Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change Paperback – May 31, 2011

This a really a very good book - well written and factual. All the documents, all the secret memos, all the money under and around the table, its all here for anyone to read. Its true what the deniers all say, that there's a global conspiracy about all of these issues - but the real truth is that They are it. They lie distort smear all that they oppose, and all the while they get paid for by their corporate sponsors. They do a grave disservice to the world and the peoples of the world - all for their 30 pieces of silver.The listing of the crises we have brought about on ourselves in just the last half century is daunting. Acid rain, ozone depletion, pesticides and global warming -all of the science was there to prove the risk and yet still we doubt and delay and frankly ignore that actual science. All we have to do is read a few books or even just this book. Please just read this book. Cause its all here - all the lies and distortions that the deniers have been peddling like snake oil salesmen.And thats the rub. The US populace seems oblivious to the 'junk science' that these Judases foist on a compliant media. Doubt and delay serve no one - including the deniers themselves.And thats what drives me crazy about the deniers - where do they think that we can go if their views are wrong - and they are undoubtedly wrong.

This is a fascinating account of disservice, of perversion of science. It is about obfuscation and delay in implementing remedies to destructive side effects from the use of modern technology. Economists have long recognized the difficulty of quantifying and attributing the cost of “externalities” in societal cost-benefit calculations. The problem is that benefits accrue to some, or perhaps all, but certain costs are born disproportionately by others. Second-hand smoke is the classic example.Today, the issue is accumulating anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere that will impose costs on future generations. The perversion of process documented by Oreskes and Conway is the support by vested interests in the commerce of destructive products—tobacco, DDT, sulfur polluting fuels, ozone depleting refrigerants and propellants, and CO2 emitting fossil fuels—of individuals with scientific credentials, to systematically attack the science and scientists who are uncovering and reporting the evidence of this destruction.The authors are science historians, Oreskes at the University of California, San Diego, and Conway with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and CalTech. The time frame is roughly the last half century, starting at the height of the Cold War. This is somewhat a tragic story, because some of the main characters as young men were productive scientists dedicated to the task of ensuring the United States would not be outsmarted and crushed by the Soviet Union. They served the country. The tragedy is that they took that earlier earned recognition and used it to shill for economic interests that wished to profit from sales of bad products to an unwitting and confused American public. In fact, the strategy was to delay action, that would protect the public, by purposefully creating confusion. This is a must read for anyone who is puzzled by the seemingly glacial pace of policy development in Washington to deal with any science discovered threat to the common wealth. Oreskes and Conway will help you understand the riddle, but any pleasure you derive will only be from the fact that you better understand. You won’t be pleased by what you understand.

This book is a very well written narrative that weaves together the characters and events involved in several different (seemingly unrelated) organized denial/contrarian/skeptic/misrepresentation campaigns (regarding the hazards of smoking, secondhand smoke, acid rain, the "Star Wars"/SDI project, "nuclear winter," the ozone hole, and global warming), and one revisionist historical campaign attacking Rachel Carson, the American biologist/ecologist who wrote Silent Spring, which criticized the agricultural overuse of pesticides, and especially DDT.The authors point out how the same handful of scientists (all of whom happened to be free-market fundamentalists well connected to powerful political and/or business interests) repeatedly attacked mainstream scientific research related to diverse issues in which they had no special expertise and had done no original research of their own, the sole common theme among all the issues being that the scientific consensus was inconvenient to private enterprise.My only misgiving about the book is not related to the quality of its contents, but rather what it did NOT include - I would have liked to see at least an entire chapter or two about conservatives/Republicans/free-market libertarians who did NOT deny the scientific consensus in each of the mini-sagas. Make no mistake, the book is not an indictment against everyone on the "Right" or the virtues of conservative/free-market principles or individual liberties; rather it only criticizes a small group of scientists, who were so fanatical about these principles that it compromised their objectivity, trying to disguise ideological fundamentalism as "scientific" skepticism. However, I could see political conservatives with chips on their shoulders nonetheless misreading the book as a direct attack on their core ideals, or its thesis as a confirmation of their suspicion that "liberal" scientists have a grand conspiracy to bring down capitalism. To counteract that, and perhaps make the message of the book more powerful, it would have been nice to deliberately focus on the stories of some people who generally identify with the same ideologies as the books "protagonists," but not so fanatically as to turn science on its head. Now, it may be that there were some scattered references here and there; I don't remember. But that's kind of the point - if there were a whole chapter devoted to counterexamples of non-science-denying conservatives, it would be impossible to miss or forget, and the important message of the book might be less likely to be tuned out by people who might misunderstand the book as attacking their core beliefs.