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Benjamin Santer
William Nierenberg was a successful oceanographer and nuclear physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb during World War II and later founded the George C. Marshall Institute with his friends and colleagues Fred Seitz and Robert Jastrow. Nierenberg also led important panels on acid rain and climate change for the U.S. government. Based on their research, Oreskes and Conway conclude that Nierenberg likely edited the executive summary of the acid rain panel’s report in order to make it less supportive of government regulation and therefore more favorable to polluting industry. Similarly, the report he organized on global warming emphasized economists’ doubts about the cost of taking regulatory action, while minimizing climate scientists’ serious concerns about the effects of global warming. A few years later, he retired and began popularizing absurd, contrarian hypotheses about climate change on behalf of the Marshall Institute. But thanks largely to Nierenberg’s political connections, the government took the Marshall Institute’s distorted statistics and baseless assertions more seriously than the broad consensus of peer reviewed scientific research when setting policy. Ultimately, like the other “merchants of doubt,” he became a pariah win the scientific community because of his dishonest tactics.
William Nierenberg Quotes in Merchants of Doubt
The Merchants of Doubt quotes below are all either spoken by William Nierenberg or refer to William Nierenberg. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 3 Quotes
Whether or not the House Committee chairman believed Singer’s claims, his letter certainly would have had at least one effect: to make it appear that the committee was divided and there was real and serious scientific disagreement. The committee was divided, but it was divided 8–1, with the dissenter appointed by the Reagan White House.
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Chapter 5 Quotes
Anti-Communism had launched the weapons and rocketry programs that launched the careers of Singer, Seitz, and Nierenberg, and anti-Communism had underlain their politics since the days of Sputnik. Their defense of freedom was a defense against Soviet Communism. But somehow, somewhere, defending America against the Soviet threat had transmogrified into defending the tobacco industry against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
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Conclusion Quotes
Free market fundamentalists can perhaps hold to their views because often they have very little direct experience in commerce or industry. The men in our story all made their careers in programs and institutions that were either directly created by the federal government or largely funded by it. Robert Jastrow spent the lion’s share of his career at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies—part of NASA. Frederick Seitz and Bill Nierenberg launched their careers in the atomic weapons programs, and expanded them at universities whose research activities were almost entirely funded by the federal government at taxpayer expense. Fred Singer worked directly for the government, first at the National Weather Satellite Service, later in the Department of Transportation. If government is bad and free markets are good, why did they not reject government support for their own research and professional positions and work in the private sector?
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William Nierenberg Character Timeline in Merchants of Doubt
The timeline below shows where the character William Nierenberg appears in Merchants of Doubt. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Introduction
...other researchers’ careers through public attacks and lawsuits. Seitz, Singer, and their collaborators (like William Nierenberg and Robert Jastrow) had no background in health or environmental science. But they did have...
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Chapter 2
...technological flaws. So he called on two close, prominent physicist friends, Fred Seitz and William Nierenberg, and they started the George C. Marshall Institute with funding from conservative foundations.
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Chapter 3
...created his own independent panel to review these conclusions. As its chair, he chose William Nierenberg—the cofounder of the Marshall Institute, who had never studied acid rain but already served in...
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In 1982, the White House appointed Singer to Nierenberg’s panel, choosing him over candidates with far more relevant research experience. On the panel, he...
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In June of 1983, the Nierenberg panel published a five-page interim report explaining that sulfur dioxide emissions were acidifying lakes, killing...
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...Review. Oreskes and Conway explore why, even though Congress and the White House received the Nierenberg panel report in April 1984, it wasn’t released to the public until August. Two congressmen...
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Chapter 6
...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.
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...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...
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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...
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Blaming the Sun. After his retirement, Bill Nierenberg joined the George C. Marshall Institute. In 1989, the Cold War was ending, so the...
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But Jastrow, Seitz, and Nierenberg’s argument was based on a serious distortion of James Hansen’s data. Hansen showed that three...
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...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...
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...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...
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Chapter 7
...to make them through regulation. Thus, people like Fred Seitz, Fred Singer, Robert Jastrow, Bill Nierenberg, and Dixy Lee Ray spread lies about science in order to avoid accepting “the limits...
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Conclusion
...War. (This is a disturbing parallel to how corporations paid the retired physicists Jastrow, Seitz, Nierenberg, and Singer to defend their products.)
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...Anti-communism was absolutely central to 20th-century American politics. The main merchants of doubt (Seitz, Singer, Nierenberg, and Jastrow) built careers around using science to fight communism during the Cold War, and...
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...doubt ensured that the best ideas wouldn’t prevail. Oreskes and Conway suggest that, ironically, Seitz, Nierenberg, Jastrow, and Singer believed in the unlimited power of private industry mostly because they never...
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...and Conway, and Ben Santer still receives constant harassment, many years after Seitz, Singer, and Nierenberg first attacked him. Finally, many scientists ignore disinformation because their job is to find the...
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