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 1995, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that humans were significantly warming the planet. Ten years later, even though virtually all climate scientists had reached a consensus on the issue, most Americans still thought that the science was uncertain. In fact, scientists have known about the greenhouse effect for over 150 years, and even in the 1960s, they were already warning the government that fossil fuel emissions could permanently change Earth’s climate. Yet the U.S. government did nothing. “The confusion raised by Bill Nierenberg, Fred Seitz, and Fred Singer” is one of many reasons for this inaction.
In many ways, this is the book’s most significant chapter. Global warming is by far the most significant political problem that the merchants of doubt have fought to undermine. Their campaign against climate change science has been by far their most effective, and it’s the only one that is still ongoing. In fact, their stance has become a mainstream political opinion and heavily influenced policy. Oreskes and Conway show this by starting with the clear discrepancy between the state of climate science and the state of public opinion about it.
Themes
1979: A Seminal Year for Climate. In 1965, the prominent oceanographer Roger Revelle wrote a report for the government about the risk of CO2 emissions causing global warming. Presidents Johnson and Nixon took the report seriously, but they mostly focused on more urgent policy challenges. In the 1970s, droughts caused severe famines across the Soviet Union and sub-Saharan Africa. In response, the U.S. government asked the Jasons, a group of elite physicists, to study CO2 emissions and the climate. Their conclusion echoed earlier studies by climate scientists: if atmospheric CO2 levels reach 540 ppm (double what they were before the industrial revolution), the atmosphere will warm 2.4 degrees Celsius—and the poles more than 10 degrees.
Oreskes and Conway note that the science on global warming is even older than that on acid rain or ozone, and yet there’s still less of a political consensus on it today—as well as less definite policy action. This shows how successful the merchants of doubt have been in undermining public support for climate science. Roger Revelle is among the scientists who can most legitimately claim to have discovered global warming. This fact becomes particularly important at the end of this chapter, when Revelle has a fateful series of encounters with Fred Singer. Finally, the government’s extensive research on climate change shows that it did take the problem very seriously at first. This was largely possible because the public still strongly trusted scientists in the 1970s, and fossil fuel corporations hadn’t yet begun their influence campaign to undermine climate change research.
Themes
The Carter administration asked the NAS to peer review the Jasons’ study. Leading climate modeler Jule Charney led a nine-member panel who used more sophisticated models but reached a similar conclusion: doubling CO2 levels would increase global temperatures by about 3°C, plus or minus 1.5°C. The panel carefully studied “negative feedback mechanisms,” or natural processes that could slow down global warming, and concluded that they would have a minimal effect on the overall temperature change. The panelists also concluded that warming wouldn’t seriously begin for several decades, because it takes oceans a very long time to heat up. Thus, people wouldn’t feel or measure global warming until it was already far too late to stop it.
The NAS report is a clear example of how effective science works: over time, researchers review, refine, and reevaluate one another’s work, until the community as a whole reaches a consensus about an issue. Charney’s work helped confirm the Jasons study’s overall predictions, while refining its specific conclusions. Slowly but steadily, scientists were forming a better understanding of global warming. The discovery that global warming wouldn’t start for decades meant that the planet wouldn’t start to suffer yet and governments would have plenty of time to act before experiencing its worst effects. But it also had a more sinister effect: it made inaction easier and its consequences much harder to see. It also made climate science easier to undermine, as Oreskes and Conway will show in the rest of this chapter.
Themes
Organizing Delay: The Second and Third Academy Assessments. The NAS commissioned a new study to follow up on the previous report. The economist Thomas Schelling led the new panel, which also included Roger Revelle and Bill Nierenberg. It concluded that global warming’s social and economic impacts were very difficult to predict, but that humans could probably manage them by migrating and adapting their ways of life. While the panel agreed that humans should stop fossil fuel use as soon as possible, it also argued that the free market would naturally make fossil fuels more expensive and less popular. Thus, it proposed that the government conduct more research instead of limiting emissions.
The next assessment contributed to the overall scientific understanding of climate change by weighing in on its implications for human life and society. However, it assessed these implications through the logic of free market fundamentalism. Just like Fred Singer’s appendix to the Nierenberg acid rain report, the Schelling panel report assumed that the problem would not be very costly just because its costs were difficult to measure. It also illogically assumed that an unregulated free market would naturally solve all of the same problems it created. It was correct to say that the government needed to do more research into global warming, Oreskes and Conway suggest, but it was too confident about humanity’s ability to solve the problem later on.
Themes
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Yet other prominent scientists firmly disagreed with the panel’s conclusion. The NAS’s top climate researcher, John Perry, wrote an article calling climate change “Today’s Problem, Not Tomorrow’s.” He pointed out that increasing CO2 levels by far less than double would still cause significant climate change, so global warming was definitely already underway. Perry was right, but most politicians found it more convenient to side with Thomas Schelling instead.
Schelling’s report assumed that global warming would not significantly harm humans, but only because it didn’t look at the problem very closely. In contrast, Perry and his colleagues tried to correct the record by examining the problem’s severity and likely timeline. When politicians chose Schelling’s explanation, Oreskes and Conway suggest, they were choosing uninformed overconfidence over realistic caution.
Themes
In 1980, Congress created another committee to study CO2, then put Bill Nierenberg in charge. Rather than publishing a collectively-authored report, like NAS committees usually do, Nierenberg’s group instead released a report with several individually-authored chapters. Five chapters by scientists described climate change’s likelihood and effects, while two chapters by economists disagreed. In the first chapter, three economists argued that CO2 levels were likely to double by 2065, but taxing fossil fuels would be more expensive than just adapting to the problem when it arrives. In the final chapter, Schelling argued that it’s better to deal with climate change’s symptoms than its causes because we know little about how future people will live or what they will want.
In the Nierenberg climate change report, like in the Nierenberg acid rain report, unfounded and overly optimistic predictions from non-specialists ended up drowning out dire warnings from scientists who actually examined the problem. Yet again, the economists’ introduction and conclusion applied free market fundamentalist principles to the environment. The introduction argued that environmental destruction only matters to the extent that its value can be quantified through money, so a significant (but highly uncertain and potentially catastrophic) level of it should be acceptable. The conclusion simply rejected government action based on the economic principle that decision-makers should care more about their present than their future, because circumstances can change and people can take action later. But this principle ignored many key facts—like the fact that humans will probably never collectively prefer for the environment to be destroyed and the fact that emissions rules always take many years to make a significant impact on the climate.
Themes
The report’s executive summary agreed with the economists, not the scientists. It argued that the government should “wait and see,” and people will migrate and adapt to new environments. Peer reviewers like physicist Alvin Weinberg critiqued the report’s unsupported claims about climate adaptation, but the NAS ignored their comments. One researcher later told Oreskes that scientists “knew [the report] was garbage so we just ignored it.”
The scientist’s comment to Oreskes succinctly captures one of the main reasons that lies often outperform truth in the media: whereas doubt-mongers spend nearly all of their time and resources manipulating the media, legitimate scientists actually have research to do. Their job is to actually do science, not explain it to the public, and their voices don’t carry nearly as far as the doubt-mongers’ when they do. As a result, the media is systematically biased towards people like the merchants of doubt—and the lies they tell.
Themes
However, the administration took the report very seriously, using it to discredit the EPA’s efforts to regulate coal. In fact, officials guided the report from the start: they asked the panel to avoid “speculative, alarmist, ‘wolf-crying’ scenarios” and instead argue that technology would solve humanity’s environmental problems. While the panel didn’t reject science altogether, it did ignore climate scientists and any economists who disagreed with free market fundamentalism.
The administration’s response further suggests that it deliberately planned the report in order to get the answer it wanted to hear. It’s telling that the administration called predictions about catastrophic climate change “speculative,” but clearly didn’t apply the same label to its own free-market fundamentalist prediction that everything would be okay because capitalism would innovate the problem away. In reality, there was much less scientific evidence for this second train of thought, which made it far more “speculative” than the scientists’ approach.
Themes
Meeting the “Greenhouse Effect” with the “White House Effect.” In 1988, a severe drought ravished the globe, and climate scientist James E. Hansen publicly testified that human-caused global warming was already observable. Global temperatures had already increased by at least half a degree, and Hansen presented models showing that, within two decades, they would likely be higher than at any time in the last 120,000 years. Hansen’s testimony was widely covered across the U.S. Meanwhile, atmospheric scientists agreed to work together and assess the evidence on climate change, just as they had done for ozone a few years before. They formed the IPCC and named Bert Bolin as its first chair. The administration also began investing in climate change research.
It’s significant that Hansen’s testimony is generally remembered as the moment when global warming became a serious scientific problem, even though there had already been research into it for decades. This reaffirms that the public and political leaders’ perceptions of science depend far more on the way scientists are covered in the media than the way they actually do research. Meanwhile, Hansen’s testimony is the merchants of doubt's worst nightmare: a rare example of legitimate, peer-reviewed science reaching a broad audience and seriously influencing political leaders’ priorities. The IPCC is still the leading global climate advisory group today.
Themes
Blaming the Sun. After his retirement, Bill Nierenberg joined the George C. Marshall Institute. In 1989, the Cold War was ending, so the Institute was pivoting from supporting the SDI to attacking environmentalists. It began circulating a report by Jastrow, Seitz, and Nierenberg blaming global warming on the sun. These scientists called the White House and arranged a meeting with several key cabinet members, who took their work very seriously.
Nierenberg’s path from government to the Marshall Institute again shows how close the links between political leaders and doubt-mongers really are. In a way, the merchants of doubt are far better connected to political power than they are to the rest of the scientific community. In turn, this is what won them such an immediate and attentive audience with the White House—even though they had no real expertise on climate science.
Themes
But Jastrow, Seitz, and Nierenberg’s argument was based on a serious distortion of James Hansen’s data. Hansen showed that three factors explain most historic temperature change: CO2 emissions, volcanic eruptions, and radiation from the sun. Jastrow, Seitz, and Nierenberg republished Hansen’s solar radiation graph, while ignoring his graphs of CO2 and volcanic eruptions. Moreover, if they were right about the sun, this would actually mean that Earth is extremely sensitive to temperature change, and greenhouse gases are even more dangerous than previously thought.
One of the most basic principles of scientific research is that scientists must fairly analyze all the data they collect, rather than simply cherry-picking the results that will help them reach their preferred conclusion. Thus, in any serious scientific circle, Jastrow, Seitz, and Nierenberg’s work would be viewed as dishonest and legitimate. Yet this somehow didn’t stop them from advising the president. The core problem, Oreskes and Conway suggest, is that the government chooses not to apply the basic criteria for legitimate science when choosing its advisors.
Themes
In 1990, the IPCC’s first report confirmed that greenhouse gases were the main cause of global warming and explained that solar radiation levels would only have a minor effect, at most, on global temperatures. Yet the George C. Marshall Institute continued blaming the sun and publishing erroneous graphs, even after Bert Bolin and other climate scientists publicly corrected them, and the White House continued listening to the Marshall Institute over the IPCC.
The first IPCC report’s conclusions represent a scientific consensus about greenhouse gas emissions causing global warming. Even though research has continued to improve ever since, this consensus was already established in 1990. But decades later, public opinion still has not caught up. This is because, just like Republican administrations, most of the public has chosen to believe a convenient (but false) version of science instead of the actual experts.
Themes
The Attack on Roger Revelle. Oreskes and Conway explain how Fred Singer started publicly accusing Roger Revelle of “chang[ing] his mind about global warming.” Revelle was studying how humans could switch to alternative energy sources and how forest growth could help remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Fred Singer contacted Revelle to propose working on an article together, and Revelle agreed.
Singer’s attack on Revelle is significant for two reasons. First, it underlines that the merchants of doubt are willing to go to extreme lengths to get their way. And secondly, Revelle was the scientist who first proposed that the greenhouse effect could warm the planet, so his voice had significant sway in the scientific community. Oreskes and Conway suggest that, judging by Revelle’s career trajectory, Singer’s accusations were designed to undermine Revelle’s life work.
Themes
Then, Revelle had a serious heart attack, which nearly killed him. During Revelle’s six-week hospital stay, Singer sent him three drafts of a joint paper. But Revelle’s secretary reports that he ignored the drafts and considered Fred Singer a poor scientist. Oreskes and Conway suggest that Revelle may have regretted agreeing to work with Singer, who was a pariah, and tried to prevent their paper from getting published by simply ignoring it.
Oreskes and Conway emphasize that it's impossible to know exactly what Revelle wanted or thought after his heart attack. However, they argue that it’s important to try and fairly interpret the existing evidence about the end of Revelle’s life, in order to test Fred Singer’s unlikely claims about him. This evidence strongly suggests that Revelle did not support Singer’s skeptical claims about climate change. After all, Singer's track record, as the authors have presented it, suggests that he would be willing to lie about Revelle’s ideas and intentions in order to undermine legitimate science.
Themes
Meanwhile, Fred Singer was independently publishing articles making the same point about global warming that he once made about ozone and acid rain: the science is still “too uncertain to justify drastic action.” When Singer and Revelle finally met to discuss their joint paper, Revelle rejected Singer’s claim that the climate would warm by “less than one degree Celsius, well below the normal year to year variation.” Revelle knew that there would be at least one to three degrees of warming, which is far more than natural variation. Yet, while Singer removed the reference to “one degree Celsius,” he left the rest of the sentence unchanged. The paper was published in the obscure, non-peer-reviewed magazine Cosmos. Revelle voiced his embarrassment at the paper’s publication, then died shortly thereafter.
Singer effectively wrote the whole paper that he claimed to co-author with Revelle. This suggests that his primary goal may have simply been to get Revelle’s name on a climate-skeptical article, so that he could later claim that Revelle changed his mind. Yet Singer and Revelle’s disagreement over the magnitude of likely global warming offers even clearer evidence that Revelle never truly did change his views. Revelle’s predictions were in line with the overall scientific consensus about climate change, and he specifically went out of his way to challenge Singer’s ideas. Of course, it’s also significant that Singer published this paper in a non-peer-reviewed journal, because this ensured that his work would not be subject to scrutiny or fact-checking.
Themes
Then, Revelle’s former student Al Gore ran for vice president. Popular media sources like the New Republic started associating Revelle with Singer’s claim that climate science was still uncertain, and soon, Ross Perot’s running mate was quoting Singer and Revelle’s paper in a vice-presidential debate. Revelle’s daughter and colleagues wrote public letters explaining that Singer misrepresented Revelle’s views. One of Revelle’s graduate students, Justin Lancaster, insisted in the New Republic and at a Harvard symposium on Revelle’s life and work that Revelle never actually wrote the article. In response, Singer sued Lancaster for libel, and Lancaster agreed to a decade-long gag order to settle the suit. But Revelle’s papers clearly demonstrate that he never changed his mind about global warming.
The media fallout surrounding Singer and Revelle’s paper further suggests that Singer pushed for the collaboration as part of a calculated public relations strategy. Clearly, it worked: Singer’s claims about Revelle spread more widely and proved more influential than the actual truth. Singer’s lawsuit against Lancaster again shows that, while the truth generally wins out in scientific circles, people like Singer often use their power and influence to ensure that it doesn’t in politics. Oreskes and Conway’s research represents an important step toward correcting the record—although they also faced similar kinds of harassment from Fred Singer for doing so.
Themes
In the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, 192 countries (including the U.S.) agreed to fight global warming. Doubling Down on Denial. Oreskes and Conway explain how the merchants of doubt stepped up their campaign in response. They began attacking the climate modeler Benjamin Santer, who used advanced statistical methods to evaluate climate models and try to show that human activities were specifically responsible for global warming. He was also the convening lead author for a chapter in the second IPCC report, which means he was responsible for coordinating with 35 other climate scientists. After an extensive process including multiple rounds of drafting and review, it became clear that Santer’s group had clearly found the “fingerprint” necessary to prove that climate change was human-caused. However, his comments for the last round of review were delayed.
As evidence about climate change mounted, the international community began taking major, much-needed steps to address the problem. Oreskes and Conway return to the example they used in the book’s introduction: the attacks on Ben Santer. Like Revelle’s work in the 1960s, Santer’s work was clearly at the cutting edge of climate research. The “fingerprint” that he discovered showed that human activity was driving climate change, which means that stopping it would become a major concern for public policy. Santer’s position at the IPCC and the extensive peer review process that his report underwent both suggest that there was no serious reason to doubt his results.
Themes
A copy of the IPCC report was leaked before its official meeting, and Republican leaders began attacking Santer’s findings. At a congressional hearing, the contrarian climatologist and fossil fuel lobbyist Patrick J. Michaels testified that the IPCC was using incorrect models and unfairly ignoring his review comments. (In response, the meteorologist Jerry Mahlman explained to Congress that Michaels’s review comments were based on a mix-up between different kinds of models.)
There’s little question that the merchants of doubt publicly attacked Santer in the hopes of undermining the IPCC as a whole. If Santer’s report was right and human greenhouse gas emissions were the primary cause of climate change, then major polluting companies would have to fundamentally transform their business models—and possibly even lose money—in order to save the planet. This was not acceptable to Republican leaders.
Themes
At the IPCC meeting, delegates from fossil fuel companies and oil-producing states questioned Santer’s work. The IPCC reached a compromise by describing the human impact on climate as “discernible” (rather than Santer’s preferred term, “appreciable”). Still, Fred Singer attacked Santer’s work with a series of baseless claims, ranging from the accusation that it was never peer reviewed (it was) to an insistence that the climate was actually cooling (it wasn’t). At a government briefing, two enraged petroleum industry lobbyists screamed at Santer for “secretly altering the IPCC report,” and William Nierenberg repeated the same claim in an interview, even though Santer’s chapter hadn’t even been published yet.
Oreskes and Conway discuss the controversy over “discernible” versus “appreciable” warming in order to emphasize that the IPCC report was already very conservative in its wording and conclusions. In other words, if anything, it underplayed the threat of climate change, because many powerful people with the same political interests as Fred Singer contributed to it. Singer’s previous actions already made it clear that he had little interest in the truth, and his attacks on Santer fit this pattern. They were obviously, verifiably false—but they made a significant dent in Santer’s credibility anyway.
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Fred Seitz publicly accused Santer of fraud in the Wall Street Journal. Santer and 40 other IPCC scientists wrote the Journal to explain that the changes were part of peer review, but the Journal significantly edited their letter, including by deleting the forty other scientists’ names. The Journal also heavily edited a similar letter from Bert Bolin and the IPCC chairman John Houghton. The American Meteorological Society independently republished the letters to show how the Journal edited them. Singer came to Seitz’s defense. Singer and Santer continued going back and forth with open letters in the Journal, then switched over to email. Singer falsely accused Santer of relying on unpublished results and changing his chapter as part of a political conspiracy with John Houghton. Of course, the reality is that these changes were merely part of peer review.
The Wall Street Journal’s biased editorial practices further show how the popular media amplifies the voices of the merchants of doubt by depicting their baseless claims as equally legitimate to (or even more reasonable than) peer-reviewed science. In particular, publications that are closely aligned with major corporations—like the Journal—stand to benefit financially from spreading pro-corporate misinformation, which creates a clear conflict of interest. Yet because these publications have a far wider circulation and much more political influence than legitimate scientific journals, their editorial decisions make an outsized impact on the way policymakers understand science and set science-related policy.
Themes
Clearly, right-wing groups and scientists were really the ones meddling with science for political purposes. Some scientists cut their ties with William Nierenberg after realizing that he was spreading disinformation. Yet millions of people, including many in Congress and the White House, still read Seitz, Jastrow, Nierenberg, and Singer’s ideas in the Wall Street Journal—and took them seriously. These men continued disguising their true motivations, like they had done during the Cold War, and the media continued covering their ideas in an ill-fated attempt to provide balanced coverage. By 1997, even though scientists had reached a consensus about climate change, “politically, global warming was dead.”
The merchants of doubt continue to use the tobacco industry’s tried-and-true playbook. This strategy delayed, but did not stop, government regulation relating to cigarettes, acid rain, and ozone. But unfortunately, it seems to have been even more successful when it comes to climate change—which is by far the largest of any of these issues. There’s little doubt that Oreskes and Conway wrote this book primarily because they understood that scientists, climate activists, and their allies must understand doubt-mongering tactics in order to successfully fend them off.
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