Oreskes and Conway call the contrarian physicists at the center of this book “merchants of doubt” because their strategy depends on paralyzing serious science through uncertainty, and not disproving it through evidence. Ever since tobacco companies invented this tactic in the 1950s, contrarians have assumed—often rightly—that the government won’t pass environmental regulations so long as they can “keep the controversy alive.” For instance, researchers fully understood acid rain by 1981. But when William Nierenberg and Fred Singer contributed to an official U.S. government report on the subject in 1984, they argued that the existing research wasn’t yet sufficient to justify government action. Proposed regulations were struck down, and a comparable law wasn’t passed until 1990. As late as 2007, Nierenberg’s George C. Marshall Institute still claimed that researchers haven’t studied acid rain enough to truly understand it. This case shows how contrarians demand scientific certainty and then manufacture doubts to stop political leaders from ever taking action.
But when there’s already substantial research on a topic, Oreskes and Conway argue, it’s unreasonable to wait until everyone is totally certain about it. In the past, before the merchants of doubt arrived on the scene, the U.S. government did this right. For example, the EPA banned the toxic pesticide DDT in 1972. When evaluating the chemical, the EPA didn’t ask if its dangers were “‘proven,’ ‘demonstrated,’ ‘certain,’ or even well understood.” Instead, it wanted to know whether DDT was safe beyond a reasonable doubt. The burden of proof fell on the chemical company, not the government. And it called for the same standard of evidence used in criminal trials. While it’s important for scientists to be absolutely sure about the claims they make—and doubly so when those claims go on to influence policy—Oreskes and Conway believe that third parties shouldn’t be able to shut down environmental regulation just by voicing any kind of doubts about the science behind it. Instead, they argue that policymakers should learn to demand from scientists what scientists demand from themselves: not perfect certainty, but rather strong evidence that proves a conclusion beyond a reasonable doubt and passes the bar of peer review.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Certainty, Doubt, and the Scientific Method ThemeTracker
Certainty, Doubt, and the Scientific Method Quotes in Merchants of Doubt
Millions of pages of documents released during tobacco litigation demonstrate these links. They show the crucial role that scientists played in sowing doubt about the links between smoking and health risks. These documents—which have scarcely been studied except by lawyers and a handful of academics—also show that the same strategy was applied not only to global warming, but to a laundry list of environmental and health concerns, including asbestos, secondhand smoke, acid rain, and the ozone hole.
Call it the “Tobacco Strategy.” Its target was science, and so it relied heavily on scientists—with guidance from industry lawyers and public relations experts—willing to hold the rifle and pull the trigger.
Over the next half century, the industry did what Hill and Knowlton advised. They created the “Tobacco Industry Research Committee” to challenge the mounting scientific evidence of the harms of tobacco. They funded alternative research to cast doubt on the tobacco-cancer link. They conducted polls to gauge public opinion and used the results to guide campaigns to sway it. They distributed pamphlets and booklets to doctors, the media, policy makers, and the general public insisting there was no cause for alarm.
The industry’s position was that there was “no proof” that tobacco was bad, and they fostered that position by manufacturing a “debate,” convincing the mass media that responsible journalists had an obligation to present “both sides” of it.
Balance was interpreted, it seems, as giving equal weight to both sides, rather than giving accurate weight to both sides.
Did they deserve equal time?
The simple answer is no. 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 research—experiments, experience, and observation—research that is then subject to critical review by a jury of scientific peers. Claims that have not gone through that process—or have gone through it and failed—are not scientific, and do not deserve equal time in a scientific debate.
Doubt is crucial to science—in the version we call curiosity or healthy skepticism, it drives science forward—but it also makes science vulnerable to misrepresentation, because it is easy to take uncertainties out of context and create the impression that everything is unresolved. This was the tobacco industry’s key insight: that you could use normal scientific uncertainty to undermine the status of actual scientific knowledge. As in jujitsu, you could use science against itself.
On one level, then, the scientific process worked. Scientists took the nuclear winter hypothesis seriously, and worked through it, evaluating and improving the assumptions, data, and models supporting it. Along the way, they narrowed the range of potential cooling and the uncertainties involved, and came to a general consensus. Without actually experiencing nuclear war, there would always be quite a lot of “irreducible uncertainty” in the concept—no one denied that—but overall, the first-order effects were resolved. A major nuclear exchange would produce lasting atmospheric effects that would cool the Earth significantly for a period of weeks to months, and perhaps longer. It would not be a good thing.
Within the scientific community, then, the nuclear winter debate took place at two levels: over the details of the science and over the way it was being carried out in public. The latter created a fair bit of animosity, but the former led to resolution and closure. The TTAPS conclusions had been reexamined by others, and adjusted in the light of their research. Whether it was a freeze or a chill, scientists broadly agreed that nuclear war would lead to significant secondary climatic effects. Out of the claims and counterclaims, published and evaluated by relevant experts, a consensus had emerged. Despite the egos of individual scientists, the jealousies and the sour grapes, science had worked pretty much the way it was supposed to.
“Does all this matter?” he asked rhetorically. Indeed it did. Seitz was painting a canvas of politically motivated exclusion—conservative victimhood, as it were. If all this were true—or even if any of it were true—it meant that science, even mainstream science, was just politics by other means. Therefore if you disagreed with it politically, you could dismiss it as political.
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.
Singer alleged that scientists had rushed to judgment. There was a bit of serious illogic here, for if scientists wanted above all to keep their own research programs going, then they would have had no reason to rush to judgment. They would have been better off continuing to insist that more research was needed, rather than saying that there was now sufficient evidence to warrant regulations.
In short, Singer’s story had three major themes: the science is incomplete and uncertain; replacing CFCs will be difficult, dangerous, and expensive; and the scientific community is corrupt and motivated by self-interest and political ideology. The first was true, but the adaptive structure of the Montreal Protocol had accounted for it. The second was baseless. As for the third, considering Singer’s ties to the Reagan administration and the Heritage Foundation, and considering the venues in which he published, this was surely the pot calling the kettle black. And we now know what happened when CFCs were banned. Non-CFC refrigerants are now available that are more energy efficient—due to excellent engineering and stricter efficiency standards—than the materials they replaced, and they aren’t toxic, flammable, or corrosive.
Scientists are confident they know bad science when they see it. It’s science that is obviously fraudulent—when data have been invented, fudged, or manipulated. Bad science is where data have been cherry-picked—when some data have been deliberately left out—or it’s impossible for the reader to understand the steps that were taken to produce or analyze the data. It is a set of claims that can’t be tested, claims that are based on samples that are too small, and claims that don’t follow from the evidence provided. And science is bad—or at least weak—when proponents of a position jump to conclusions on insufficient or inconsistent data.
He concluded emphatically, “The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time.” This, of course, was precisely what he had said about acid rain. And ozone depletion. It was easy to see why many working scientists didn’t like Fred Singer. He routinely rejected their conclusions, suggesting that he knew better than they did.
Sometimes reopening an old debate can serve present purposes. […] In the demonizing of Rachel Carson, free marketeers realized that if you could convince people that an example of successful government regulation wasn’t, in fact, successful—that it was actually a mistake—you could strengthen the argument against regulation in general.
The Kennedy PSAC report, Use of Pesticides: A Report of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, is notable in hindsight as much for what it did not do as for what it did. The scientists did not claim that the hazards of persistent pesticides were “proven,” “demonstrated,” “certain,” or even well understood; they simply concluded that the weight of evidence was sufficient to warrant policy action to control DDT.
[…]
Both science and democracy worked as they were supposed to.
