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June 8 - June 26, 2017
It’s a foundational ethic of scientific work: no claim can be considered valid—not even potentially valid—until it has passed peer review.
The industry made its case in part by cherry-picking data and focusing on unexplained or anomalous details. No one in 1954 would have claimed that everything that needed to be known about smoking and cancer was known, and the industry exploited this normal scientific honesty to spin unreasonable doubt.
It’s one thing for scientists to report something in peer-reviewed journals, however, and another for the country’s doctor in chief to announce it publicly, loud and clear.
Industry doubt-mongering worked in part because most of us don’t really understand what it means to say something is a cause. We think it means that if A causes B, then if you do A, you will get B. If smoking causes cancer, then if you smoke, you will get cancer. But life is more
In science, something can be a statistical cause, in the sense that that if you smoke, you are much more likely to get cancer.
Doubt-mongering also works because we think science is about facts—cold, hard, definite facts.
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.
In the years to come various groups and individuals began to challenge scientific evidence that threatened their commercial interests or ideological beliefs.
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 Such arguments are effectively impossible to refute, as Lewis noted. “A belief in invisible cats cannot be logically disproved,” although it does “tell us a good deal about those who hold it.”19
They understood the power of language: you could undermine your opponents’ claims by insisting that theirs were uncertain, while presenting your own as if they were not.
By May 1986, sixty-five hundred academic scientists had signed a pledge not to solicit or accept funds from the missile defense research program, a pledge that received abundant media coverage.25 Historically, it was unprecedented. Scientists had never before refused to build a weapons system when the government had asked. Why did scientists react so strongly to SDI?
also demonstrated that you could get what you wanted if you argued with enough conviction, even if you didn’t have the facts on your side.
Science is hard—why so many kids hate it in school—and nothing is ever entirely clear. There are always more questions to be asked, which is why expert consensus is so significant—a point we will return to later in this book.
SCIENCE IS NEVER FINISHED, so the relevant policy question is always whether the available evidence is persuasive, and whether the established facts outweigh the residual uncertainties.
One aspect of the effort to cast doubt on ozone depletion was the construction of a counternarrative that depicted ozone depletion as a natural variation that was being cynically exploited by a corrupt, self-interested, and extremist scientific community to get more money for their research.
Singer neglected to mention Ramanathan and Hansen’s arguments, and in doing so misrepresented their larger points: both the surface warming and stratospheric cooling trends were direct results of human activities. The ozone hole was anthropogenic from two distinct, but interrelated, standpoints: the excess chlorine came from CFCs, and the cooling effect came from anthropogenic global warming.
Those charged with protecting public health were less sanguine.
Industry disinformation campaigns now took new and creative forms. Sylvester Stallone was paid $500,000 to use Brown and Williamson products in no fewer than five feature films to link smoking with power and strength, rather than sickness and death.
The industry promoted the idea of “sick building syndrome” to suggest that headaches and other problems suffered by workers in smoky atmospheres were caused by the buildings, not smoke.
Bad, bad science. You can practically see the fingers wagging. Scientists had been bad boys; it was time for them to behave themselves. The tobacco industry would be the daddy who made sure they did. It wasn’t just money at stake; it was individual liberty. Today, smoking, tomorrow … who knew? By protecting smoking, we protected freedom.
The strategy was nothing if not clever, for these articles were based on real events and real concerns within the scientific community.
In fact, no scientific results were corrected by any of these articles, because the point wasn’t to correct particular scientific mistakes. It was to provide the reader with materials to challenge science in general, as a means to challenge science on any topic. And the topic at issue was secondhand smoke.
Scientists are confident they know bad science when they see it. It’s science that is obviously fraudulent—when data have been invented, fudged, or manipulated. Bad science is where data have been cherry-picked—when some data have been deliberately left out—or it’s impossible for the reader to understand the steps that were taken to produce or analyze the data. It is a set of claims that can’t be tested, claims that are based on samples that are too small, and claims that don’t follow from the evidence provided. And science is bad—or at least weak—when proponents of a position jump to
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They “found the evidence for respiratory health effects in children to be stronger and more persuasive” than stated, and suggested that the panel consider the possibility that “the impact of ETS on respiratory effects in children may have much greater public health significance than the impact of ETS on lung cancer in nonsmokers.”85 In other words, while 3,000 additional adult lung cancer deaths per year was a serious public health concern, 150,000 to 300,000 cases of bronchitis and pneumonia in infants and young children was even worse.
Mrak was pulling a rhetorical switcheroo because it wasn’t environmentalists who argued everything was harmful; it was the tobacco industry. The industry insisted that everything from crossing the street to riding a bicycle was harmful, so tobacco should be viewed as just one of the routine risks that people accept by living life. The menace of daily life, some industry apologists called it.105 Life is dangerous. So is tobacco. Get used to it. So the tobacco industry argued. But there’s a world of difference between risks we choose to accept in exchange for rewards we want—like driving a car,
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Anti-Communism had launched the weapons and rocketry programs that launched the careers of Singer, Seitz, and Nierenberg, and anti-Communism had underlain their politics since the days of Sputnik. Their defense of freedom was a defense against Soviet Communism. But somehow, somewhere, defending America against the Soviet threat had transmogrified into defending the tobacco industry against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
BUGS AND BACTERIA offer the best evidence we have of natural selection. When an insecticide wipes out part of a population, the ones that survive pass on their genes to their offspring, and it is only a matter of time before the population adapts to the insecticide-laden environment.
Carson’s argument was that any war on nature was one that we were bound to lose.
was a mistake to assume that the only harms that counted were physical. Even if DDT caused not one human death, humans would be affected: our world would be impoverished if spring came and no birds sang.
Scientists’ commitment to expertise and objectivity also places them in a delicate position when it comes to refuting false claims. If a scientist jumps into the fray on a politically contested issue, he may be accused of “politicizing” the science and compromising his objectivity—as Carl Sagan was when he tried to call public attention to the dangers of nuclear winter. This places scientists in a double bind: the demands of objectivity suggest that they should keep aloof from contested issues, but if they don’t get involved, no one will know what an objective view of the matter looks like.
An all-purpose expert is an oxymoron.
Sensible decision making involves acting on the information we have, even while accepting that it may well be imperfect and our decisions may need to be revisited and revised in light of new information.
