Read full summary on Blinkist >> These are not fun facts, they are terrifying (and often aggravating) facts. Rating: 6/10. The rain was hurting the resources the Canadian economy was highly dependent on. We all need a better understanding of what science really is, how to recognize real science when we see it, and how to separate it from the garbage. But what makes the story so fascinating (or rather infuriating) are the methods used by the merchants of doubt. They may suffer chronic bronchitis, emphysema, heart disease, or stroke, and they may suffer cancer of the mouth, uterus, cervix, liver, kidney, bladder, or stomach. back to contents. SDI would fuel the arms race, not stop it. Maduro had concluded that the ozone depletion theory was a “fraud” after interviewing Reid Bryson for an article on the “hoax” of global warming. Spraying DDT in New Brunswick to save evergreens from a budworm infestation destroyed the bugs upon which local salmon relied, and the fish starved. Meanwhile, the Ford administration established an interagency task force on so-called Inadvertent Modification of the Stratosphere (IMOS) in January 1975. Valid question, but that is an extremely isolated case—not representative of the average at all. (This is also why the industry could exploit an apparent loophole by sponsoring their own conferences and publishing their proceedings.). They really did an exceptional job! He insisted that nuclear winter was not science at all: it was left/liberal/environmental politics dressed up as computer code. Scientists do this because it’s necessary for inquiry—the research frontier can’t be identified by focusing on what you already know—but it’s not very helpful when trying to create public policy. And as in the debate over tobacco, opponents of regulating the pollution that caused acid rain would argue that the science was too uncertain to justify action. This is why free market ideologues and old Cold Warriors joined together to fight them. Your submission has been received! Why? And worse still, it didn’t make trying ways to remedy the problem seem worth it. While not flawless, Merchants of Doubt is an immensely important and timely book. It’s a surprising story of a true conspiracy by the government that not many know about. It did not accept that cause and effect had been established, on the grounds that the relative importance of different contributing factors had not been quantified, and potentially offsetting processes had not been fully investigated. But often one side is represented only by a single “expert”, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Sacred Cow by Diana Rodgers and Robb Wolf, Gödel Escher Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter. When you put the stories side by side—like the book does—you start noticing that their strategies are always the same. “No one who is familiar with the malleability of computer projections can be surprised at the result.”. This weapon is particularly damaging for scientific findings because a single scientists disagreeing with the general scientific consensus1, can use the fairness doctrine to make it look (in the eye of the public opinion) like there is a significant disagreement among scientists. I say delay because in most of these cases, regulation eventually kicks in. But these criticisms couldn’t be further from the truth. Like other environmental issues at the time, prominent scientists pegged global warming as just another media ruse. These are obvious exaggerations—totally disconnected from reality...but they resonate with the uninformed. “They … ask me to come back in forty-nine years.”. The uncertainty was about the precise nature of its cause: tall smokestacks—dispersing sulfur higher in the atmosphere—or just increased use of fossil fuels overall? Whether fast or slow, “disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would have … far-reaching consequences.”, Schelling’s attempt to ignore the cause of global warming was pretty peculiar. Government intervention was required. Scientists can make mistakes, they are human too. The tobacco business created reports that the EPA was using “junk” science and unjustly giving too much weight to imaginary problems.

It didn’t matter who had done the work—the EPA, the World Health Organization, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, or distinguished scientists at private universities. A perfect rhetorical circle.

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