What Book to Read?

‘That the science was uncertain, that more research was needed, that the economic consequences of controlling … would be too great, and that … might be caused by natural sources’. Sound familiar? Fill in ‘climate change’, and you have a summary of the argument of those who oppose action on global warming. But in this quote from Merchants of Doubt (2010), Oreskes and Conway are putting the argument made by electricity utilities in the US against taking action on acid rain back in the 1980s. And this is their point. Whether it is cigarette smoking, acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer or climate change, the same arguments have been rolled out over and over against taking action. And, very often, they claim, by the same people.

Oreskes’s and Conway’s book traces the actions taken by individuals, industry groups and privately funded think tanks to defend certain positions, such as the right to smoke and the need to install weapons in space (the Strategic Defence Initiative), and to attack attempts to regulate smoking, both active and passive, phase out the use of chlorofluorocarbons, prohibit DDT, and most recently, to control the emission of Co2 into the atmosphere. They argue that strikingly similar tactics have been used in all these cases. These include attacking the science that says the threat is real by emphasising any uncertainties; attacking scientists’ credibility; establishing organisations, most notably the George C. Marshall Institute, to commission and fund alternative research and cultivate scientists to at best research other areas that might be causing the ill effects of, for example, smoking; and cultivating links to politicians, journalists and senior public servants. The authors show how difficult it has been for scientists to gain the same level of public hearing when they seek to correct ‘science’ that has not been peer reviewed, and is not accepted by the vast majority of experts in the area. A letter to Science does not carry the same weight as an editorial in The Wall Street Journal.

Oreske and Conway say that the same names come up surprisingly often – first working with tobacco companies, then denying the reality of acid rain or the hole in the ozone layer. Several of the individuals they discuss had distinguished careers in physics and rocketry in the 1950s, but have done little research since, and none on the areas in which they later chose to comment. The authors suggest that their motivation was probably a fierce anti communism, and a concomitant attachment to the free market economy. Controlling environmental hazards involves regulation by the state, and it seems that this is anathema to them. They have therefore joined with organisations with similar aims, such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heartland Institute and the Heritage Foundation, to defend what they see as ‘liberty’. They do not acknowledge that the operation of the free market can ever result in market failure as evidenced by human induced climate change.

The authors have done extensive research, in particular in the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, and each of their case studies is exhaustively footnoted. Occasionally the detail can become a little tedious as they seek to show exactly what happened in this committee or to that report. But I can forgive them this; they are being scrupulous in their scholarship, because they know they are likely to be attacked over it. And overall, it’s an easy, if disturbing read.

Oreske and Conway are historians, not scientists (though Oreskes’s original degree was in geology, and Conway is the historian at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory). Their aim is to recount the history of the attempts to create doubt, not to test the science. They accept that uncertainty and scepticism are fundamental tools of science, but argue for the validity of peer review in establishing what can be called scientific knowledge. They lament what they see as the misuse of the doctrine of journalistic ‘balance’ which gives equal time to the few who doubt the scientific conclusions of the vast majority of working scientists, and to those that accept them. I think they let the media off a bit lightly on this, seeing it as an attempt to be fair, rather than the result of laziness or vested interest.

What they have shown is that doubt works. And their suggested antidote of a public informed about what is good science and what is rubbish seems over-optimistic. But in the absence of anything else, read the book and apply the history it outlines to the debates that fill our media today. I particularly like the quote they use from Isaiah Berlin –‘liberty for wolves means death to lambs’.

You can read more about the book here, including an attack on it by the Marshall Institute. You can see Professor Oreskes answering climate sceptics here.