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
Unassuming, soft-spoken Ben Santer is one of the world’s leading climate scientists. He works at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he collects, shares, and analyzes atmospheric data. He has shown that the lowest layer of the atmosphere, the troposphere, is getting warmer, but the next-lowest, the stratosphere, is getting cooler. This proves that human activity on Earth’s surface—and not the sun—is causing global warming. But Santer has been brutally attacked for making this discovery.
Oreskes and Conway begin with Ben Santer’s story because it clearly represents the pattern that lies at the heart of their book: the “merchants of doubt” work to publicly undermine legitimate science in order to advance their own political agenda. Santer’s story shows how high the stakes of this conflict are today. Doubt-mongering threatens to undermine action on climate change, the greatest threat to humankind’s survival in the 21st century.
Themes
In 1988, the United Nations and World Meteorological Organization founded the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Scientists had long known that burning fossil fuels could warm the planet, and by the 1980s, they had evidence that it was happening. In 1995, the IPCC’s hundreds of distinguished climate scientists publicly reported that greenhouse gases were warming the planet. Their report’s lead author was Ben Santer.
The merchants of doubt attacked Santer precisely because he was so highly trusted and respected: he was the scientific community’s most authoritative voice on climate change. Thus, undermining Santer was a way for the merchants of doubt to undermine public trust in the scientific community as a whole—and prevent lawmakers from implementing science-based policies to limit climate change.
Themes
After the IPCC published its report, a group of physicists at a Washington, D.C. think tank started publicly attacking it. They called the report doctored and deceptive, and they accused Ben Santer of tampering with it before publication. (He did make changes to it, but only as part of the peer review process that all reputable scientific work undergoes.) Santer and his colleagues publicly rebutted these baseless accusations—which still spread widely. Santer’s reputation and personal life fell apart. He tried to defend himself with facts, but this didn’t work. His accusers didn’t want to discover the truth—they wanted to fight it.
The physicists who attacked Santer are the merchants of doubt. They succeeded by exploiting the gap between how science actually works and how the rest of society understands it. Specifically, they recognized that, to get attention from policymakers and the media, their accusations didn’t need to be true—they just needed to be plausible. They knew that honest researchers like Santer have a professional obligation to tell the truth, so their strongest weapon was their ability to blur the line between truth and falsehood.
Themes
Years later, Ben Santer read a newspaper article about how the tobacco industry paid scientists to publicly attack the evidence linking smoking to cancer. By “keep[ing] the controversy alive,” these scientists helped tobacco companies avoid legal challenges. Santer realized that the exact same thing happened to his climate change research—and exactly the same physicists did it: Fred Seitz and Fred Singer.
Seitz and Singer developed a tried-and-true strategy for undermining policy action on important health and environmental issues: they loudly and publicly denied that established scientific facts were truly established at all. Politicians and corporate elites could then use Seitz and Singer’s claims as a basis for refusing to solve problems they profited from.
Themes
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Seitz and Singer both worked closely with the U.S. defense industry during the Cold War: Seitz helped design the atomic bomb, Singer led the nation’s satellite program, and both publicly supported Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative on behalf of a conservative think tank called the George C. Marshall Institute. Both Seitz and Singer also worked for the tobacco industry: Seitz led the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company’s $45 million program to fund pro-tobacco research from 1979–1985, and the tobacco industry paid Singer to publicly question the EPA’s findings on the dangers of secondhand smoke in 1990.
Seitz and Singer built their careers in an era when science was closely wedded to public policy. They used the power and connections that they gained to shape national policy for decades afterward. Yet their career trajectories show that their motivations were primarily financial and political, not scientific. Put differently, after retiring as legitimate scientists, they started exploiting their credentials and reputations to imitate legitimate scientists for a living.
Themes
Court documents show that Seitz and Singer used this “Tobacco Strategy” on issues ranging from global warming to the hole in the ozone layer. They worked with public relations professionals, industry lawyers, and think tanks to undermine scientific consensus and attack other researchers’ motivations. They even ruined some of these 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 close connections to the government and significant experience dealing with the media. Thus, even though they never actually researched the issues they spoke about, journalists frequently presented them as scientific authorities and politicians consistently justified inaction by pointing to their claims. This book explains how they did it—and how others continue to use their strategies today.
Oreskes and Conway summarize the chapters to follow, in which they will look in depth at Seitz, Singer, and their collaborators’ strategies and effects on government policy over almost four decades. They point out that the merchants of doubt are really one branch of a vast corporate marketing strategy. Moreover, the merchants of doubt largely succeeded because the media and government are often not scientifically literate enough to distinguish legitimate research from confidently-asserted nonsense. In this way, the authors emphasize that many different actors and institutions are all partially responsible for the way the merchants of doubt have undermined good health and economic policy—and all of them must be reformed, in different ways, in order for science to take back its rightful place in public life.
Themes
