonmonetized costs (such as pollution) imposed on uninvolved third parties to commercial transactions.

Merchants of Doubt is a timely and immensely important work that should leave readers disturbed and concerned. Although it is also a fine contribution to the growing scholarly literature in and around what Robert Proctor has termed “agnotology”—the study of culturally produced ignorance—the book is published by a trade press and aimed at a broad audience. I fear, however, that it will raise far fewer eyebrows than it should due to the exact phenomenon that the authors so convincingly describe. Positions on scientific questions with social relevance draw accusations of bias and hidden agendas precisely because agreement among scientists has become associated with political conspiracy rather than collective wisdom. The authors conclude that such consensus deserves our trust not because the experts who construct it are infallible, but because it is the...