Merchants of Doubt

Kenner tells us that big oil is using the same tactics – and often the same personnel – as big tobacco: set up any number of supposedly independent thinktanks, get plausible professionals on the (mouthwatering) payroll, and just sow the seeds of doubt. You undermine conviction, filibuster government action, fog public opinion, get brazen blowhards to shout loudly on Fox News. And the people best at this are the ageing, neocon attack dogs, veterans of the tobacco wars, who in the evening of their lives find a thrilling new purpose in climate change doubt-production.

A felicitously presented documentary on global warming -- or rather how to under mine acceptance of scientific findings. Full disclosure: I am a behavioral scientist who has spent thirty years in research and can generally tell the good from the bad.

According to this film it all began with the tobacco industry. I don't know why it's so consistently called "big tobacco" since as far as I can tell there is no such thing as "little tobacco." If there were, what would it look like -- a Mom and Pop store with a patch of tobacco plants in the back yard and a cigarette rolling machine? Anyway -- you'll have to excuse my divagations. The voices tell me to do it from time to time.

Anyway, things began to get a bit hot for the tobacco industry in the 1950s with the growing public awareness of what appeared to be a link between smoking and lung cancer. So they hired a PR firm to help them out, and it worked fine for forty or fifty years. There was a scroll of techniques for disarming the public, for introducing doubt about the conclusion. I didn't write the dozen or so down because I wasn't taking notes, but they ran along lines like "attack the messenger", "find another enemy," "muddy the waters," "pay for your own experts," "say we need more research," and the like.

It was really a dirty business, not just because it wound up killing so many people but because it laid out a playbook for handling controversies in other scientific areas backed by vested interests. The techniques were so effective at inducing confusion that other industries have picked them up and used them. All of the techniques are now being used daily by the fossil fuel industry.

Some of the "merchants of doubt" are proud of their profession, as all effective professionals should be. The most agreeable of them admits to enjoying sending anonymous death threats to climate scientists, and I would be surprised if there weren't ill-paid human robots in Macedonia or someplace who were being paid to grind out insults and fake news about what they call "global warming alarmism."

There is no debate in scientific circles about anthropogenic global warming. The only questions left are about details, not about human contributions to climate change. That matter is settled. Look up Global Warming Controversy in Wikipedia. And recall, though the film doesn't mention it, that most leaders of the developed world came to an agreement in Kyoto about reducing greenhouse gases. We withdrew from the Kyoto accords some ten years ago, when we were the world's leading polluter. It was 2015 when about 200 countries were represented at a meeting in Paris and agreed to more stringent rules governing greenhouse gas emission, including China, which had taken over the number one spot. The USA signed the agreement too but we're now in the process of pulling out.

I'd always wondered what exactly motivated the people who stood firm in opposition to the indisputable findings of scientists around the world. It had to be something more general, more implanted in the mind, than simple skepticism because, after all, scientists are among the most skeptical people on earth. Without giving it much thought, I finally came to think it might be simply that acceptance of anthropogenic global warming had somehow come to be defined as a "liberal" position. (To me, it was about as liberal as the Zika virus.)

But the rhetoric of "climate deniers" pins it down to an impulse that no one can argue with -- the desire for "freedom," specifically freedom from still more government regulations. Nobody wants Big Brother telling him what to eat or what kind of energy to use. Another reasons, briefly referred to, is that most scientists are poor public performers. They don't pound their chests and bellow, and they talk like wimps. Compare Bill Nye the Science Guy with Rush Limbaugh or Alex Jones. I mean, for Bog's sake, Nye wears a BOW TIE!

I doubt that the program will persuade anyone who denies AGW that they're wrong. It's tough for anyone to admit he's wrong. I'm afraid a lot of people will dismiss the program as still more socialist propaganda. However, it's a well-done documentary, both in terms of the narrative and the visual effects. It's not at all academic. It's far too clear for that -- and much more entertaining.

I made the mistake of reading the user reviews before watching and was expecting a mediocre film. Thankfully it was much better than that. I found it to be thoroughly interesting and entertaining while doing a great job of detailing the depth of scumbaggery and deception behind the climate change denialist movement.

The imagery, interview editing, flow of the narrative, choice of people to interview, camera work were all outstanding. I highly recommend that anyone who is not already committed to denialism watch it. Some might find some parts shocking but overwhelmingly the evidence points to the views expressed in this film being correct.

I wasn't thrilled with the magic tricks being blended in to this excellent expose of science denial funded by big business. It just distracted from the excellent content showing strategic manipulation of the public and legislation by unbelievably conscience-less minions, starting with big tobacco and followed by flame retardant chemicals and climate change science. As a movie I would rate it lower but the material presented was worth more, thus the 8 stars. One tidbit from the film: the average American sofa contains 2 POUNDS of flame retardant chemicals. These of course escape into the bodies that use the furniture and into the air around the furniture, resulting in American babies being born with HUGE levels of these chemicals compared to babies born in any other country on earth. It also showed how the "lessons" learned by big tobacco's 50 years of successfully suppressing science has been replicated repeatedly across many industries. If there is a hell, this film highlights several folks who should end up there.

The doc is enlightening, and timely. I worked in the tobacco litigation and this film gets it spot on. In the face of near universal consensus, tobacco companies hired marketing firms and paid scientists to poke holes in prevailing well established theory, attempting to cast doubt where anything less than 100% certainty exists, which in science, it essentially always does.

Now the climate change deniers come out, in the face of 97% worldwide consensus, peddling the same nonsense. The doubters don't contest the data, which is indisputable. They instead attack the motives of 97% of the climatologists in the world. And their intended audience buys it hook line and sinker yet again.

Reasonable doubt is essential to science, and in that meritocracy, the best explanation wins. Here, decades of data have made the situation clear. Yet, climate denier laymen, for some reason, choose to believe the 3% of scientists who are largely funded by the interests most likely to suffer financial harm should alternative energy be explored in full.

You can't fix stupid.