PDF Summary:Merchants of Doubt, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway

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Peer Review

How does expert consensus come about? The basic system has been in place since the 1600s. When scholars first became interested in learning new information (in medieval times, learning was about studying ancient texts and preserving what was already known), they realized that there had to be some sort of way to check new ideas for validity, or people could just make things up and be taken seriously. To prevent this, they built a system in which claims had to be backed up by evidence, and both the claim and evidence needed to pass the judgment of other scientists to be considered legitimate. If a claim failed the process, it was just a claim, not science.

Today, the process is called peer review, and no science is considered legitimate until it passes peer review. Typically, the process works like this:

Step #1: A scientist comes up with an idea, collects evidence to support it, writes a paper, and then submits it to a scientific journal for publication.

Step #2: The journal sends the paper to three other scientists to review. The reviewers aren’t paid—since everyone’s work has to be peer-reviewed to be considered science, someone else will...

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This belief isn’t completely wrong—in many ways, modern life is better than medieval life, and there have been historical instances of governments oppressing their citizens with regulations. However, cornucopianism includes two potentially flawed assumptions:

1. Technology is guaranteed to advance fast and well enough. Technology has advanced in the past, but things are different today. In the past, human-caused environmental problems were small and regional. Today, they’re global and have a time limit, and technology is not developing quickly enough to meet it.
2. All advances were entirely generated by the free market. This claim originates from Milton Friedman—he wrote that no technological advances had ever been generated by centralized government—but that’s untrue. (It only wasn’t dismissed as nonsense because he was an influential economist.)
   • For example, the communist Soviet Union was a technological powerhouse—it launched the first satellite, Sputnik, into space.

Individual Merchants of Doubt

Four notable merchants of doubt were involved in doubt-mongering multiple scientific questions from the 1960s-2000s. All of them media-savvy,...

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• Promoting the work of Wilhelm C. Hueper, with his permission. Hueper was chief of the Environmental Cancer Section for the National Cancer Institute (a reputable organization), and he had given a talk questioning how related tobacco and cancer were. (This might have been because he was often called as a witness in asbestos litigation, where sometimes, lawyers would try to blame the plaintiff’s cancer on smoking instead of asbestos. If there was no link between cancer and cigarettes, then asbestos would have to be the cause.)
• Asking previously settled questions. The industry asked journalists questions that scientists and the industry (but not the journalists) knew the answers to. Phrasing the facts as questions made them seem uncertain. For example, the industry asked: Why do more people get cancer in the city than in the country, even if the smoking rates in both regions were the same? (The answer is that other things cause cancer.)
• Establishing relationships with reputable organizations. By the early 1960s, the tobacco industry had connections to medical schools, public health, and doctors.

Further Scientific Exploration

**Scientists continued...

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The MOD's Response

The tobacco industry attacked both papers. They criticized the first because the offices were “smoky,” but scientists hadn’t measured exactly how much smoke the workers were exposed to. (This is a hard thing to measure because smoke quickly disperses in the air.)

To deal with the second paper, they hired consultants to disprove Hirayama. One consultant accused Hirayama of making a critical statistical error, and the Tobacco Institute advertised the critic’s work and got the press to cover it by calling for coverage of “both sides” again. (Industry internal memos acknowledged that Hirayama’s study was accurate, and he was an expert scientist.)

Policy and Public Action

The industry received their equal media coverage, but their tactics didn’t fool the scientific community, and medical professionals and anti-tobacco activists pushed for regulation of smoking in public. States started restricting public smoking, the Civil Aviation Board considering banning smoking on flights, and Congress considered advertising controls.

In 1986, **a Surgeon General’s report announced that secondhand smoke could cause health problems, including lung...

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The right-wing media also picked up on the discrepancy and cited the higher percentage to misleadingly imply that the Soviets were expanding their military and the U.S. was falling behind. (In reality, the Defense Intelligence’s number suggested that the Soviets were less efficient and weaker—they had to spend more money to get the same amount of weaponry.)

The combined pressure from all these detente (disarmament) opponents citing uncertainty prompted the CIA’s director, George H.W. Bush, to allow an “independent” analysis by panelists. All the panel members already thought the CIA had underestimated the Soviet threat, and as a result, they came to the following conclusions:

• The Soviets only supported detente because it would give them a chance to get ahead—if the U.S. stopped and they didn’t, they could reach superiority.
• The Soviet’s goal wasn’t mutual deterrence; it was to win, and they’d attack as soon as they thought they had enough firepower. (In 1995, CIA interviews found that the Soviet leaders had never thought they’d win, or even that it was possible to win a nuclear war.)
• The Soviets were building a new, sophisticated missile defense system....

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Announcing the Nuclear Winter Hypothesis

The astrophysicists started work on a paper that would be known as TTAPS for the last names of its authors. Notably, the “S” was for Carl Sagan.

In 1982, organizations worried about the effects of nuclear war approached Carl Sagan and three other scientists about giving a conference. The TTAPS paper hadn’t been published yet, so the scientists agreed to hold a conference only if the paper passed peer review during a workshop, and only after it was reviewed by prominent biologists. (Typically, peer review is done individually, but workshop review didn’t violate any scientific protocols.)

Shortly after Star Wars was announced, the TTAPS did pass peer review and the biologists found it so compelling they wrote their own paper, so the conference was green-lighted.

Three days before the conference, Sagan published an article in Parade, a Sunday magazine with more than 10 million readers, that summarized the nuclear winter hypothesis and emphasized the worst-case scenario while not discussing the caveats in detail. He also published an article in Foreign Affairs around the same time as the conference. **He argued that...

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• Merchants of doubt can more legitimately bring up uncertainty and lack of proof to delay regulation.
• Regulators need to keep reevaluating and updating policy as scientists discover more.
• It’s hard to put a number on the value of clean air and species conservation. It’s a lot easier to do the math on how expensive it is to reduce pollution. Usually, the more a policy will cost, the more certainty that’s required.

In this chapter, we’ll first look at the history of U.S. environmentalism. Then, we’ll look at how this foundation informed the acid rain “debate,” and in later chapters, other “debates.”

A History of U.S. Environmentalism

In the first two-thirds of the 19th century, environmentalism was “preservationist”—focused on preserving natural places. This kind of environmentalism was popular and bipartisan—many people valued outdoor recreation and aesthetics and felt that preserving the environment was moral. (For example, when the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives voted on the 1964 Wilderness Act, it passed by a landslide.) Some environmentalists were interested in science, but people didn’t need proof to see the value in nature.

During **Nixon’s...

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Nitrogen Oxides (NOX)

In March 1971, the Department of Transportation held a conference on stratospheric flight. One of the attendees, Harold Johnston, an atmospheric chemist, disagreed with the SCEP study’s conclusion that NOX wouldn’t significantly deplete ozone. Johnston handwrote a paper while at the conference that showed that NOX would have a huge effect—10-90% ozone depletion, depending on region. The higher-air-traffic regions, such as the North Atlantic, would see the greatest depletion.

None of the other scientists were very worried about NOX, but Johnston was so vehement they recommended doing more research on NOX at the end of the conference. No one knew how much NOX was currently in the atmosphere, so it was impossible to know if the SST emissions would be a drop in the bucket or a huge amount.

Johnston revised his handwritten paper and tried to publish it in Science. The peer reviewers rejected it because Johnston hadn’t cited an important paper on NOX and because his tone was biased—he wrote that an SST fleet would deplete ozone concentration by 50% and cause blindness. **Johnston went to work revising it, but an earlier draft leaked to...

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Lyndon Johnson read the report but had bigger problems (such as the Vietnam War) and didn’t do anything about it. The next president, Nixon, did consider atmospheric changes, but he was focused on the greenhouse gas effects of water (from supersonic transports (SSTs)), not CO₂.

Drought and Famine

In the 1970s, there was drought in Asia and Africa that caused famine. The famines affected the whole world because the price of food increased globally. This brought some attention to the fragility of the global food supply, which would be affected by changes to weather patterns and global warming.

The Jasons Study

In 1977, the Department of Energy asked the Jasons, an independent, elite scientific group, to review the science on climate and CO₂. The Jasons group:

• Confirmed that agriculture was vulnerable to climate change
• Used a model to determine that if atmospheric CO₂ concentrations doubled from preindustrial levels, the earth’s average surface temperature would rise by 2.4 degrees Celsius. The poles would warm 10-12 degrees.

**Other scientists had already established all this, but the Jasons were highly regarded...

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DDT also had mixed results when it was used as part of the Global Malaria Eradication Campaign. From 1955-1969, the World Health Assembly and the U.S. sprayed indoor surfaces and walls with DDT and other pesticides. This spraying helped end malaria in Australia and Europe and reduced it in parts of Latin America and India, but wasn’t very effective in less developed areas.

Spraying failed for three reasons:

1. Spraying wasn’t the only factor that eliminated malaria. Health care, education, nutrition, and reducing mosquito breeding grounds were also important, and the less developed countries didn’t always have these supporting factors.

2. For spraying to work, the pesticide needed to remain on the walls, so people couldn’t wash them or refinish them. Many people didn’t understand or like this—it conflicted with other public health instructions and made their homes feel dirty.

3. As they had in Florida, mosquitoes were becoming resistant. Indoor spraying doesn’t produce resistance quickly because only a small percentage of the mosquito population (the ones that get into buildings) are exposed to DDT. However, in many of the regions that used indoor spraying,...

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• The MODs reprised the same settled issues that we looked at in previous chapters. For example, the tobacco debate restarted around vaping in the U.S.

Additionally, today, it’s even easier for MODs to go public with their opinions, no matter how ludicrous or dangerous, because of the Internet. Anything on the Internet is sharable and permanent, and there aren’t gatekeepers on the Internet (for example, journals that will refuse to print an MOD’s letter).

Oreskes and Conway believe the world is in a bad place, and they see this book as a wake-up call. Scientists are often told not to be negative because they’ll depress people, which leads to them giving up rather than acting. Oreskes and Conway agree that negativity can be paralyzing, but reassurance that things aren’t so bad when they really are creates the same effect—inaction.

Protecting Yourself Against Doubt-Mongering

Doubt-mongering is still alive and well—so how do you avoid being taken in?

First, don’t count on scientists to set the record straight for you. Other than defending Ben Santer, the scientific community as a whole hasn’t done much to counter the MODs. This is likely for some of the...