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Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change?
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Haha. If only. In reality, it's so much worse. We can only hold so much information, and the "resolution" (depth/granularity) of our understanding diminishes over time. Throughout history people could contend with increases in the complexity of the collective human understanding of the world, but the breadth of the information available in any given society was so small that it was manageable. Furthermore, their forms of government relied more on a class of experts for governance and statemenship.
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Now everyone is involved in governance through voting, and the world is so complex that one individual cannot be expected to have a functional understanding of more than a tiny portion of it. This fundamentally changes how a society can, and should, organize. Should we all have opinions on the finer points of climate change without being experts in it? Should we be voting for people based on their specific policies related to climate change without that understanding? Can we just rely on endorsements from relevant experts? What happens when some of those experts decide they are willing to sellout to the opposition? This: Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
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The first step in solving a problem is admitting there is a problem. The second step is defining that problem. The third is designing a plan. The fourth is executing that plan, and the last is maintaining/updating that plan. We are still stuck on the first step, but we are trying to patch the leaking boat in the meantime, while claiming it solves the design flaws that led to the leaks. Let's not confuse the holes with the design flaws.
For those who haven't read it Naomi Oreskes et. al.'s <em>Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming</em> does a fantastic job of laying all of these tactics and campaigns out.
This actually began during the Cold War; the 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative (the "Star Wars" program) under Reagan was a plan to build a network of satellites designed to down incoming ICBMs.
The scientific community was opposed to the project. It was impossible to test (how do you test a system designed to shoot down ALL of a nuclear arsenal without firing an entire nuclear arsenal at yourself?), it was extraordinarily costly, and it would result in the weaponization of space.
The Reagan administration decided to get "its own scientists" to convince Congress to fund the project. They basically hired a bunch of PhD shills to argue that the scientific community was politicized, communist-leaning liberals and that the SDI project was scientifically sound. This led to discussions of "nuclear winter" which gave Carl Sagan his platform.
Fast forward a few years, and the same "scientists" hired by the Reagan administration were hired to argue that acid rain was not a major environmental problem.
Later, that same group was arguing that second-hand smoke was not harmful.
Next, they argued that smoking itself was not harmful.
Today, those same people are leading campaigns of disinformation attempting to discredit the science surrounding climate change.
If you'd like to learn more about the history of scientific disinformation in conservative America
> No, there's big money and has been for almost two decades in climate / environment related businesses and organizations.
If you think the money moving in the alternative energy industry is in any way comparable to the money moving in the fossil fuel sector - boy do I have an investment opportunity for you.
>I didn’t use the term scientists because there are quite a few scientists doing the real science
Correct. 97% of all climate change research (that is - papers published in peer reviewed journals) supports that climate change is happening and is driven by human activity.
>but there's also a lot of people (some with degrees, some without) that are sensationalizing the situation out of fear and/or personal gain motives.
That's as may be - but still - consider how much money someone like Al Gore stands to make off of his climate change movie - then go hop over and look at Exxon's quarterly profit statement.
There are solar systems between those two numbers.
Finally - many of the people disparaging the climate science are recycled actors from the tobacco industry's fight against regulation 60s-80s. Merchants of Doubt is an excellent, well sourced book that lays out the strategy and personalities behind climate change denial. One of the tactics that "experts" on the side of the Tobacco companies used was claiming that anti-smoking groups were personally profiting from legislation aimed at discouraging tobacco use.
This movie has already played once.
The tobacco industry was found liable for misleading the public about the hazards of smoking. Exxon literally went and hired the tobacco-cancer denial machine in response to finding out what their product would do.
So yeah, they're a bad actor in this case.
The problem is that the people there aren't engaged in rational discourse -- it's an effort to sow unwarranted doubt, led by a bunch of people who got their careers started telling people that tobacco smoke doesn't cause lung cancer. You can't hold rational discourse with them; the most you can do is to discredit them, and making them hard to find would be a step along that route.
I think it comes down to a general erosion of the concept of objective truth arising from decades of conservative bashing of science which discredits their stances.
It began with Carl Sagan and others discrediting the Global Defense Initiative as being onerously costly, ineffective, impossible to test, and a first step towards the total militarization of space. Hawkish Republicans high on McCarthyism found a retired doctor (who didn’t even study physics, but medicine IIRC) to provide “alternative facts” on the plan and to try to undermine the mainstream scientific community. Thus was born an attitude of skepticism towards mainstream science among Republicans.
Since then, the strategy has been applied to tobacco smoke, secondhand smoke, acid rain, DDT, and climate change.
Merchants of Doubt is a well-sourced, thorough review of this deplorable pattern of behavior among American politicians to discredit science for corporate and political gain.
e: word
Yup. Even the link between cancer and tobacco was disputed for decades so there is a mountain of evidence that show the link now. Same thing happened with leaded gas and global warming. There is a great book about it called Merchants Of Doubt
The reality is that the big oil companies in the US understood what was going on decades ago, and went and hired the tobacco-cancer denial machine to make their case. That's why there is so much disinformation out there.
The difference is this: people doing that don't have a history of trying to confuse the public about what the science is saying, which is something the fossil fuels industry has been doing for decades.
Morsomt er det også at akkurat de samme personene som jobbet for big tobacco for å overbevise folk om at forskningen om faren ved å røyke var tull og egentlig ikke førte til kreft, jobber nå for big oil med å spre tvil om klimavitenskap.
"Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change: Oreskes, Naomi, Conway, Erik M.: 9781608193943: Amazon.com: Books" https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Obscured/dp/1608193942
Merchants of doubt talks about how doubt on climate change has been willfully spread, and how tobacco companies used similar tactics. I haven't read it myself though.
The anti-vaccine movement was started by a doctor named Andrew Wakefield, and a few celebrities latched onto it and spread it on their twitter feeds and such.
Most of the prominent "skeptics" are deniers whose job it is to confuse people, in the same way that the tobacco industry hired people to convince people that cigarette smoke doesn't cause cancer and heart disease. A few of them are actually the same people. You might want to take a look at this book.
Sorry, that’s not the case; I was sure we can, at least, agree that hurricanes, floods and natural fires will cause deaths. Whole regions going underwater will cause deaths. And this will all amount to millions, at least.
It is the overwhelming consensus in the relevant scientific communities. The scientists that claim otherwise are few and far in between, and are usually easily linked to special interest groups such as large polluting companies.
I would recommend you the following book if you haven’t read it, it’s really an eye opener:
https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Obscured/dp/1608193942
What happened is that fossil fuels companies hired the fossil-fuels-don't-cause-cancer propaganda machine. There's a little bit of it in other English-speaking countries too, notably the UK and Australia, but it's not nearly as widespread.
I wonder if this disinformation is in anyway related to the Merchants of Doubt crew? You know, the ones behind casting doubt on cigarettes causing cancer and global warming.
BTW, you are correct that there is a lot of distrust of media out there. Here is the best book I know of on distrust-- and how a propagandist doesn't need to convince you they are right, in order to be successful, but only needs you to convince you to distrust their opponent:
Merchants of Doubt
Not really a right wing campaign. More of a oil/gas/coal campaign that some republicans are so stupid they fell for and others saw an opportunity to get some money from.
https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Obscured/dp/1608193942
Yes. The book Merchants of Doubt details many instances of such manipulations, where a small minority would argue that their views needed to be aired according to the Fairness Doctrine, which would create the appearance of controversy where there essentially was none.
Who went to jail from the Tobacco fraud case?
My point here, what the Koch brothers and companies like Exxon have been doing since the 80s is THE EXACT SAME THING. They even used some of the same "Scientists" to write their "scientific papers."
Check out Merchants of Doubt
There is a similar book called, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming! http://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Obscured/dp/1608193942
As I read it I kept thinking of the church. They get a group of TBM apologists in a room and "set them apart" to save the church, then give them marching orders to create doubt. As one executive said, and it could be the words of one of the Q15, "Doubt is our product, and these experts create it."
There is a lot of intentional misinformation out there. And a lot of people think there are "two sides to every story" and that both "sides" are equally legitimate.
I recommend this book:
It helps in understanding why we have become tribal on this issue. It was by design.
Fun fact: 25% of Americans still don't believe that smoking is harmful to health. This technique of instilling doubt is terribly effective.
The oil companies have known for a lot longer, and made a decision to spread doubt and denial instead of taking action.
I have to get this out of the way: PragerU is a conservative think tank. It would not be an overstatement to call think tanks propaganda machines, because that's essentially their purpose: they are paid to come up with ways to influence public perception on policy issues.
The people who work for think tanks are not scientists. They're not academics.
One pertinent policy issue involves climate change. Conservative think tanks have pushed many books on climate skepticism, with the aim of infusing doubt about the reality of climate change into the minds of voters^(1):
>This study quantitatively analyses 141 English-language environmentally sceptical books published between 1972 and 2005. We find that over 92 per cent of these books, most published in the US since 1992, are linked to conservative think tanks (CTTs). Further, we analyse CTTs involved with environmental issues and find that 90 per cent of them espouse environmental scepticism. We conclude that scepticism is a tactic of an elite-driven counter-movement designed to combat environmentalism, and that the successful use of this tactic has contributed to the weakening of US commitment to environmental protection.
Historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway have explored this issue at length in their excellent book Merchants of Doubt^(2).
In Think Tanks in America^(3), sociologist Thomas Medvetz argues that their growing influence "has ultimately undermined the value of independently produced knowledge in the United States by institutionalising a mode of intellectual practice that relegates its producers to the margins of public and political life."
Scientists have become less relevant in political discourse, while think-tank pundits have become increasingly influential.
Take the term "tax relief", for instance. That expression was born in a conservative think tank. It frames taxation as something inherently bad. Cognitive linguist George Lakoff discusses this and more in Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think^(4).
In the same book, Lakoff also suggests a reason why conservatives are "obsessed with values," as you say. His argument is that liberals and conservatives rely on different types of metaphors to guide their sense of morals. Liberals rely on the "nurturant mother" metaphor, while conservatives rely on the "strict father" metaphor.
Liberals, then, will see it as natural that we should help each other and that we shouldn't put ourselves before others. We should teach our children to think for themselves rather than instruct them on what to believe. We should ensure that the world is just for everyone.
Conservatives, on the other hand, will see it as natural that we should punish those deemed to be immoral and lazy. We should instill discipline in our children and demand obedience from them. The world is just in that the good are rewarded through hard work while the bad are punished because of their flaws.
I think it also should be mentioned that Lakoff has argued that conservative think tanks must be countered with progressive think tanks. Personally, I disagree with this notion. I believe think tanks should be countered with scientists and actual experts rather than pundits.
You should this in mind when exposed to material from think tanks: it is produced by people whose job it is to manipulate public opinion. PragerU wants people to think about political issues in a way that favors conservative values. They're particularly interested in reaching young people who haven't made up their mind about politics yet. Their conclusions aren't attempts at getting at the truth: they are attempts at getting into your head.
One of their main roles is to produce memes in the Dawkinsian sense: narratives about political events and issues that spread as people discuss them. They tell politicians how to frame debates and how to answer specific questions. It's all orchestrated and organized in a disturbingly efficient manner.
So that's that. I just wanted to get that out there.
References:
- Jacques, P., Dunlap, R., & Freeman, M. (2008). The organisation of denial: Conservative think tanks and environmental scepticism. Environmental Politics, 17, 349 - 385.
- Oreskes, N., & Conway, E.M. (2010). Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.
- Medvetz, T. (2012). Think Tanks in America.
- Lakoff, G. (1996). Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think.
Large corporations, governments, political parties etc. have a template that they follow for various issues.
- Stage 1: Deny the problem exists.
- Stage 2: Deny responsibility.
- Stage 3: Downplay the threat.
- Stage 4: Attack the solutions as too costly.
- Stage 5: It’s too late
That's actually the old school way, what I call "the pitbull defense." Here are some links:
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-53640382
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/04/coronavirus-doubters-follow-climate-denial-playbook/
https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Obscured/dp/1608193942
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The new way is a much more de-centralized, throw everything at the wall / bury the truth under a mountain of lies that the Russians are experts at. The strategy attempts to dismantle the idea of an objective, verifiable set of facts.
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR2200/RR2237/RAND_RR2237.pdf
The ones which make it through peer review are well summarized in this paper, and mostly consist of mistakes.
The popular denial claims tend to come from a small number of people who are generally paid to push denial.
The person who has done a really good job of categorizing denial, how people approach it is John Cook, who first built skepticalscience.com which contains most denial arguments and explanations of why they're wrong, and more recently Cranky Uncle, a game designed to teach people to understand the reasoning associated with denial, and why it's not valid.
China experienced the most rapid and successful economic rise in history thanks to its reliance on technocracy. As Deng Xiaoping arrived at the stage, government positions became filled with engineers. With Xi Jingping, engineers have been replaced by people with degrees in law, politics, and philosophy. With that it seems likely they are ready to focus more heavily on social issues, a point on which they have been routinely criticized. At least that's one interpretation. A pessimistic view might be that they are instead doubling down on nationalism and authoritarianism (see for instance The Longer Telegram) in a return to the Maoist school of thought. Some argue that Chinese technocracy, if such a thing ever existed, ended with the arrival of Xi. A more optimistic view might be that there are going to be some growing pains while they navigate this transition and that they will most likely arrive at some version of humanism. Eventually.
Whatever the case, it's difficult to ignore China's sheer rise coupled with their Deng-influenced scientific/pragmatic approach to governance. In economic terms, they have done well to rely on engineers. Socially speaking ... Well, that's a different matter.
I do believe there's some merit to technocracy/meritocracy. I think teachers and doctors are better able to choose candidates to manage education and health than elected officials currying various favors. The ubiquity of think tanks in the US has eroded the notion of representative democracy anyhow with powerful companies paying academia dropouts to figure out the most effective ways of manipulating the public into supporting policies that are against their interest (see Merchants of Doubt).
This is a tactic used by the tobacco industry for years. Here is a good lay out of disinformation tactics. https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/disinformation-playbook
One of the strongest tactics is similar to what you describe. Tobacco Funds health research into Heart disease, lots of it is very beneficial and legit, but the point for them is not to cure heart disease, it's to find reasons besides smoking that cause heart disease, then argue smoking alone doesn't cause heart disease.
The argument is the goal - 40 years of arguing about the true nature of heart disease, because research proves lots of things cause heart disease and 'smoking isn't the only thing' = 40 years of tobacco sales while the jury is still out whether smoking causes heart disease.
Here is a great book on the tactic, also used for the Oil Industry/Climate Change Denial.
Doubt is all that is needed - 9 out of 10 dentists - Let's focus on the one, pay him, fund him, and circulate his research and WE WIN while the fight continues.
There are a bunch of people whose job it is to put out hard-to-debunk nonsense. People aren't going to watch this kind of video content because it takes a big chunk of their day, and they're not going to learn anything meaningful from it. Instead, try to identify the argument that they're making, and do a site-specific search on skepticalscience.com, which maintains of database of this kind of stuff, along with explanations of why it is wrong. Something like: site:skepticalscience.com natural cycle
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This is a known source of disinformation.
Please see the book Merchants of Doubt to understand why people produce stuff like this.
See this infographic for an explanation of what is going on with the climate.
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We'd have had the time to actually do things if we'd started when the oil companies found out there was a problem. But no, they spent decades preventing appropriate action.
So yes, they're exactly the same kind of villain that the tobacco companies are. The fossil fuels industry even went so far as to hire the same people to prevent action.
Temperatures were shockingly stable from the development of agriculture to industrial revolution. That stability is what made agriculture and civilization possible.
When the fossil fuels industry found out the damage they were causing, they went and hired the tobacco-cancer denial machine to confuse people. Instead of repeating the same bogus PR talking points they've been using, why not pick up a decent textbook which walks you through what is going on?
There are a bunch of people whose job it is to put out hard-to-debunk nonsense. People aren't going to watch this kind of video content because it takes a big chunk of their day, and they're not going to learn anything meaningful from it. Instead, try to identify the argument that they're making, and do a site-specific search on skepticalscience.com, which maintains of database of this kind of stuff, along with explanations of why it is wrong. Something like: site:skepticalscience.com natural cycle
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The "political" thing happened because the oil companies knew about the problem decades in advance and chose to hire the tobacco-cancer denial machine instead of doing the right thing and shutting down their extraction business
There are a bunch of people whose job it is to put out hard-to-debunk nonsense. People aren't going to watch this kind of video content because it takes a big chunk of their day, and they're not going to learn anything meaningful from it. Instead, try to identify the argument that they're making, and do a site-specific search on skepticalscience.com, which maintains of database of this kind of stuff, along with explanations of why it is wrong. Something like: site:skepticalscience.com natural cycle
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You're probably intending this one rhetorically, but the basic answer is the oil companies figured out what was going on before most of the rest of us, and instead of phasing out their business to preserve a civilization-supporting planet, decided to hire the tobacco-cancer denial machine to confuse people and prevent decarbonization.
They don't just lie; they hire big PR operations to make it confusing about who the liars are
There are some people like that. Exxon executives for example, got accurate information about the impact of their product in the 1970s, and chose to run a PR campaign to confuse the public instead of figuring out a way to wind down the business. There is absolutely no way you can reach them with more and better information — they had it before I was born, and chose to be a lot of damage.
Per my earlier comment, there is a much larger group of people who are misinformed by people they trust. You can reach them, but it has to come from the right messenger, and it has to be done in a way that doesn't presume a lot of knowledge.
This is a known source of disinformation.
Please see the book Merchants of Doubt to understand why people produce stuff like this.
See this infographic for an explanation of what is going on with the climate.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/climate) if you have any questions or concerns.
There are a bunch of people whose job it is to put out hard-to-debunk nonsense. People aren't going to watch this kind of video content because it takes a big chunk of their day, and they're not going to learn anything meaningful from it. Instead, try to identify the argument that they're making, and do a site-specific search on skepticalscience.com, which maintains of database of this kind of stuff, along with explanations of why it is wrong. Something like: site:skepticalscience.com natural cycle
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There are a bunch of people whose job it is to put out hard-to-debunk nonsense. People aren't going to watch this kind of video content because it takes a big chunk of their day, and they're not going to learn anything meaningful from it. Instead, try to identify the argument that they're making, and do a site-specific search on skepticalscience.com, which maintains of database of this kind of stuff, along with explanations of why it is wrong. Something like: site:skepticalscience.com natural cycle
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There are a bunch of people whose job it is to put out hard-to-debunk nonsense. People aren't going to watch this kind of video content because it takes a big chunk of their day, and they're not going to learn anything meaningful from it. Instead, try to identify the argument that they're making, and do a site-specific search on skepticalscience.com, which maintains of database of this kind of stuff, along with explanations of why it is wrong. Something like: site:skepticalscience.com natural cycle
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There are a bunch of people whose job it is to put out hard-to-debunk nonsense. People aren't going to watch this kind of video content because it takes a big chunk of their day, and they're not going to learn anything meaningful from it. Instead, try to identify the argument that they're making, and do a site-specific search on skepticalscience.com, which maintains of database of this kind of stuff, along with explanations of why it is wrong. Something like: site:skepticalscience.com natural cycle
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There are a bunch of people whose job it is to put out hard-to-debunk nonsense. People aren't going to watch this kind of video content because it takes a big chunk of their day, and they're not going to learn anything meaningful from it. Instead, try to identify the argument that they're making, and do a site-specific search on skepticalscience.com, which maintains of database of this kind of stuff, along with explanations of why it is wrong. Something like: site:skepticalscience.com natural cycle
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There are a bunch of people whose job it is to put out hard-to-debunk nonsense. People aren't going to watch this kind of video content because it takes a big chunk of their day, and they're not going to learn anything meaningful from it. Instead, try to identify the argument that they're making, and do a site-specific search on skepticalscience.com, which maintains of database of this kind of stuff, along with explanations of why it is wrong. Something like: site:skepticalscience.com natural cycle
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There are a bunch of people whose job it is to put out hard-to-debunk nonsense. People aren't going to watch this kind of video content because it takes a big chunk of their day, and they're not going to learn anything meaningful from it. Instead, try to identify the argument that they're making, and do a site-specific search on skepticalscience.com, which maintains of database of this kind of stuff, along with explanations of why it is wrong. Something like: site:skepticalscience.com natural cycle
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You can point out that while the oil companies knew they've been funding a propaganda campaign to confuse the people and government, and that this prevented action. Just like the tobacco industry did before them.
| Item | Current | Lowest | Reviews |
|---|---|---|---|
| Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists O… | - | - | 4.5/5.0 |
^Item&nbsp;Info | Bot&nbsp;Info | Trigger
They knew about the problem decades ago..
Instead of fixing it, they launched a PR campaign to lie to to the public, using the exact same people and tactics as the tobacco industry did when they learned that their product caused cancer and heart disease.
These heavily-promoted lies prevented anybody else from taking action either.
As such, they're responsible for the damage done in the interim.
There are a bunch of people whose job it is to put out hard-to-debunk nonsense. People aren't going to watch this kind of video content because it takes a big chunk of their day, and they're not going to learn anything meaningful from it. Instead, try to identify the argument that they're making, and do a site-specific search on skepticalscience.com, which maintains of database of this kind of stuff, along with explanations of why it is wrong. Something like: site:skepticalscience.com natural cycle
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>Er "oljepropaganda" måten du avfeier rasjonell kritikk av dine grønne drømmerier?
Fint å være litt opplyst om hva du selv sier. At du heller velger å videre støtte oljebransjen sier sitt lol.
Her kan du lese en godt dokumentert bok om dette: https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Obscured/dp/1608193942
> Avgifter = ekstra skatt av befolkningen. Så tar man disse avgiftspengene, og gir mindre igjen i form av tilsvarende "grønne" tjenester (fordi de er dyrere).
Det er ikke slik økonomi fungerer. Selskapene får beskjed om at avgiften kommer, de endrer seg og slipper ut mindre CO2 for å slippe avgiften. De som ikke klarer endre seg går konkurs fordi kostnadene vil være for høye til å overføres til forbrukeren. Slik fungerer det. Dette er hele poenget med avgifter. Avgifter som dette er ikke for å samle inn penger, det er for å endre oppførsel i økonomien.
>Og det er folk i resten av verden overhode ikke interessert i.
De vil ikke merke noe av de virkelig store kuttene innenfor energi og industri og vil ikke protestere. Og uansett, det har ingen betydning. Vanlige folk kan faktisk ikke bestemme dette. De har ikke kompetansen. Vi kan ikke akseptere at folk vil fortsette å slippe ut haugevis med CO2 fordi det er vanskelig å ikke gjøre det når vi vet at det leder oss mot 6-8 grader økning. Idioters meninger om vitenskap har ingen verdi.
>Selv i Norge blir det bråk bare man lager litt bomveier eller prøver seg med vindmøller som gir høyere strømpris pga. grønne sertifikater.
Blant en bitte liten andel av befolkningen. En stor majoritet er for alt du nevnte. Ikke engang prøv å få det til å virke som at de fleste er mot bomveier, vindmøller eller grønn og litt dyrere strøm. At noen som har gått livets skole sutrer over miljøtiltak har ingenting å si. Vi ignorerer de.
>Det er ingen globale reduksjoner i utslipp
Hvor sa jeg det totale globale utslippet hadde gått ned?
>Norges 50 MT er ikke synlige engang
Og du har ignorert alt jeg har skrevet...
>har toget for lengst gått. Tuut tuut
Hvorfor er du hånlig mot folk som vil jobbe for å kutte utslipp når du samtidig mener det er et reelt problem? Har du bare gitt opp alt eller er det bare egoisme? Genuint nysgjerrig på denne fatalistiske mentaliteten.
Sadly not. The small number of papers claiming otherwise all make errors of logic, math, or physics.
The fossil fuels industry figured out what was going on by 1982, and rather than do the right thing, they hired the tobacco-cancer denial machine to confuse people.
There are a bunch of people whose job it is to put out hard-to-debunk nonsense. People aren't going to watch this kind of video content because it takes a big chunk of their day, and they're not going to learn anything meaningful from it. Instead, try to identify the argument that they're making, and do a site-specific search on skepticalscience.com, which maintains of database of this kind of stuff, along with explanations of why it is wrong. Something like: site:skepticalscience.com natural cycle
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This is a known source of disinformation.
Please see the book Merchants of Doubt to understand why people produce stuff like this.
See this infographic for an explanation of what is going on with the climate.
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Glad you replied when you did, I happened to be listening coincidentally to episode 173 of The Michael Shermer Show, the podcast for Skeptic Society. This episode he is interviewing Naomi Oreskes, the co-author of "Merchants of Doubt" as well as several other fantastic novels.
It covers her latest book "Why you trust science?". I think everyone here would enjoy their conversation, and I always recommend the Michael Shermer show/skeptic society as a good place for diverse discussions.
She is very set on climate change being man made settled, she has good arguments, I think Michael fails to catch a few mistakes, but that is beside the point as she is always interesting to listen to (I have a soft spot for historians of science).
Episode is here, but probably everywhere else too for those interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ_4UHmnWi8
ANYWAY, I appreciate the follow-up information you gathered bivalverights, I can't at the moment go through - both for lack of time, and lack of expertise - I am merely playing a bit of devils advocate by extending charity to the author of "Unsettled" assuming he is merely trying to stress A) the topic is far more complex than people are being told and B) the media is selling panic.
I think in the case of B), that is true. You can go back 40 years and find a near unlimited supply of doomsday predictions covered disproportionately in mainstream media than you would find in actual peer reviewed scientific journals. I don't think this is surprising either, as that is what you expect the media to do - make money by telling interesting stories. "Sea level rise by 1.2 MM compared to modeled 1.3 MM" is far less likely to capture eyes than "Florida Keys to be underwater by 2050"
And as I mentioned originally, I think A) is self evidently true as well - there are an enormous amount of disciplines that go into studying what is happening, how it happened, why it happened, what could be done, what cannot be done, what are the tradeoffs between solutions, etc.
Denying that there is any human impact on climate is a standard position within the Republican party today. Up until a few years ago, it was also common to see merchants of doubt deny that there was any warming.
The denial doesn't come from stupidity. It comes from being paid off
What you are saying is *technically half true* and has a strong tendency to mislead. Only a very A small handful of well informed people think it's likely enough to talk about that "we will all die" if we do not change by 2030. So technically "we will all die" is not the likely outcome that scientists are saying will happen. However "the media" has a consistent and well documented record of underplaying climate change and failing to build understanding of the basic science.
However the vast majority of experts that study climate change are saying we need to cut emissions in half in 10 years to avoid irreversible damage. This is not my opinion, any serious and unbiased dive into the research will show you this is well accepted. Its irresponsible to ignore these problems. Like running up your credit card to pay for a mortgage on a giant house you can't afford because moving is too much work, and a house you can afford won't be as fancy. Will you literally die? I suppose after the eviction if you are homeless you might, but not likely. Usually takes a string of other bad things on top of the foreclosure to reach that point. more likely you will ruin your credit, go bankrupt and be worse off than if you took responsibility when its clear your budget can't make it work.
There are scientists getting more and more desperate, and media misinformation specifically why things are so bad. Do you know how many people already die from climate change? How many will die each year in the future? Most people I talk to don't think in those terms, and don't really have a good guess (although the question itself does tend to lead people to assume its a big number, after all why would I ask that question if I didn't expect you to be surprised). Well you can read up on it here
>environmental degradation is an externality that simply needs to be priced in
I generally agree, but there are 2 major stumbling blocks here:
- An abstract question about the value of future suffering against present prosperity. Without going down a whole tangent about moral relativism, I just don't know how to motivate people to care about the quality of life their grandchildren will experience if they don't already.
- The concrete fact that as long as these externalities aren't priced in, the obviously optimal investment strategy in certain industries (e.g. oil and gas) is to prioritize public relations campaigns (or, perhaps more accurately, outright disinformation and lies) to ensure that the political will you reference remains lacking. If my mid-sized oil company is looking at $1B in annual carbon taxes that I can delay indefinitely with a well-placed $5M donation, there's a clear path to keep my shareholders happy.
And then, of course, there's the same problem every public policy faces in the modern era. It's really, really hard to get these things right at scale such that they actually have the impact they want them to.
(Again, I agree with you. Just letting my inner doomer shine through for a minute here.)
That sounds similar to the book Merchants of Doubt.
The reality is that Heartland is an organization which worked to bring the personnel and tactics of the tobacco-cancer denial machine to the fossil fuels industry. It's true that this particular article doesn't go into complete detail; That's something that's done for each individual claim made by Heartland on skepticalscience.com.
The consensus exists for a reason: it's been clear for decades that the world is warming, and human-induced changes in greenhouse gas concentrations are why.
There are too many of these things to be worth watching individually. Here's how you debunk stuff yourself:
- Start with 'what's really warming the world' data animation ( bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-world/ ), which shows GHGs are the only forcing (among 'the usual candidates') that tracks with global temperature rise?
- Look at the fact that 97% of climate scientists agree that global warming is happening and is human-caused? ( skepticalscience.com/global-warming-scientific-consensus-intermediate.htm )
- See if claims are addressed (with science citations) in this list of almost 200 assertions at SkepticalScience.com ( skepticalscience.com/argument.php ), and have you read the page for it?
- (Here are two useful tools for finding where a specific claim is mentioned :
- Within a webpage, you can search for, say, "CO2", by typing ctrl-F (or apple-F, or windows-F) to bring up a search field (at upper right), then typing 'CO2' into it.
- You can search throughout a website, by adding site:SkepticalScience.com to your search string, like so: https://www.google.com/search?q=CO2+site%3Askepticalscience.com(click on it, then change 'CO2' to the search term you want) )
- Is the concern actually about something else? What is he you worried would happen, if he did conclude that we need to stop climate change?
- Is there a history of tobacco-cancer denial by the video producer? A lot of the climate denial people got their start working for the tobacco-cancer denial machine. The book Merchants of Doubt goes into this in incredible detail. You can often find stuff online with an appropriate search as well.
​
Unfortunately, it's almost never the case that providing a point-by-point debunking changes the minds of parents. See if you can change the household media diet instead. Try to get them off of Fox and talk radio and extremist blogs, and onto mainstream news sources. Do something like ask for a household New York Times subscription for your birthday.
Not going to watch anything from the Heartland Institute. Basically a bunch of paid liars. Extensive documentation in the book Merchants of Doubt.
If you want to undstand the details of why a specific claim that they make is wrong, skepticalscience.com is a good resource.
> But what I find most politicized and sensationalized are the current claims that we are on the edge of the next great extinction. These seem to fall in line with the hysterics of the 1970s Earth Day predictions.
So, one of the points I may not have expressed clearly enough is that environmental science as we know it began in the late 1960's and early 1970's, and much of the reactive regulations of the 1970's was a direct response to the realization that the post-WW2 chemical, fossil fuel, and nuclear industries were responsible for some nasty negative externalities.
Were there some apocalyptic scenarios asserted that never came to fruition? Yes. Were there some overly restrictive regulations enacted? Also, yes.
These were heady days a small group of influential scientists and these people were genuinely worried for the planet, even though the environmental science was new and the breadth and depth of the supporting data was relatively thin.
But, and I want to emphasize this part, the science is no longer new, and is being performed by thousands of scientists, who are producing huge reams of relevant data. The science is much less speculative than it was 40 years ago. All of the models that produced results that varied from reality have been reworked to produce more accurate results. The science, in other words, has matured not in spite of its mistakes, but from its past mistakes.
As a result, it makes more sense to have greater confidence in contemporary scientific assertions, than to question them because scientists were wrong 40 years ago.
And lastly, it is crucial to differentiate the role of the scientist in analyzing the data to confirm or refute a hypothesis, and the policymaker in proposing what to do to address that problem.
Because scientists, either in 1970 or 2019, may not be the best people to coordinate the subsequent policy/regulatory solutions.
>Here’s where I have an issue taking these things at face value. You say that conservatives politicize things because they’ve been bought and paid for by the natural oil and fossil fuel industry.
In regards to my last point about separating the science from the policy, this is another thing I may not have been clear enough about in my last comment: what the Conservative think tanks are guilty of is politicizing the science, which has filtered into the Conservative political identity.
In the same way as the debate about the tobacco industry (and with some of the same people), these think tanks have used propaganda to create the impression that the science is wrong or faked. They have politicized the science by manufacturing doubt about the credibility of the scientists and their results. They've been paid by the fossil fuel/mining/chemical industries to lie to Americans about the nature of the threats Americans are facing.
As far as I'm concerned, this is shameful behavior because these companies are poisoning Americans every day (and getting away with it).
What I have no problem with, is these think tanks proposing solutions to these problems (alternative policies) and lobbying to gain support for their favored solutions. The politicization of policy solutions is the bread and butter of politics. It may be a messy business, but it's perfectly legitimate that a libertarian think tank would seek to solve a problem differently than the socialist quasi-eco-terrorists at Greenpeace. Lobbying is just part of the marketplace of ideas, and I say, may the best ideas win.
But lying to discredit the scientists and politicize environmental science, that's not cool.
>What makes you think that liberal politicians aren’t bought and paid for by the green companies?
The short answer is that politicians will take money from just about anyone, but there is way more money in fossil fuels/mining/chemicals than there is in "green companies."
One of the biggest scams in environmental protection is corn ethanol for cars. The corn industry lobbied hard for ethanol standards, despite the fact that it takes more than a barrel of oil to create a barrel of corn ethanol. To the degree that Democrats or Republicans supported this mandate, however they justify it, they are in on the scam.
And it's also worth noting that most of the environmental regulation (that banned a certain product or practice) imposed since 1970 was only passed once American industries had a replacement product or process ready to go to replace it.
For example, one of the most far reaching international environmental laws - the Montreal Protocol (to address the thinning of the ozone layer) was only signed and ratified by President Reagan once he knew that DuPont had developed a replacement product (and because they were the first to discover it, it gave the US a strategic trade advantage).
In this regard, industry and government have always worked together to find mutually-beneficial regulatory solutions. This is as true of Democrat or Republican Administrations and legislators. This can lead to regulatory capture, or can reflect responsive/flexible regulation that is more efficient than mere command and control dictates.
But what liberal think tanks and politicians don't do is participate in the creation of propaganda to misrepresent and politicize environmental science. They take the un-politicized science from the scientists and propose liberal solutions to problems outlined by the scientists.
Conservative think tanks and politicians have every right to propose alternative Conservative/libertarian solutions, but they should not be excused for propagating climate-denier propaganda.
Nota bene: I want to be clear, I don't hold all Conservatives accountable for the lies being sold to them by the party elites, because they're being sold as part of a package identity. Once Conservatives realize they've been poisoned for profit, however, they will be as pissed off as the rest of us.
If you want to learn more about the denier industry, I recommend Oreskes and Conway's, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming [Amazon link] or Dunlap's, Climate Change Skepticism and Denial : An Introduction [PDF warning].
It's been a pleasure chatting with you. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.
Truth isn't balanced by lies, and letting the same people who spent decades telling the world that tobacco smoke doesn't cause cancer lie some more doesn't have any real benefit.
The reality is that on those rare occasions when the US press covers climate at all, they've largely been engaging in the kind of false balance you are asking for. The outcome? A confused public, which doesn't realize that almost all the scientists who study the same issue have come to the same conclusion.
Basically, local sources and sinks have a huge influence. If you measure in the middle of a city, where there tends to be a lot of combustion, you get a high number. If you measure in the middle of a photosynthesizing forest, you get a low CO2 concentration. Because of this, those old measurements aren't representative of the atmosphere as a whole.
Figuring out that there are places where you can sample the well-mixed part of the atmosphere, which don't have local influences or a dinural pattern, was a key piece of how modern CO2 measurements got going.
The ice-core CO2 concentrations tend to be treated as reliable because Greenland and Antarctica have near-zero combustion and photosynthesis, which means that bubbles trapped in the ice have concentrations which were only modified by the process of being trapped there. This lets you get accurate CO2 concentrations from the era before there were reliable direct measurements.
Since Timothy Ball's pre-Keeling CO2 concentration numbers are not representative of the atmosphere as a whole, his argument basically falls apart.
There are a LOT of kind-of-sort-of-plausible things like this out there because the fossil fuels industry went and hired the tobacco-smoke-doesn't-cause-cancer people back in the 1990s, and they've been hard at work producing and disseminating propaganda ever since. The group hosting this document, the "friends of science" in particular, has a history of being funded by the oil industry .
There are enough individual pieces of propaganda like this that you can spend basically your whole life pointing out what is wrong with each individual one; there site like SkepticalScience.com where people have done just that. In particular, they've published a detailed explanation of how we know that increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere cause warming
Among people who actually study climate, it's not even close.
And yes, there's a serious effort to manufacture doubt, in part by misrepresenting studies and what actual conditions are. Basically, re-run the tobacco-cancer denial playbook but with climate. As a result, rebutting individual facts probably won't get you anywhere so long as he's plugged into the denial-propaganda system -- he'll have a fresh myth or misrepresented fact every week or so.
If you want to change his mind, your best bet is to get him disconnected from that propaganda.
Sounds like the book Merchants of Doubt would give you the information you're looking for - it's a fantastic read btw.
Thing is that you have to look at the history of climate change science to figure out where things started so I'll try to give a bit of a synopsis. You can Google all of this pretty easily.
Way back in 1896, Svante Arrhenius characterised the greenhouse effect and the relationship to CO2. However, it wasn't until Carl Sagan started looking at the atmosphere of Venus in the late 50s that the relationship became more than a theoretical abstract. Sagan himself wrote an essay on the subject which was included in his influential book Cosmos.
Things began to accelerate when James Hansen gave his testimony to a senate committee in 1988 which, in turn, led to the signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.
During all of this time, as you can read in Merchants of Doubt, the opposition to action on climate change was fairly mild. That was largely to do with various other environmental concerns (acid rain, ozone layer hole) taking up much of the news cycle and dominating companies' lobbying efforts to stop, slow down or mitigate the effect of legislation that would impact their profits in those areas. In particular, the automotive industry lobbied HARD against acid rain legislation and the electronics/white goods firms did the same for anti-CFC laws.
However, with the signing of Kyoto, many of the world leaders were substantially on board with the urgent need to take action on climate change. This was highlighted by the growing acceptance of the IPCC reports which contained sections specifically directed at policy makers from the 1990 initial report and continuing to the present day.
Suddenly climate change/global warming leaped to the forefront of the news cycle and it was sexy to talk about it. Lots of research groups received more funding and there seemed to be a flurry of positive action.
As highlighted in Merchants of Doubt, that led to a reaction from those who stood to lose profits from action on climate change and companies of that ilk have always been able to find pet scientists to take their money and obfuscate the science. Many of the scientists were the same ones who had argued against the dangers of tobacco smoking!
So the anti-science machine sprang into action using a multi-pronged approach which had proven quite effective in the past.
First they lobbied law-makers to slow down, commission studies and consider more evidence before taking action. This stalled and delayed action on the Kyoto Protocol and continues to this day.
Secondly they commissioned pseudo-scientific papers casting as much doubt on the science of climate change as possible. Recall that the science was fully settled as far back as the 1960s, long before any special interest group had even heard of climate change. The scientific "debate" was purely manufactured. Real scientists agreed climate change was happening but may have disagreed on some details like the exact cooling effect of volcanoes, the impact of clouds and the like.
Thirdly they got talking heads to start raising FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) about climate change. The airwaves were filled with that sort of discussion and the largely ignorant public was heavily swayed because they didn't understand the science.
Finally they lobbied. Politicians are cheap to buy and generate returns of 1000% or more on the cost of political contributions.
Over the years, the anti-science rhetoric has been gradually beaten down by the plethora of pop-science books that have been written by reputable scientists explaining climate change in layman's terms. With some trepidation, I think that the consensus is swinging towards action.
Unfortunately, that only causes certain companies and organisations to redouble their FUD efforts. Delaying legislation by even a year can be worth billions to their bottom line so spending tens or even hundreds of millions to achieve that is just good business sense.
> Are people really dumb/ignorant or is it just another case of "let's hate the black guy stepping on white folks"?
Even you, who questions, doesn't see the real picture:
Lobbyist Spending, Coal Industry
Lobbyists, PR pros, you're in a constant spin. Feel dizzy?
Read Merchants of Doubt (amazon but no referral link)
From a cursory glance, looks like a comprehensive study...reviews seem overwhelmingly positive...but, alas, like virtually any other online media venue, also include numerous typical lame attempts by astroturf "reviewers" to troll and "debunk", on Amazon...go figure, lol.
I've been really, really annoyed, for over 50 years now, but for those who are not familiar with the craven ploys of corporate propaganda, the gory details of this subject are definitely worth looking into, and being prepared to combat.
This OP is kinda...weak, in that it kinda makes it look like it was only these two relatively small family foundations that were like the totality of mercenary corporate "science" propaganda...which, while seminal in some regards, perhaps, does not go into how pervasively the method and style are applied by monopoly corporate fascism, across the board, not only for mere PR and "marketing" purposes, but also for legal, political and economic insurgency, to defiantly maximize their "own" profits, against the public interest, the popular democratic mandate, and the peoples' will.
Those aren't a result of failed alarmism; they're a result of a deliberate disinformation campaign, where the fossil fuels industry hired the tobacco-cancer denial machine to confuse people.
The scientists have been incredibly conservative when it comes to describing consequences.
It's the same thing as DEET or cigarettes. We doubted that the research was real because industry-paid research showed that neither of those substances were dangerous. You can read more about it in "Merchants of doubt"
https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Obscured/dp/1608193942
Races are not antagonistic "jokes" about cyclists. You're just an ass. I don't watch shows that are obviously schilling for the petrochemical industry. Maybe you should read a book. Start with this.
tenured? The Overton Window of opinion you allow gets smaller and smaller every time you post.
There're tenured 'experts' in the GMU econ department too. Would you care to guess what their consensus would be? Should we make them our only 'quality contributors'?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
And you have let slip away another chance to show you have bothered to research the issue at all.
You can add this book to the stack of books you will never read:
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
http://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Obscured/dp/1608193942
The book Merchants of Doubt explains the history and philosophy of climate skepticism very well.
It may also be worth pointing out that "liberal" or "left" in America is actually roughly centre for the rest of the developed world. Policies that are "crazy left" in the US, like government controlled universal healthcare, have worked really well for the rest of us.
The idea that the media should be drawing a line in the sand that is equidistant from both political parties is remarkably similar to the Golden Mean fallacy. Similarly, the media culture leftover from the Fairness Doctrine years assumes that equal time given to both sides of an argument is the best way to present it.
Equal time and obsession with what Americans regard as "centrist" (which is very right-wing for the rest of us), has caused you great harm in the past, and continues to do so. This book does a good job at explaining why.
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