Merchants of doubt orchestrate climate deniers

Dr. Naomi Oreskes is a geologist and professor at Harvard University who, more than a decade ago, shifted from mining ore to mining historical archives to expose the research aimed at undermining climate change policy.

By exploring the history of climate change denial, she has shaken things up. She and colleague Dr. Erik M. Conway have found that the same handful of scientists who consistently stir doubt on climate change also were the ones who in previous decades muddled science on other contemporary issues like tobacco, acid rain and the ozone shield. Further, they have consistently teamed with and been funded by corporations and political/policy think tanks with biased interests.

In a 2010 book, Oreskes and Conway called these men “Merchants of Doubt,” and they document how this small group of scientists, in case after case, denied the existence of scientific agreement, even though they themselves were pretty much the only ones who disagreed. Now their book is a documentary film by Robert Kenner.

According to a Monday story in the New York Times about Dr. Oreskes and her research, the handful of scientists were described as men who had major career triumphs during the Cold War, but in subsequent years came to equate environmentalism with socialism, and government regulation with tyranny. In the 1960s they joined with think tanks and private corporations like R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. to challenge scientific evidence on tobacco. In later years, their various works to blur environmental issues came from the fossil fuel industry.