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

Introduction

  • Page 6 First they claimed there was none, then they claimed it
  • Page 7 was just natural variation, and then they claimed that even if it was happening and it was our fault, it didn’t matter because we could just adapt to it.
  • Page 7 This book tells the story of the Tobacco Strategy, and how it was used to attack science and scientists, and to confuse us about major, important issues affecting our lives— and the planet we live on.

    Chapter 1 Doubt Is Our Product

  • Page 14 in 1979 it was still true. No one had collected a penny from the tobacco industry, even though scientists had been certain of the tobacco- cancer link since the 1950s (and many had been convinced before that).
  • Page 18 The industry had realized that you could create the impression of controversy simply by asking questions, even if you actually knew the answers and they didn’t help your case.
  • Page 32 While the idea of equal time for opposing opinions makes sense in a two- party political system, it does not work for science, because science is not about opinion. It is about evidence. It is about claims that can be, and have been, tested through scientific
  • Page 34 This was the tobacco industry’s key insight: that you could use normal scientific uncertainty to undermine the status of actual scientific knowledge.
  • Page 34 various groups and individuals began to challenge scientific evidence that threatened their commercial interests or ideological beliefs. Many of these campaigns involved the strategies developed by the tobacco industry, and some of them involved the same people. One of these people was Frederick Seitz.

    Chapter 2 Strategic Defense, Phony Facts, and the Creation of the George C. Marshall Institute

  • Page 47 you could get what you wanted if you argued with enough conviction, even if you didn’t have the facts on your side.
  • Page 52 Sagan’s behavior— publishing in Parade and Foreign Affairs before the peer- reviewed TTAPS paper had appeared in Science— was a violation of scientific norms. Moreover, the Parade article presented the TTAPS worst- case scenarios and omitted most of the caveats, so to some scientists it didn’t appear as an honest effort in public education. Some saw it as outright propaganda.
  • Page 53 On the other hand, Sagan’s argument was based on scientific evidence— it was based on data— and he believed it was his duty as a citizen to explain the very real threat of catastrophe.

    Chapter 3 Sowing the Seeds of Doubt: Acid Rain

  • Page 71 There are always more questions to be asked, which is why expert consensus is so significant—
  • Page 75 the tendency to emphasize uncertainties rather than settled knowledge. Scientists do this because it’s necessary for inquiry— the research frontier can’t be identified by focusing on what you already know— but it’s not very helpful when trying to create public policy.
  • Page 80 Sometimes in error but never in doubt.
  • Page 92 A dollar in the future is not worth as much to you as a dollar now, so you “discount” its value in your planning and decision making. How much you discount it depends in part on inflation, but also in part on how much you value the future.
  • Page 105 Regulation is an effective means to stimulate technological innovation.
  • Page 105 Because pollution prevention is a public good -- not well reflected in the market price of goods and services— the incentives for private investment are weak.
  • Page 106 One thing we know do know for sur is that doubt - mongering about acid rain -- like doubt mongering about tobacco -- led to delay, and that was a lesson that many people took to heart. In the years that followed the same strategy would be applied again and again.[Denial in the form of pseudo skepticism ]

    Chapter 4 Constructing a Counternarrative: The Fight over the Ozone Hole

  • Page 111 Paul Crutzen, a brilliant Dutch atmospheric scientist who would later dub the current period of Earth’s history the “Anthropocene”
  • Page 113 The Western Aerosol Information Bureau. ...Resistance campaign.
  • Page 120 Like the famous images of the Earth from space, these ozone depletion maps were viscerally powerful.
  • Page 125 Conservative and Libertarian think tanks in Washington. These think tanks— which included the Cato Institute,
  • Page 125 The American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute,

    Chapter 5 What’s Bad Science? Who Decides? The Fight over Secondhand Smoke