Archive for July 8, 2010

I purchased from Amazon the book Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. (For the record, I spread my custom among many merchants, focusing on the little guys rather than the chains.) The subtitle speaks for itself: “How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.”

Amazon kept nagging, and finally I agreed to write a review. I was teased into doing so by a New Yorker cartoon, where a guy was boasting to friends about how five people had found his review helpful. So I thought it would be a lark. I gave the book 4 stars out of 5. It seriously impressed, but didn’t provide an orgasm.

Here’s the review:

In 2004 Ron Suskind quoted a White House aide as saying that guys like Suskind belong to “the reality-based community”; that is, persons who “believe that solutions emerge from judicious study of discernible reality.” But, the aide continued, “That’s not the way the world works anymore.… We create our own reality.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html)

That would make a dandy epigraph for this book.

Oreskes and Conway fully document the way a-political scientists and ingenuous progressives have trusted that “discernible reality” would speak for itself. Meanwhile, corporations and their conservative political allies have been undermining that “discernible reality” and creating their own substitute. Successfully.

In short, the corporations and movement conservatives have eaten the lunch of the overwhelming majority of scientists. Ironically, to steal the lunch they have used a select group of their own cat’s paw scientists. These are legitimate and in some cases highly accomplished scientists. So what’s the problem?

These select scientists have acted on the basis of political persuasion, personal grudges, and generous funding of their work by industry and politically financed front groups. (At the very least this is a serious conflict of interest.) Not infrequently they have testified on topics well beyond their areas of specialization, and in some cases have continued to do so long after they had ceased to do active, peer-reviewed research.

A source of satisfaction for the wealthy and politically conservative. A call to action for the majority of scientists and of political progressives. Worth reading, regardless of persuasion.