Perspectives on global warming: Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway: Merchants of doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010, 368pp, $ 27.00 HB

Metascience (2012) 21:531559 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9639-9

BOOK SYMPOSIUM

Perspectives on global warming

Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway: Merchants of doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010, 368pp, $ 27.00 HB

Steven Yearley David Mercer Andy Pitman

Naomi Oreskes Erik Conway

Published online: 12 January 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Steven Yearley

This is a terrically researched and very well presented book. It is a major achievement to produce a trade book based on the social and historical analysis of science that tells a wonderful, though alarming, story with wit and irony. The heart of this story is the way that industry interests, friendly scientists and conservative activistsmainly in the UShave over the last half century developed a strategy for generating the appearance of doubt relating to the scientic claims underwriting a series of environmental and public health reforms. The dramatic but wryly entertaining aspect of this story is that in the differing elds of smoking, acid rain, ozone depletion, nuclear winter and climate change, the same scientists and advisers

S. Yearley (&)

ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum, University of Edinburgh, Holyrood Road, Edinburgh EH8 8AQ, UKe-mail: [email protected]

D. Mercer

Science and Technology Studies Program, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australiae-mail: [email protected]

A. Pitman

Climate Change Research Centre, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australiae-mail: [email protected]

N. Oreskes

Department of History, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0104, USA e-mail: [email protected]

E. Conway

Caltech, 1200 East California Blvd., Pasadena, CA 91125, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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manage to crop up, always trying to talk the regulations down. They devise and rene a strategy of focusing on generating the appearance of doubt, insisting on media outlets featuring balanced coverage of the two sides, and of targeting a series of friendly mass-media outlets. Nearly everyone has noted the t between some conservative politicians and the self-styled sceptics, but the great achievement of Oreskes and Conway is twofold: rst, to have shown how often it is the same core of doubt-mongers (usually including Fred Seitz and S. Fred Singer) who are present almost irrespective of the specic scientic issue, and second, to have...