Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Merchants of Doubt, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Science, Trust, and Public Policy
Capitalism and the Environment
Media Bias
Certainty, Doubt, and the Scientific Method
Summary
Analysis
In 1970, scientists found that new supersonic planes (SSTs) would emit so much water vapor that they could deplete Earth’s ozone layer and substantially increase skin cancer rates. At a major conference, the atmospheric chemist Harold Johnston showed that the nitrogen oxide compounds SSTs released would damage the ozone layer even more. A draft of Johnston’s passionate paper on the subject leaked to the press and caused a public uproar.
Just like acid rain, ozone depletion presents a serious, potentially irreversible risk to a large portion of the population and environment. In both cases, it’s possible to stop the emissions responsible for the danger, and the only people who stand to suffer from these emissions restrictions are the wealthy executives who run polluting companies. As a result, it's little surprise that the merchants of doubt got involved in both issues—on behalf of the polluters.
Themes
After cancelling the SST program due to its cost, the U.S. government still funded a climate assessment report on it. The report found that SSTs would significantly deplete the ozone layer, but oddly, its executive summary simply argued that better SSTs in the future wouldn’t pose any ozone-related risks. Major newspapers started attacking scientists like Harold Johnston, but they refused to publish letters defending their research and correcting the executive summary. Johnston published his rebuttal in the journal Science, but it never received public attention. SST airplanes never became common, but Johnston’s research led to a wave of studies about how industrial chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) destroy ozone. Congress recognized the danger and immediately started holding hearings about CFCs.
Years before the acid rain debate, government officials were already manipulating scientific reports to play down the dangers of pollution. This approach was the same as Fred Singer’s appendix to the Nierenberg report: the SST report placed blind faith in future technology, which it claimed would solve environmental problems on its own. And the media repeated the same troubling pattern: leading publications treated pollution as a political issue, not a scientific one. They sidelined legitimate scientific research, while amplifying doubt-mongers’ voices instead. Yet despite all these obstacles, the government still worked as intended: it began investigating how to build policies around the best available science for the sake of the public interest.
Themes
The Ozone War. Oreskes and Conway describe how aerosol manufacturers conducted their own research on CFCs and funded public relations campaigns to defend them. A U.S. government task force recommended banning CFCs, and it assigned the National Academy of Sciences to review the evidence. In response, the aerosol industry paid a British professor to tour the U.S., denouncing this research. Reporters publicly discredited him. So, the industry changed tactics: it started blaming volcanos for high atmospheric CFC levels. However, a major eruption quickly disproved this hypothesis.
Aerosol companies defended their dangerous products using many of the same dishonest public relations strategies as tobacco companies. Yet journalists effectively exposed their lies and the government didn’t fall for them. Again, this shows how environmental regulation should work in a functional democracy. But the following chapters will show how the merchants of doubt have distorted this system more and more in the decades since the debate over CFCs.
Themes
Next, a young researcher proved that CFCs were breaking down the ozone layer by discovering chlorine monoxide in the stratosphere. Chlorine monoxide is a “fingerprint” for ozone depletion: it is only produced when chlorine breaks down ozone. However, when the NAS delayed its final report on ozone to make revisions—new data suggested that ozone breakdown could be slower than previously thought—the aerosol lobby triumphantly told the public that CFCs were totally safe. Yet the final NAS report indicated that CFCs were quickly destroying the ozone later. The NAS suggested completely banning CFCs within two years. Regulators started formulating new rules, and the public started dramatically reducing CFC use on its own.
The National Academy of Sciences did its job: it assessed the state of research on ozone depletion and made rational policy recommendations based on its findings. The industry’s doubt-mongering was neither sophisticated nor persuasive enough to challenge the NAS’s findings. And perhaps most importantly, the public’s immediate move to reduce CFC use shows that there was a broad sense of trust in the government and scientific community: the population willingly followed government scientists’ advice because it believed that they had its best interests at heart.
Themes
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Holes in the Ozone Layer. Oreskes and Conway explain how, in the 1980s, British researchers discovered a massive hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica. This shocked the scientific establishment, which couldn’t explain the hole and wondered why NASA satellites failed to detect it. They realized that the satellites had mistakenly processed low ozone concentrations as measurement errors. Soon, researchers had clear images of the vast Antarctic ozone hole. Some meteorologists questioned the evidence, but the U.S. sent two groups to Antarctica to investigate further. They discovered that CFCs specifically accelerated ozone breakdown in the Antarctic because of Antarctica’s distinctive strong winds and icy clouds.
Depending on one’s interpretation, the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole is either a story of serious scientific failure or one of profound scientific success. On the one hand, researchers initially missed the hole because they programmed satellites incorrectly. This shows that the merchants of doubt are right to say that scientists sometimes do make serious mistakes, which can undermine the validity of their research. But, on the other hand, the researchers also caught and fixed their error. This shows how scientists’ shared commitment to discovering and speaking the truth leads the whole scientific community to form a consensus around this truth, over time.
Themes
Creating an Adaptive Regulatory Regime. In 1987, at a UN conference in Montreal, nations agreed to reduce global CFC emissions by half and reconvene every few years to adapt their plans as needed. New satellite data soon proved that ozone depletion was worse than predicted—including in the Northern Hemisphere. But scientists also knew that satellite measurements could be very unreliable, so they established the Ozone Trends Panel to review the evidence. The panel concluded that ozone depletion was very severe, even if satellites were overestimating it. A DuPont chemical company scientist who served on the panel even convinced the company’s executives to stop making CFCs.
The international community’s collective agreement to address the ozone problem again shows how science-based policy should work. Of course, this depends on a generalized sense of trust between policymakers and the scientific community. Indeed, as DuPont’s agreement to stop producing CFCs shows, even polluting corporations seemed to share this fundamental trust in science. DuPont’s decision also underlines how easy it can be for such corporations to stop polluting—especially when governments give them clear incentives to do so.
Themes
An Arctic Ozone Hole? Next, researchers began asking whether there might also be an ozone hole over the Arctic. In 1989, stratospheric scientists made several flights into the Arctic and found even higher levels of chlorine monoxide than in the Antarctic. Yet there was no ozone hole, because the Arctic isn’t as cold or windy as the Antarctic. Still, based on this new research, nations agreed to completely ban CFC production in 1990.
The Arctic research suggested that CFCs would only cause more and more damage over time, as their atmospheric concentration continued increasing. Meanwhile, the differences between the Arctic and Antarctic speak to how difficult it can be to generalize about scientific problems—which is another reason that the government should prefer empirical research over vague, speculative promises from people like the merchants of doubt.
Themes
Constructing a Counternarrative. Oreskes and Conway call the CFC ban “a success story” for science-based environmental regulation. Yet they note that industry, Reagan appointees, and conservative think tanks also consistently tried to derail the regulations through doubt-mongering. One of the leading voices was the Heritage Foundation, a new right-wing think tank funded by banks and large corporations. It gave Fred Singer a prominent platform in the 1980s. By the time of the ozone debate a few years later, Singer was working for the U.S. government instead. But he publicly questioned the research on ozone anyway.
The CFC ban was “a success story” because the government’s interest in human well-being proved stronger than the merchants of doubt’s campaign to undermine science. However, this all happened around the same time that Fred Singer and his allies did successfully undermine acid rain regulations. This all shows that each environmental debate is separate, and the winner will always depend on conditions specific to each—like who has more power, resources, and allies in the government. If nothing else, Oreskes and Conway’s book could serve as a resource to help scientists and their allies to fight this battle more effectively.
Themes
In an article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, Fred Singer claimed that ozone wasn’t being depleted, just moving around. He blamed many factors besides ozone depletion for causing more skin cancer, and he seriously mischaracterized the research about SSTs. He suggested that researchers overreacted by panicking about SSTs and were repeating the same mistake. In a paper the following year, Singer argued that natural climate change caused the ozone hole by cooling the stratosphere. He cited researchers like V. Ramanathan and James E. Hansen, who agreed that climate change was cooling the stratosphere—but attributed this to human greenhouse gas emissions, not natural processes. Of course, Singer concluded that no new regulations were necessary.
Singer followed the same tried-and-true doubt-mongering playbook: he distorted the existing peer-reviewed research to justify rejecting it, and then presented his own absurd, unproven ideas as unquestionable facts. If emissions weren’t destroying ozone, then there would be no need for companies to stop them. It’s also telling that Singer blamed the ozone hole on supposedly natural global warming, while failing to mention Ramanathan and Hansen’s work on greenhouse gas emissions. This suggests that he already knew that human-caused climate change would also become a controversial—and profitable—political issue.
Themes
When Science rejected Fred Singer’s paper for its lack of rigor, Singer publicly complained in the conservative National Review. He accused the scientific community of selfishness, alarmism, and jumping to conclusions. He falsely claimed that the ozone hole was first discovered in the 1950s, and he warned that CFC substitutes would be ineffective and dangerous—even though they didn’t exist yet. In fact, after CFCs were banned, scientists did develop far safer and more effective alternatives.
Singer even used his signature move to deal with his detractors: when his work was rejected for being unscientific, he turned the charge on its head and called his accusers unscientific instead. Oreskes and Conway point out that this accusation is deeply ironic, because if mainstream scientists were really so selfish, they would have simply demanded more funding so that they could keep conducting more research (instead of declaring the ozone issue settled).
Themes
After the final CFC ban, most policymakers and scientists moved on to other pressing issues, but Fred Singer stayed focused on ozone. He founded a think tank called the SEPP (Science and Environmental Policy Project), secured funding from a powerful conservative church, and started publishing articles claiming that the consensus on ozone was wrong because it used ground-based measurements instead of satellite data. (Actually, the satellite data showed even more ozone depletion.)
Singer’s persistence serves as an important warning to scientists and their allies: the merchants of doubt continue trying to undermine science long after it is settled. Oreskes and Conway will explore the dangers of this phenomenon further in their seventh chapter, which explores how the merchants of doubt attacked Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking work on DDT.
Themes
In 1990, the zoologist and former Washington governor Dixy Lee Ray lent credibility to Singer’s work by citing it in her book, which was an attack on the environmentalist movement. But Singer’s data wasn’t based on original research—instead, it came from a fringe political magazine. It confused stratospheric chlorine, which destroys ozone, with chlorine emissions from sources like volcanos, which never reach the stratosphere. Sherwood Rowland publicly refuted this evidence in a major 1993 speech, but Singer kept repeating it—including at congressional hearings. When Rowland won a Nobel Prize for his work on ozone, Singer accused the committee and the public of “environmental hysteria.” Yet Republican leaders continued listening to Singer, not Rowland.
Dixy Lee Ray’s writing shows how misinformation about science can spread, especially when it’s repeated by public figures with elite credentials and a wide following. Singer and Ray’s distortions are difficult to fight because they are based on extremely obscure sources and highly technical misinterpretations of the data. As a result, when repeated in the press, their ideas often sounded just as legitimate as the real scientific truth. In contrast, the scientists doing legitimate work on ozone (like Rowland) struggled to correct the public record because they weren’t as well-connected or powerful.
Themes
What Was This Really About? Oreskes and Conway explore Singer’s true motives for spreading doubt about ozone depletion. Even as he accused other scientists of seeking money and fame, his organization, the SEPP, made millions of dollars, and he became one of the most popular scientists in the country. But it wasn’t just about money. In 1989, he argued that socialists were trying to overthrow free-market capitalism by spreading lies about environmental threats. Thus, it’s clear why the Marshall Institute began repeating Singer’s claims and pro-business newspapers eagerly published them.
Once again, the paper trail shows that undermining legitimate science was extremely profitable for the merchants of doubt. But Oreskes and Conway also emphasize that financial incentives alone can’t explain Singer’s behavior. Instead, his actions were part of a broader political mission to defend unregulated capitalism against what he viewed as an environmentalist conspiracy. In the following chapters, Oreskes and Conway will further explore how the Cold War and its aftermath shaped this mission.
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