Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

by Naomi Oreskes

A scientific discovery is not an event; it’s a process, and often it takes time for the full picture to come into clear focus.

Doubt-mongering also works because we think science is about facts—cold, hard, definite facts. If someone tells us that things are uncertain, we think that means that the science is muddled. This is a mistake. There are always uncertainties in any live science, because science is a process of discovery.

Doubt is crucial to science—in the version we call curiosity or healthy skepticism, it drives science forward—but it also makes science vulnerable to misrepresentation, because it is easy to take uncertainties out of context and create the impression that everything is unresolved.

The writer C. S. Lewis once characterized this style of argument: “The very lack of evidence is thus treated as evidence; the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden.”18

Singer made a similar argument in a book on population control published in 1971, in which he framed the debate about population as a clash between neo-Malthusians, who focused on the limits of resources, and Cornucopians, who believed that resources are created by human ingenuity and are therefore unlimited.

weight-of-evidence approach: no one study is perfect, but each can contribute useful information.

ORWELL UNDERSTOOD THAT those in power will always seek to control history, because whoever controls the past controls the present.

But not every “side” is right or true; opinions sometimes express ill-informed beliefs, not reliable knowledge. As we’ve seen throughout this book, some “sides” represent deliberate disinformation spread by well-organized and well-funded vested interests, or ideologically driven denial of the facts. Even honest people with good intentions may be confused or mistaken about an issue.