Merchants of Doubt
Description
Featuring a new Foreword by former Vice President Al Gore
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
"Important and timely. We ignore this message at our peril."-Elizabeth Kolbert
Merchants of Doubt has been praised-and attacked-around the world, for reasons easy to understand. This book tells, with "brutal clarity" (Huffington Post), the disquieting story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. The same individuals who claim the science of global warming is "not settled" have also denied the truth about studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. "Doubt is our product," wrote one tobacco executive. These "experts" supplied it. Merchants of Doubt rolls back the rug on this dark corner of American science. Now with a new Foreword by former Vice President Al Gore, and with a new Postscript by the authors.
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Persons
Naomi Oreskes is a professor of the history of science and affiliated professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University. Her study "Beyond the Ivory Tower," published in Science in 2004, was a milestone in the fight against global warming denial and was cited by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth. Her books include Why Trust Science? and Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don't Know about the Ocean.
Erik M. Conway has published five previous books, including Atmospheric Science at NASA: A History and Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars. Merchants of Doubt was their first book together. In 2014, they published The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, and they are currently working on The Magic of the Marketplace: The True History of a False Idea.