The conclusion of Merchants of Doubt begins with this scene:
Imagine a gigantic banquet. Hundreds of millions of people come to eat. They eat and drink to their hearts’ content — eating food that is better and more abundant than at the finest tables in ancient Athens or Rome, or even in the palaces of medieval Europe. Then, one day, a man arrives, wearing a white dinner jacket. He says he is holding the bill. Not surprisingly, the diners are in shock. Some begin to deny that this is their bill. Others deny that there even is a bill. Still others deny that they partook of the meal. One diner suggests that the man is not really a waiter, but is only trying to get attention for himself or to raise money for his own projects. Finally, the group concludes that if they simply ignore the waiter, he will go away.
Who among us wouldn’t be reluctant to pick up that tab? But the above anecdote isn’t about an imaginary feast at all — it’s actually about industrial civilization’s feast on energy from fossil fuels. And the bill? It’s also real. It’s the environmental consequences of this feast, which include global warming. But actually, how can the authors make such a bold statement about global warming when the science behind it is still mired in controversy?
Consider for a moment a different issue, discussed in Merchants of Doubt, that was once controversial: whether smoking cigarettes is bad for you. You probably know that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer and heart disease, and that if you smoke a pack a day it can very likely kill you. Scientists, including ones who worked for tobacco companies themselves, also knew this back in the 1950s, though the public was not convinced yet.
But then, what if you saw these questions in an article “presenting the other side” of the issue (questions tobacco companies were asking in the 50s, excerpted from Merchants of Doubt)?
Experiments showed that laboratory mice got skin cancer when painted with tobacco tar, but not when left in smoke-filled chambers. Why? Why do cancer rates vary greatly between cities even when smoking rates are similar? Do other environmental changes, such as increased air pollution, correlate with lung cancer? Why is the recent rise in lung cancer greatest in men, even though the rise in cigarette use was greatest in women? If smoking causes lung cancer, why aren’t cancers of the lips, tongue, or throat on the rise? Why does Britain have a lung cancer rate four times higher than the United States? Does climate affect cancer? Do the casings placed on American cigarettes (but not British ones) somehow serve as an antidote to the deleterious effect of tobacco? How much is the increase in cancer simply due to longer life expectancy and improved accuracy in diagnosis?
Even today, reading that paragraph might start to make you think that the issue of smoking and cancer is a lot more complicated than we thought! You might be left confused by so many questions you never thought to ask when you were warned not to smoke cigarettes. But the thing is, the people who were asking those questions in the 50s knew the answers full well, and the answers didn’t help tobacco’s cause. For example, at that time women had only recently begun smoking cigarettes and there was a latency before they started developing cancer. Additionally, many of the questions are obfuscations… would you really care about why cigarettes didn’t cause lip cancer when you knew they definitely did cause lung cancer? And similarly, what does it matter if pollution also contributes to cancer? That doesn’t change the fact that smoking causes cancer too, and is more avoidable than pollution to boot.
Nevertheless, just getting those questions out in the press, in a format where they could not be instantly refuted with the above answers, was enough to create doubts in the public and postpone action. With these questions taken in isolation, the safety of cigarettes didn’t seem cut and dried — despite the fact that scientists could already prove that smoking was extremely hazardous. You obviously couldn’t start taxing cigarettes, suing cigarette companies, or putting warning labels on cigarettes, when it all might just be a false alarm. It wasn’t until decades later that serious action was taken against cigarette manufacturers and the public accepted the health risks of smoking as a fact.
Now consider what you and your acquaintances know (or think your know) about climate change. Here in the US we’ve all been left with the vague impression that climate change really isn’t settled. So many people seem not to be convinced, and maybe all the attention in the press is just alarmist fear-mongering. Probably some of your friends in America think it’s a hoax, or at least not well-enough understood to start taking action. If global warming were real, why would we still be having record cold snaps? And, sure, maybe the planet is warming… but it might not even be caused by humans. I mean, you’ve heard of the ice age, right? The planet went through plenty of changes before humans were even here.
At first, I personally believed global warming was true simply because my parents did. I realized that some people thought it was fake, but that didn’t bother me and I didn’t give the actual science too much thought. Then one day in my early college years the topic came up with Kubo King, who I’d just started dating. At the time, he told me he wasn’t convinced that global warming was real, and recommended that I read a book about it: State of Fear. The book is a science-fiction thriller by Michael Crichton (of Jurassic Park fame). In the book terrorists connected to an environmentalist movement are trying to deceive the government and the people about global warming, intentionally causing natural disasters to lend credence to their views. It was immediately obvious to me that terrorists weren’t causing tropical storms and hurricanes. But the book also presented evidence that warming on the planet could be due to natural causes, and it included some scientific-looking graphs which seemed to support its objections to climate science.
Just this scant evidence (from a fiction writer!) was enough to sow seeds of doubt for me… I still trusted my parents’ view of global warming, but not strongly enough that I would defend it to others. I was left with an uncomfortable feeling that I didn’t understand the science behind the global warming theory, and that maybe scientists didn’t really either. As I looked around me, it seemed the science truly wasn’t really settled. Maybe warming was a natural part of the earth’s climate, and not man-made at all. I allowed myself to exist in a state of agnosticism on the whole matter — maybe warming was true, maybe it was not, and how could someone like me possibly know? This made it very convenient to forget about, and in all honesty I just turned a blind eye to the whole frightening topic.
But is there actually more than wishful thinking behind the public perception of climate change?
Fast-forward to the present. I’ve just finished reading the excellent book Merchants of Doubt (also recommended to me and read by Kubo King). This one is by science historians, not a popular science-fiction writer. I learned in this book a fact that might be a surprise to a lot of Americans. The thing is, scientists do know that global warming is real. They do understand it. They know it’s man-made. The science is, in fact, settled. And the craziest thing is, they’ve known for a long time. They’ve been certain since the Reagan administration — over 30 years ago. They were warning Lyndon Johnson about the serious possibility of climate change in the 1960s, over 50 years ago. The basic chemical/physical mechanism — that CO2 traps heat in the atmosphere — was actually an established fact in the 19th Century. As in, over 100 years ago. So how is it that many Americans have come to believe that global warming is uncertain and may even be a deliberate environmentalist hoax?
Merchants of Doubt is what you should read if you’re at all on the fence about climate change yet genuinely want to know the truth about it. The authors have documented a surprising fact: it’s no accident that the American people are in doubt about climate change, because a handful of influential organizations and dissenting scientists have intentionally created that doubt. Strengthening the authors’ case, it turns out that many of those dissenting scientists did the same thing before regarding other public issues: including the fact that cigarettes cause cancer. Seeing the comparison to a settled matter like “smoking kills people and causes lung cancer” makes it difficult to dismiss the current science about global warming. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Shame on us this time.
Over the course of the book, the authors answer two major questions you might have about its general thesis. The first is how the public has been fooled about the dangers of smoking and other issues, leading on up to the present day “debate” about global warming. The second is why dissenting scientists have been involved in fooling us.
The answer to the first question is that you can sow doubt about an issue by simply creating an appearance of debate over the topic. You don’t actually have to engage in sensible debate by producing valid evidence on your own side. Historically, this strategy was helped along by a regulation dating back to 1949 called the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine mandated that equal attention be given to different sides of an issue in the press (specifically on TV, but print sources chose to follow the Doctrine as well). The example about cigarettes given at the beginning of this article illustrates how just asking questions, disingenuously, makes it look like the other side doesn’t have all their facts straight. And until the facts seem to be straight, people will lean towards maintaining the status quo, probably in a spirit of not wishing to do more harm than good by implementing changes.
The answer to the second main question of the book is somewhat speculative, but the authors offer an interesting take. A handful of scientists, usually in nationally prominent positions and usually specializing in a field of science having nothing to do with the given issue, have repeatedly lent their voices on the side of tobacco, oil, and other harmful industries throughout the years. My immediate question before reading the book was just, Why? Surely professional scientists have a strong interest in getting to the truth of scientific matters, which would discourage them from spreading misinformation.
Unsurprisingly, one reason is that these scientists received financial compensation of one form or another from tobacco and oil companies. The more interesting reason for their actions, however, is ideological. Several of the scientists were involved in the development of weapons for the military during WWII, and involved in advising the White House on defense during the Cold War. These men were strongly patriotic and saw themselves as defenders of American democracy and capitalism. The authors speculate that these scientists, who were horrified by the totalitarian regimes that they witnessed during WWII and the Cold War, believed that government intervention in public health and environmental matters was a slippery slope to the US becoming the next Soviet Union. Understanding that many people in power view climate change as a threat to democracy and free market capitalism goes a long way towards explaining our response to it as a nation today as well.
Merchants of Doubt thoroughly documents its claims (there are probably over a thousand citations in the endnotes), and treats the political issues surrounding its thesis with a light hand — while still speaking out firmly in defense of science and reason in responding to climate change. There is no scientific debate about global warming, just an economical and political one. And whatever your political stance, you should finish reading Merchants of Doubt convinced of that fact, and ready to start considering what we should be doing about it from now on.
For me, it’s not really a surprise that businesses who are still enjoying the feast on fossil fuels don’t want it to end. Or that they’re motivated to discredit the scientists around the world who agree on the facts of climate change. In contrast to State of Fear’s narrative about eco-terrorists waging war on democracy, one has to admit that the Merchants of Doubt narrative is highly plausible.
To return to our banquet from the conclusion of Merchants of Doubt, the authors put the current situation better than I can. Continuing the story of the diners trying to deny the bill for their banquet:
This is where we stand today on the subject of global warming. For the past 150 years, industrial civilization has been dining on the energy stored in fossil fuels, and the bill has come due. Yet, we have sat around the dinner table denying that it is our bill, and doubting the credibility of the man who delivered it. Economists have often noted that “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” They are right. We have experienced prosperity unmatched in human history. We have feasted to our hearts’ content. But the lunch was not free.
It’s not surprising that many of us are in denial. After all, we didn’t know it was a banquet, and we didn’t know that there would be a bill. Now we do know. […] Now we either have to pay the price, change the way we do business, or both. No wonder the merchants of doubt have been successful. They’ve permitted us to think that we could ignore the waiter while we haggled about the bill.
Merchants of Doubt gives me the guts and ammunition to respond to people who say “I’m not sure about climate change” or “I don’t believe it”… with a resounding “Well, you’re wrong!” And it reminds me to put my trust back in the scientific process and the consensus of scientific experts, where it really belongs — not in the wishful thinking and doubt-mongering of a small minority without expertise in an area. I hope you’ll give this book a read, and see if it’s an important reminder to you too.
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