Merchants of Doubt Book Summary - Merchants of Doubt Book explained in key points

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Name: Merchants of Doubt
Rating: 3.8 (281 reviews)
Author: Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway

Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway

How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

3.8 (281 ratings)

18 mins

Brief summary

Merchants of Doubt exposes how a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming, deceiving the public.

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Table of Contents

Merchants of Doubt
Summary of 7 key ideas

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What’s in it for me? Learn how certain industries and the US government sowed doubt about scientific evidence to protect their own interests.

Is smoking bad for your health? Does nuclear weaponry present a danger to society? Do you believe the scientific explanations for acid rain, climate change and ozone layer depletion?

These questions may seem ridiculous to the modern-day reader, and most people accept that smoking is a health hazard, nuclear weapons pose a threat to humanity and that the science around climate change is airtight. But the answers to these questions might not have been so obvious if you had been asked them in the mid-twentieth century.

Merchants of Doubt sheds light on a period during which the causes and harmful effects of many new phenomena were still being investigated – a time when misinformation and dishonest arguments were spread, with devious ulterior motives, by major business interests and the US government.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

why, back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, you wouldn’t imagine that smoking a cigarette was a bad idea;
how the US government managed to explain that climate change was nothing to worry about; and
how former US president Ronald Reagan felt about nuclear weapons.

The tobacco industry intentionally misinformed the public about the dangers of smoking.

Nowadays, even a kid could tell you that smoking kills. But this now well-known fact was not such common knowledge in the second half of the twentieth century. It’s shocking now, but plenty of people had no idea about smoking’s adverse health effects. But did the tobacco industry itself know about its product’s dirty secret?

Absolutely.

In fact, they knew that smoking was harmful as early as the 1950s, when the tobacco industry first came under scrutiny regarding the harmful effects of cigarettes. Realizing that they had to take action, in 1953, the four biggest tobacco companies in the United States – American Tobacco, Benson and Hedges, Philip Morris and US Tobacco – joined forces in defense of their industry.

Their strategy?

To hire a PR firm, Hill and Knowlton, to save tobacco’s deteriorating image. This same decision would later be used as evidence in court to prove that the tobacco industry was well aware of its product’s harmful effects, and had thus knowingly misled their customers.

The strategy itself was simple: simply cast doubt upon the idea that smoking was bad for your health. So, as more research indicating tobacco’s harmful effects began to emerge in the 1960s and ‘70s, the tobacco companies opted for the only strategy at their disposal: challenging scientifically proven facts by propagating doubt about their validity.

For instance, in 1979, the tobacco industry began a program that funded top universities like Harvard. They committed $45 million over six years for one purpose: to prove that smoking was not connected to health problems.

But they didn’t just fund universities; they also hired a respected scientist by the name of Frederick Seitz, who distributed the money himself and gave the tobacco industry’s credibility an added boost.

They even summoned scientists to testify in court that there was no connection between smoking tobacco and poor health. However, the industry could only suppress the truth for so long, and eventually people wisened up.

The tobacco industry continued its campaign to cast doubt on the harms of secondhand smoke, as well as on science itself.

Despite their best efforts, the tobacco industry couldn’t keep its product’s harmful effects under wraps. But when scientific evidence of smoking’s health risks first came to light, it only concerned the act of smoking itself. In fact, the dangers of passive tobacco smoking weren’t proven and acknowledged until the 1980s!

In 1980 and ‘81, British and Japanese studies proved that non-smokers experienced decreased lung function after being in smoky environments. Then, in 1986, the US Surgeon General reported that second-hand smoke was as dangerous as smoking. And finally, in 1992, the US Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, issued a report detailing second-hand smoke’s harmful effects.

The scientific debate about nuclear weapons was artificially prolonged.

Nuclear war has been a major topic of conversation since the first atomic warheads were developed and, as recently as the 1980s, the conversation about how to prevent such a catastrophe was in full, heated swing. In fact, fear of nuclear war prompted scientists to wage their own war, against a government defense protocol of the 1980s.

Here’s what happened:

The US government undermined scientific findings on acid rain in the 1970s.

The latter half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of environmental issues that demanded the attention of scientists and politicians. One such problem was acid rain. In fact, the phenomenon has been studied in detail since the 1960s, and plenty of scientific evidence has been compiled on its origins and effects.

Acid rain is essentially rain with a lower than normal pH concentration. It leads to a variety of problems such as decreased forest and plant growth, and it can kill animals such as fish. Over time, scientists began to trace acid rain to the burning of fossil fuels and determined that the pollution that causes it often occurs in a different geographical area than where the rain itself falls.

The hole in the ozone layer was debated into the 1990s.

It’s common for science to advance slowly, especially when industry interests are at stake, and this was especially true throughout the scientific discussions regarding the depletion of the ozone layer. It should thus come as no surprise that the conversation about whether there is in fact a hole in the ozone layer dates back almost 50 years.

In the 1970s, scientists presented indisputable evidence that certain chemicals were causing the depletion of the ozone layer. Researchers had been investigating the effects of various chemicals on the ozone layer as early as the late-1960s, and in 1970, scientist James Lovelock shared his work: he hypothesized that certain chemicals, called chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which were commonly used in aerosol products like hair spray, were in fact concentrating in the Earth’s stratosphere, potentially depleting the planet’s ozone.

The science proving global warming faced an uphill battle for recognition during the 1980s.

It’s clear that there have been alarming cases in which the public was misled about dire environmental issues, and another excellent example is global warming. Despite clear scientific proof, global warming wasn’t taken seriously until the 1980s.

Why?

In the early 2000s, a long-dormant pesticide debate was resurrected as a posterchild attack on environmental regulations.

Now that you know how science can be appropriated for political ends and lobbying, it’s time for one last example: the pesticide dichlordiphenyltrichlorethan, or DDT. DDT was banned in 1972 because of its devastating environmental effects, which were first made public in the 1960s.

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What is Merchants of Doubt about?

Merchants of Doubt (2011) examines some of the world’s major scientific debates on topics including the environment, smoking and nuclear weapons. These blinks will explain how a handful of extremely vocal scientists have heavily misrepresented these issues through the mainstream media, often with the goal of aiding corporate and industry interests.

Best quote from Merchants of Doubt

A key strategy in the campaigns to market doubt was to create the appearance that the claims being promoted were scientific.

—Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway

Who should read Merchants of Doubt?

Anyone interested in politics, the media and public opinion
Journalists, activists and anyone with a social conscience

About the Author

Naomi Oreskes teaches at Harvard University where she specializes in the history of science. She has previously spent 15 years as a professor of history and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, and is also respected authority on geophysics and global warming.

Erik M. Conway is a historian and author, and currently works at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Categories with Merchants of Doubt

Society & Culture Nature & the Environment

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