How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
by Erik Conway & Naomi Oreskes
Readers' rating:
Published May 2010
368 pages
Genre: Science, Health and the Environment
Publication Information
The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. Our scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. But at the same time, a small yet potent subset of this community leads the world in vehement denial of these dangers.
Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly - some of the same figures who have claimed that the science of global warming is "not settled" denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. "Doubt is our product," wrote one tobacco executive. These "experts" supplied it.
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science, roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how ideology and corporate interests, aided by a too-compliant media, have skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era.
"A well-documented, pulls-no-punches account of how science works and how political motives can hijack the process by which scientific information is disseminated to the public." - Kirkus Reviews
"Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have demonstrated what many of us have long suspected: that the ‘debate’ over the climate crisis--and many other environmental issues--was manufactured by the same people who brought you ‘safe’ cigarettes. Anyone concerned about the state of democracy in America should read this book." - Former Vice President Al Gore, author of An Inconvenient Truth
"As the science of global warming has grown more certain over the last two decades, the attack on that science has grown more shrill; this volume helps explain that paradox, and not only for climate change. A fascinating account of a very thorny problem." - Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
"Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have written an important and timely book. Merchants of Doubt should finally put to rest the question of whether the science of climate change is settled. It is, and we ignore this message at our peril." - Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change
This information about Merchants of Doubt was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Naomi Oreskes is Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her essay "Beyond the Ivory Tower" was a milestone in the fight against global warming denial. Erik Conway is the resident historian at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Fighting Facts is their first book together.
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