Merchants of Doubt

A felicitously presented documentary on global warming -- or rather how to under mine acceptance of scientific findings. Full disclosure: I am a behavioral scientist who has spent thirty years in research and can generally tell the good from the bad.

According to this film it all began with the tobacco industry. I don't know why it's so consistently called "big tobacco" since as far as I can tell there is no such thing as "little tobacco." If there were, what would it look like -- a Mom and Pop store with a patch of tobacco plants in the back yard and a cigarette rolling machine? Anyway -- you'll have to excuse my divagations. The voices tell me to do it from time to time.

Anyway, things began to get a bit hot for the tobacco industry in the 1950s with the growing public awareness of what appeared to be a link between smoking and lung cancer. So they hired a PR firm to help them out, and it worked fine for forty or fifty years. There was a scroll of techniques for disarming the public, for introducing doubt about the conclusion. I didn't write the dozen or so down because I wasn't taking notes, but they ran along lines like "attack the messenger", "find another enemy," "muddy the waters," "pay for your own experts," "say we need more research," and the like.

It was really a dirty business, not just because it wound up killing so many people but because it laid out a playbook for handling controversies in other scientific areas backed by vested interests. The techniques were so effective at inducing confusion that other industries have picked them up and used them. All of the techniques are now being used daily by the fossil fuel industry.

Some of the "merchants of doubt" are proud of their profession, as all effective professionals should be. The most agreeable of them admits to enjoying sending anonymous death threats to climate scientists, and I would be surprised if there weren't ill-paid human robots in Macedonia or someplace who were being paid to grind out insults and fake news about what they call "global warming alarmism."

There is no debate in scientific circles about anthropogenic global warming. The only questions left are about details, not about human contributions to climate change. That matter is settled. Look up Global Warming Controversy in Wikipedia. And recall, though the film doesn't mention it, that most leaders of the developed world came to an agreement in Kyoto about reducing greenhouse gases. We withdrew from the Kyoto accords some ten years ago, when we were the world's leading polluter. It was 2015 when about 200 countries were represented at a meeting in Paris and agreed to more stringent rules governing greenhouse gas emission, including China, which had taken over the number one spot. The USA signed the agreement too but we're now in the process of pulling out.

I'd always wondered what exactly motivated the people who stood firm in opposition to the indisputable findings of scientists around the world. It had to be something more general, more implanted in the mind, than simple skepticism because, after all, scientists are among the most skeptical people on earth. Without giving it much thought, I finally came to think it might be simply that acceptance of anthropogenic global warming had somehow come to be defined as a "liberal" position. (To me, it was about as liberal as the Zika virus.)

But the rhetoric of "climate deniers" pins it down to an impulse that no one can argue with -- the desire for "freedom," specifically freedom from still more government regulations. Nobody wants Big Brother telling him what to eat or what kind of energy to use. Another reasons, briefly referred to, is that most scientists are poor public performers. They don't pound their chests and bellow, and they talk like wimps. Compare Bill Nye the Science Guy with Rush Limbaugh or Alex Jones. I mean, for Bog's sake, Nye wears a BOW TIE!

I doubt that the program will persuade anyone who denies AGW that they're wrong. It's tough for anyone to admit he's wrong. I'm afraid a lot of people will dismiss the program as still more socialist propaganda. However, it's a well-done documentary, both in terms of the narrative and the visual effects. It's not at all academic. It's far too clear for that -- and much more entertaining.

Merchants Of Doubt is a truly fascinating new documentary. By now, we all know the big tobacco story. You know the one about the cigarette manufacturers who knew, even prior to the surgeon general's 1964 declaration, that cigarette smoking was physically harmful and addictive? Then when scientific studies proved that, in fact, smoking does cause cancer, heart disease, and so forth, big tobacco testified under oath that the science community was wrong. They even called "expert" witnesses who cast doubt on the results of these studies, and called for even more testing – just to be sure. Later, when the results were simply beyond doubt, big tobacco and its "experts" continued to request no restrictions be placed on smoking, claiming our freedom was being infringed by so-called "big government" (read "big brother"). They developed the phrase "smokers' rights," to convince the rest of us that poor addicted smokers had no choice but to continue smoking, and that the rest of us should simply leave them alone. Lapdog "big government" bellyachers like Rush Limbaugh bought into this argument.

Then came scientific studies bemoaning the dangers of second-hand smoke. And the experts came to the rescue again, first casting just enough doubt on the science to prolong the inevitable, and buy more time for the cigarette manufacturers. Eventually, fifty years after big tobacco first acknowledged (in private in-house memos) that cigarette smoking was harmful, the CEOs of the tobacco corporations were forced to go before Congress and admit they intentionally and systematically lied to America about the known dangers of their products.

Now, just who were these so-called "experts" used by big tobacco to prolong the eventual demise of a once-powerful industry? A new documentary by filmmaker Robert Kenner attempts to shed some light. Merchants Of Doubt is based on the 2010 book of the same name, by Harvard professor Naomi Oreskes and NASA historian Erik M. Conway. Oreskes and Conway draw a fascinating correlation between the half-century of denial thrust upon us by the tobacco industry and the now-thirty-year denial of climate change by the oil and coal industries, particularly Exxon/Mobil. Ironically, some of the very same "experts" used by the tobacco industry to discredit the results of the scientific smoking studies are now being used to discredit the results of scientific climate studies.

Oreskes researched every climate study published since the mid-1980s – almost a thousand different scientific works – and found the same thing Al Gore alluded to in his 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. 100% of climate scientists agree that global warming is not only real, but is man-made. Those who disagree may have science degrees, but they do not make their livings studying the earth's climate. Specifically, Merchants Of Doubt cites Fred Singer, a rocket scientist, and Fred Seitz, who helped develop the atomic bomb. Singer and Seitz, both of whom are interviewed in this film, were the very same physicists used by cigarette manufacturers to dilute the science condemning smoking. They have also cast doubt on the harm of acid rain, and the ozone hole. What do they have to gain by testifying against the rest of the scientific community? Money and fame.

Singer, Seitz, and a very small handful of other scientists and marketing gurus have made a living by forming conservative thinktanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, and using them as a front for fossil fuel companies like Exxon/Mobil. For example, if a Sunday morning news program featured a climatologist arguing the science behind global warming with the CEO of Exxon/Mobil, no viewer would believe the CEO to be an independent voice. He'd obviously have an agenda. But if a "senior fellow at a prominent Washington thinktank" were to argue against the climatologist, the debate would now appear to be non-biased. And that's exactly what the big oil companies have done to buy time – just as big tobacco did throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

Merchants Of Doubt takes the additional step of implicating the media for not investigating climate change more thoroughly, and for giving equal voice to these political thinktanks. As a former member of the media myself, I am continually disappointed in what has become of our once-great political watchdog. When Walter Cronkite visited Vietnam in 1968, then returned to the CBS Nightly News to declare there was "no light at the end of the tunnel," America listened. America took note. "If Cronkite says this war is a lost cause, then it must be," we thought. Who carries that kind of weight now? Heck, name one television news journalist who has the courage to personally investigate both sides of the global warming debate, then declare that climate change is real and must be addressed immediately, even if that means the eventual death of the American fossil fuel industries.

If there is a light at the end of the proverbial climate change tunnel, it is addressed at the end of Merchants Of Doubt. The Tea Party movement was an outgrowth of perceived excess government regulation. Many Americans, under the guise of capitalism and free markets – don't want their government to regulate anything – even industries destroying our earth. As in the tobacco narrative, this is the final stage of denial before big oil is forced to admit they knew all along their products were ruining our atmosphere. Unfortunately, as Dr. Oreskes states, "This time we don't have fifty years." As documentaries go, Merchants Of Doubt is somewhat dry. To me, it's not as interesting a topic as Robert Reich's "Inequality For All," and it's certainly not as entertaining as a Michael Moore picture. But I loved it anyway. It brought to light nothing I didn't know (or at least nothing I didn't suspect), yet it still held my interest throughout, and, dare I say, fascinated me. That's the mark of a great documentary. You owe it to yourself to see this one.

This is not a film about the science of climate change, second-hand smoke, or risks of flame-retardants. It is about the tactics used (repeatedly) to mislead the public about that science. Most notably, the "merchants of doubt" foster unwarranted images of uncertainty and obscure scientific consensus, and even threaten the scientists themselves (and then joke about it). All the while they hide their sources of funding and conflicts of interest that might lead a reasonable person to measure their claims. The documentary evidence and testimony presented is compelling--including, ironically, the voices of the con-artists themselves (Marc Morano, Fred Singer, Tim Phillips). Especially noteworthy is testimony by those who discovered the deceptions despite prior sympathetic beliefs: Matthew Crawford, Michael Shermer, Congr. Bob Inglis.

Striking imagery. Amusing moments. But also chilling when one reflects how these voices obscure harms to our health and environment. Worse, they appeal to the banner of free speech and other "freedoms" (to do harm, in the name of unregulated business, I suppose), and imagine that sheer will or personal belief can trump sound scientific conclusions.

Other naysaying reviews one finds of this film will surely be further evidence of what the film itself exposes so well. Once revealed, never again concealed.

I made the mistake of reading the user reviews before watching and was expecting a mediocre film. Thankfully it was much better than that. I found it to be thoroughly interesting and entertaining while doing a great job of detailing the depth of scumbaggery and deception behind the climate change denialist movement.

The imagery, interview editing, flow of the narrative, choice of people to interview, camera work were all outstanding. I highly recommend that anyone who is not already committed to denialism watch it. Some might find some parts shocking but overwhelmingly the evidence points to the views expressed in this film being correct.

Kenner tells us that big oil is using the same tactics – and often the same personnel – as big tobacco: set up any number of supposedly independent thinktanks, get plausible professionals on the (mouthwatering) payroll, and just sow the seeds of doubt. You undermine conviction, filibuster government action, fog public opinion, get brazen blowhards to shout loudly on Fox News. And the people best at this are the ageing, neocon attack dogs, veterans of the tobacco wars, who in the evening of their lives find a thrilling new purpose in climate change doubt-production.