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June 9, 2010, 04:09 PM ET
Deadly Conspiracies, Fueled by Reputations and Doubts
After enduring decades of inexplicably persistent news reports casting doubt on the fact that cigarettes cause lung cancer, pollution harms the planet, and nuclear weapons are extremely dangerous, one might be forgiven for wondering if the same mob of misguided mercenaries might be behind them all.
As it turns out—according to the evidence assembled in Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, just published this month by Bloomsbury Press—they are.
Much the way meteorologists can now demonstrate the clear correlation between increasing carbon emissions and rising global temperatures, the book's authors—Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California at San Diego, and Erik M. Conway, a historian at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena—show the links between a small group of renowned researchers and the public confusion they've skillfully sown since the 1950s about a series of basic and critical scientific facts.
The deniers, according to Oreskes and Conway, are typically well-respected scientists whose strong political convictions led them to repeatedly publicize their beliefs in areas of research outside their fields of professional expertise.
Orchestrated by industry allies and other financial backers, Oreskes and Conway show, these self-appointed experts again and again followed the same basic formula: finding the tiny statistical variation of result that can exist in the final outcome of almost any scientific test, and then exploiting the media's thirst for conflict to miscast that often-insignificant variation into an image of genuine intellectual controversy.
A classic example: The basic causes and widespread implications of acid rain were well understood by 1980, but scientists couldn't be sure exactly what proportions of the problem could be assigned to which specific factors - such as the increasing usage of fossil fuels or the growing tendency of power plants to use of taller smokestacks. The Reagan administration, Oreskes and Conway said, seized upon that largely irrelevant uncertainty to argue that no new regulation was necessary at all.
With formidable forces still in place in 2010 to deny facts such as the man-made nature of global warming, Oreskes and Conway may only be providing confirmation of a conspiracy that many people have already come to recognize. The question they may have left untackled is whether American consumers and voters, increasingly aware of the fact that they've been misled all these years, are now willing to pay the costs that science says they must pay, or if they'll find it more comfortable to just keep playing along with their convenient deceptions.—Paul Basken
PageView is The Chronicle's blog about scholarly publishing.
Comments
1. iris411 - June 10, 2010 at 10:36 am
There will always be dissenters in any community who try to make a profit for being different. The question we should ask is why we the public buy into whatever the less than 1% of the scientific experts say while ignoring the 99% majority? Shall I suggest that we are willing to be cheated because lies are sweeter than truth?
2. adamreed - June 10, 2010 at 04:14 pm
All sciences share the same methodological foundations. All specialized subcultures are prone to fallacies, fads, confirmation biases and so on. The authors of this book omit the many cases where the doubters turned out to be right: "parapsychological research" (still receiving government grants,) recovered memory therapies, global cooling (the previous climate fad before global warming) etc. Global warming could be happening - but we doubters won't know until the datasets and the model-fitting software are published for independent replication; publishing everything that one would need to replicate (or disconfirm) the claimed result is indispensable before the result becomes science. Doubt is good. Doubt by out-of-specialty scientists who understand the requirements of scientific methodology has a proven track record as a necessary corrective, in cases where the specialists go out on a fad fed by out-of-control confirmation bias.
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