Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway

Author:Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-10-02T14:00:00+00:00

DURING THE FIVE-YEAR INTERREGNUM between the release of the Nierenberg report and Hansen’s powerful testimony, atmospheric scientists had been busy with other things. They had discovered the Antarctic ozone hole, investigated it, and explained its cause. They had also demonstrated the existence of global ozone depletion through the work of the Ozone Trends Panel. Certain scientists, including NASA’s Bob Watson, began to think that something like the Ozone Trends Panel was needed for global warming, too. This became the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Bert Bolin, the man who had first warned about acid rain in Europe, thought that Hansen’s temperature data hadn’t been “scrutinized well enough,” and accepted the task.60 He divided the panel into three working groups. The first would produce a report reflecting the state of climate science. The second would assess the potential environmental and socioeconomic impacts. The third would formulate a set of possible responses. The scientists set themselves a deadline of 1990 for their first assessment: a very short time given their intent to involve more than three hundred scientists from twenty-five nations.61

The political pressure generated by the June hearings also caused presidential candidate, and sitting vice president, George H. W. Bush to promise to counter the “greenhouse effect with the White House effect” by bringing the power of the presidency to bear on the problem.62 After his inauguration as forty-first president of the United States in January 1989, he sent his secretary of state, James Baker, to the first IPCC meeting, and had the Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering, and Technology’s Committee on Earth Sciences outline a proposed U.S. Global Climate Change Research initiative for the fiscal year 1990 budget.63 It was welcomed in the U.S. Senate, where the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation had prepared a bill proposing the same thing: the National Global Change Research Act of 1989.64 The United States, it seemed, was preparing to deal with anthropogenic climate change. As Gus Speth later recalled, “We thought we were on track to make real changes.”65 He underestimated the challenge.

Blaming the Sun

In 1984 Bill Nierenberg retired as director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and joined the Board of Directors of the George C. Marshall Institute. As we saw earlier, Robert Jastrow had established the Institute to defend President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative against attack by other scientists. But by 1989, the enemy that justified SDI was rapidly disappearing. The Warsaw Pact had fallen apart, the Soviet Union itself was disintegrating, and the end of the Cold War was in sight. The Institute might have disbanded—its raison d’être disappeared—but instead, the old Cold Warriors decided to fight on. The new enemy? Environmental “alarmists.” In 1989—the very year the Berlin Wall fell—the Marshall Institute issued its first report attacking climate science. Within a few years, they would be attacking climate scientists as well.

Their initial strategy wasn’t to deny the fact of global warming, but to blame it on the Sun. They circulated an unpublished “white paper,” generated by Jastrow, Seitz, and

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