The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread

by Cailin O'Connor

In the end, no legislation on acid rain was seriously considered for five more years, until after Reagan had left the White House. When Sherwood Rowland won the Nobel Prize in 1995 for his work on CFCs and ozone, Fred Singer wrote an op-ed piece criticizing the Nobel committee: “In awarding the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to the originators of the stratospheric ozone depletion hypothesis, the Swedish Academy has chosen to make a political statement.”51 This critique echoed the earlier industry arguments that, by advocating for new regulations on the basis of his work on CFCs, Rowland had become a political agent rather than a “true scientist.” The irony here is deep. Even if we grant—as we surely must—that Rowland’s work was influenced in various ways by his political and cultural contexts, there is a huge difference between speaking out about the socially relevant consequences of one’s own scientific research, as Rowland did following his 1974 paper, and working in direct consultation with the White House to undermine a scientific panel’s findings.