Merchants of Doubt Quotes

“While the idea of equal time for opposing opinions makes sense in a two-party political system, it does not work for science, because science is not about opinion. It is about evidence.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“The industry had realized you could create the impression of controversy simply by asking questions”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“For the past 150 years, industrial civilization has been dining on the energy stored in fossil fuels, and the bill has come due. Yet, we have sat around the dinner table denying that it is our bill, and doubting the credibility of the man who delivered it.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“Science is pretty much the same. A conclusion becomes established not when a clever person proposes it, or even a group of people begin to discuss it, but when the jury of peers—the community of researchers—reviews the evidence and concludes that it is sufficient to accept the claim.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“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.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“The problem was that public had no way to know that this “evidence” was part of an industry campaign designed to confuse. It was, in fact, part of a criminal conspiracy to commit fraud.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“C. P. Snow once argued that foolish faith in authority is the enemy of truth.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“In the 1950s, the tobacco industry realized that they could protect their product by casting doubt on the science and insisting the dangers of smoking were unproven. In the 1990s, they realized that if you could convince people that science in general was unreliable, then you didn’t have to argue the merits of any particular case, particularly one—like the defense of secondhand smoke—that had no scientific merit. In the demonizing of Rachel Carson, free marketeers realized that if you could convince people that an example of successful government regulation wasn’t, in fact, successful—that it was actually a mistake—you could strengthen the argument against regulation in general.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“Conventional statistics is set up to be skeptical and avoid type 1 errors. The 95 percent confidence standard means that there is only 1 chance in 20 that you believe something that isn’t true. That is a very high bar. It reflects a scientific worldview in which skepticism is a virtue, credulity is not.90 As one Web site puts it, “A type I error is often considered to be more serious, and therefore more important to avoid, than a type II error.”91 In fact, some statisticians claim that type 2 errors aren’t really errors at all, just missed opportunities.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“While the idea of equal time for opposing opinions makes sense in a two-party political system, it does not work for science, because science is not about opinion. It is about evidence. It is about claims that can be, and have been, tested through scientific research—experiments, experience, and observation—research that is then subject to critical review by a jury of scientific peers. Claims that have not gone through that process—or have gone through it and failed—are not scientific, and do not deserve equal time in a scientific debate.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“All scientific work is incomplete—whether it be observational or experimental. All scientific work is liable to be upset or modified by advancing knowledge. That does not confer upon us a freedom to ignore the knowledge we already have, to postpone action that it appears to demand at a given time. Who knows, asks Robert Browning, but the world may end tonight? True, but on available evidence most of us make ready to commute on the 8:30 next day.9”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“Economists have a term for these costs—a less reassuring one than Friedman’s “neighborhood effects.” They are “negative externalities”: negative because they aren’t beneficial and external because they fall outside the market system. Those who find this hard to accept attack the messenger, which is science.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“Singer cited the famous essay “The Tragedy of the Commons,” in which biologist Garrett Hardin argued that individuals acting in their rational self-interest may undermine the common good, and warned against assuming that technology would save us from ourselves. “If we ignore the present warning signs and wait for an ecological disaster to strike, it will probably be too late,” Singer noted. He imagined what it must have been like to be Noah, surrounded by “complacent compatriots,” saying, “‘Don’t worry about the rising waters, Noah; our advanced technology will surely discover a substitute for breathing.’ If it was wisdom that enabled Noah to believe in the ‘never-yet-happened,’ we could use some of that wisdom now,” Singer concluded.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“The “real” agenda of environmentalists—and the scientists who provided the data on which they relied—was to destroy capitalism and replace it with some sort of worldwide utopian Socialism—or perhaps Communism. That echoed a common right-wing refrain in the early 1990s: that environmental regulation was the slippery slope to Socialism. In 1992, columnist George Will encapsulated this view, saying that environmentalism was a “green tree with red roots.”99”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“Did all of Singer’s efforts to discredit mainstream science matter? When asked in 1995 where he got his assessments of ozone depletion, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, probably the most powerful man in Congress at the time, said, “my assessment is from reading people like Fred Singer.”93”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“Throughout our story, the people involved demanded the right to be heard, insisting that we—the public—had the right to hear both sides and that the media had an obligation to present it. They insisted that this was only fair and democratic. But were they attempting to preserve democracy? No. The issue was not free speech; it was free markets.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“Two crucial developments during the presidential campaign year of 1988 changed climate science forever. The first was the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The second was the announcement by climate modeler James E. Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, that anthropogenic global warming had begun. An organized campaign of denial began the following year, and soon ensnared the entire climate science community.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“If you believed in capitalism, you had to attack science, because science had revealed the hazards that capitalism had brought in its wake. The biggest hazard of them all—one that could truly affect the entire planet—was just at that moment coming to public attention: global warming. Global warming would become the mother of all environmental issues, because it struck at the very root of economic activity: the use of energy. So perhaps not surprisingly, the same people who had questioned acid rain, doubted the ozone hole, and defended tobacco now attacked the scientific evidence of global warming.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“A similar phenomenon developed with acid rain in the 1990s, as the media attended to the idea that its cause was still not established—more than a decade after that was no longer true—or the claim that it would cost more to fix than it was worth, which was unsupported by evidence.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“In an active scientific debate, there can be many sides. But once a scientific issue is closed, there’s only one “side.” Imagine providing “balance” to the issue of whether the Earth orbits the Sun, whether continents move, or whether DNA carries genetic information. These matters were long ago settled in scientists’ minds. Nobody can publish an article in a scientific journal claiming the Sun orbits the Earth, and for the same reason, you can’t publish an article in a peer-reviewed journal claiming there’s no global warming.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“From its earliest, days, science has been associated with institutions—the Accademia dei Lincei, founded in 1609, the Royal Society in Britain, founded in 1660, the Académie des Sciences in France, founded in 1666—because scholars (savants and natural philosophers as they were variously called before the nineteenth-century invention of the word “scientist”) understood that to create new knowledge they needed a means to test each other’s claims.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“Like its bête noire, Marxism, laissez-faire economics claimed to be scientific, based upon immutable laws of nature, and also like Marxism, it has not stood the test of experience. If it were a scientific theory, it would have long ago been rejected.37 Free-market fundamentalism is an article of faith.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“The Heartland Institute is known among climate scientists for persistent questioning of climate science, for its promotion of “experts” who have done little, if any, peer-reviewed climate research, and for its sponsorship of a conference in New York City in 2008 alleging that the scientific community’s work on global warming is a fake.75 But Heartland’s activities are far more extensive, and reach back into the 1990s when they, too, were working with Philip Morris.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“As University of California professor Stanton Glantz and his colleagues have shown in their exhaustive reading of tobacco industry documents, by the early 1960s the industry’s own scientists had concluded not only that smoking caused cancer, but also that nicotine was addictive (a conclusion that mainstream scientists came to only in the 1980s, and the industry would continue to deny well into the 1990s).58”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“This was the Bad Science strategy in a nutshell: plant complaints in op-ed pieces, in letters to the editor, and in articles in mainstream journals to whom you’d supplied the “facts,” and then quote them as if they really were facts. Quote, in fact, yourself. A perfect rhetorical circle. A mass media echo chamber of your own construction.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“In “My Adventures in the Ozone Layer,” he cast the scientific community as dominated by self-interest. “It’s not difficult to understand some of the motivations behind the drive to regulate CFCs out of existence,” he wrote. “For scientists: prestige, more grants for research, press conferences, and newspaper stories. Also the feeling that maybe they are saving the world for future generations.”69 (As if saving the world would be a bad thing!)”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“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. One of the first people to make this argument was a man who had been a fellow at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1980s: Fred Singer.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“During the early 1980s, anti-environmentalism had taken root in a network of conservative and Libertarian think tanks in Washington. These think tanks—which included the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Marshall Institute, variously promoted business interests and “free market” economic policies, and the rollback of environmental, health, safety, and labor protections. They were supported by donations from businessmen, corporations, and conservative foundations.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“These men, committed as they were to freedom—liberty as they understood it, and viewing themselves as the guardians of it—were therefore also committed capitalists. But their scientific colleagues were increasingly finding evidence that capitalism was failing in a crucial respect: it was failing to protect the natural environment upon which all life—free or not—ultimately depends.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“Historians and sociologists in the 1960s and ’70s had stressed that scientists work in communities where they are buffeted by the same social forces that prevail in all human communities, plus a few distinctive ones. One of these distinctive pressures was the pressure to innovate, which at times encouraged individuals to cut corners.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming