Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming »

Naomi Oreskes is Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her essay "Beyond the Ivory Tower" was a milestone in the fight against global warming denial.

Erik Conway is the resident historian at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Fighting Facts is their first book together.

THE book about the movement to refute global warming. One of the most talked-about climate change books of recent years, now in paperback.

The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. Our scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. But at the same time, a small yet potent subset of this community leads the world in vehement denial of these dangers.

Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly—some of the same figures who have claimed that the science of global warming is "not settled" denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. "Doubt is our product," wrote one tobacco executive. These "experts" supplied it.

Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science, roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how ideology and corporate interests, aided by a too-compliant media, have skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era.

Publishers Weekly

Oreskes and Conway tell an important story about the misuse of science to mislead the public on matters ranging from the risks of smoking to the reality of global warming. The people the authors accuse in this carefully documented book are themselves scientists—mostly physicists, former cold warriors who now serve a conservative agenda, and vested interests like the tobacco industry. The authors name these scientists—all with powerful connections in government and the media—including Robert Jastrow, Frederick Seitz, and S. Fred Singer. Seven compelling chapters detail seven issues (acid rain, the dangers of smoking and secondhand smoke, the ozone hole, global warming, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the banning of DDT) in which this group aimed to sow seeds of public doubt on matters of settled science. They did so by casting aspersions on the science and the scientists who produce it. Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at UC-San Diego, and science writer Conway also emphasize how journalists and Internet bloggers uncritically repeat these charges. This book deserves serious attention for the lessons it provides about the misuse of science for political and commercial ends. (June)

Introduction 1

1. Doubt Is Our Product 10

2. Strategic Defense, Phony Facts, and the Creation of the George C. Marshall Institute 36

3. Sowing the Seeds of Doubt Acid Rain 66

4. Constructing a Counternarrative: The Fight over the Ozone Hole 107

5. What's Bad Science? Who Decides? The Fight over Secondhand Smoke 136

6. The Denial of Global Warming 169

7. Denial Rides Again: The Revisionist Attack on Rachel Carson 216

Conclusion: Of Free Speech and Free Markets 240

Epilogue: A New View of Science 266

Acknowledgments 275

Permissions 277

Notes 279

Index 345