A local Climate Activist suggested I take a look at a new book that came out last year, known as Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. As somebody who has had a longtime interest in Climate Change and Energy Policy more generally, I was excited to find it at the Albany Public Library. I brought it home on a Friday night, and spent half the night reading it from cover to cover. Merchants of Doubt is the story of “How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming”. It details and follows the lives of some of the most well known scientific contrarians specifically, the late S. Fred Singer, Jim Tozzi, and Steven Milroy. These people spent most of their later career criticizing scientific reports, emphasizing uncertainty and cost of implementing reform.
The book is very critical of these contrarians, arguing that they have both mislead the public, the media, and policymakers. The book says due to the abuse of science, many Americans and policy makers make bad decisions. The book also argues that artificial delay and debate over policy response has had a negative effect both on environmental and human health, and increased the costs of resolving problems. Yet, are all these concerns expressed in the book with the scientific contrarians really legitimate? I find that conclusion hard to accept. In a pluralistic democracy, having more voices is a good thing. It is good to have debate and allow “popularizers” on both sides of political debates to take scientific research and make it easily accessible to the public. Science is much too technical for the layman to understand it unless an effort is made to make it accessible.
One can make a legitimate complaint when a “popularizer” distorts scientific reality in a way that is completely contrary to what widely accepted research says. It for example is not right for a “popularizer” to claim that Man-Made Climate Change is not happening at all whatsoever, when the evidence is clear to the contrary. It is however the moral obligation for the popularizer to put that scientific research in context, emphasizing what he or she believes is the proper political context for it to be considered in. Smoking causes cancer. Excessive sulfur dioxide emissions from large power plants causes acid rain. Climate Change and the associated disruptions is caused by excessive carbon dioxide by the mass burning of fossil fuels. These are all well established facts. It’s not a fact that we should use control greenhouse gases or sulfur dioxide emissions – that is a political choice.
There are many policy choices that ought to be debated. Just because science can predict a result does not mean we should necessarily adopt any one policy. Some may try to dodge reality because it’s easier then facing the facts, or admitting the true costs of one policy choice. That is a bad thing. However, nobody should act just because the science says one should do one thing. It’s unfortunate that Oreskes and Conway did not make it clear that while facts should not be debated, policy choices should. We should look at the science, weight costs, and decide on action or inaction. Regardless, it’s a interesting read, well worth your couple of hours time.
