Book review

None of us wants to believe the truth about Climate Change. We are suckers for anyone who tells us with conviction that there isn't a problem and that nothing needs to be done. So a handful of mavericks, using the array of techniques described in this meticulously-researched book, have been able to delay remedial action on a range of crucial public health issues, sometimes for many decades, by the deliberate cultivation of our all-too-willing doubt about the soundness of the underlying science.

But the extraordinary thing is the way the same few people keep cropping up. These are the ‘Merchants of Doubt’. One them happens to be the Fred Singer who was interviewed by Professor Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society, on the recent BBC2 Horizon programme, Science Under Attack, as a prize specimen of global warming denial.

Which he is. But what was not mentioned on the programme was that this is the same Fred Singer who campaigned for the tobacco industry in their denial of the adverse effects of environmental tobacco smoke; for the fossil fuel industry in their fight to deny that the burning of coal was the cause of acid rain; for the chemical industry in their battle to deny the existence of the ozone hole – and when that was proved, of its link to the release of CFCs. He was also the Fred Singer who undermined the message of Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth by creating the false impression that the Roger Revelle, Gore's mentor and inspiration, had changed his mind about global warming just before he died. That story alone is worth getting the book to read, and if it doesn't make you very angry, nothing will. There were others like him, the names Fred Sietz and William Nierenberg are equally ubiquitous in the book, but one quote about Singer serves as an example of such people's access to power:

‘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”.’ (page 133)

Of course many people's reaction will be to reject the book piecemeal; often without reading it, like the notorious one-star reviewers of Amazon (the great majority of Amazon reviews are five-star). It is, on the face of it, a story of almost unbelievable wickedness, and our humanity revolts against the possibility of it being true. But it is a story told in careful, consistent detail, in calm and understated terms, by two historians of science. And it is backed up by 64 pages of references.

The next reaction will be to ask what can possibly motivate these ‘merchants’. When they are in the pay of vested interests there is no mystery, but what, you may well ask, about global warming? Don't they live on Earth with the rest of us? Do none of them have grandchildren too? And here the book provides a very interesting and convincing answer.

Many of these people were physicists of the highest distinction during the Cold War. They share a passionate commitment to freedom, and are therefore fiercely antipathetic to regulation of any kind. They see all regulation as a route to socialism, and therefore communism, that perennial bogeyman of the American right. Devotees of the economic theories of Milton Friedman, they believe that capitalism is the only way to solve the world's problems, and they are passionately opposed to any science which demonstrates the inconvenient truth that capitalism contains no mechanism for protecting the environment. This explains why they are opposed to environmentalism per se, and repeat catch phrases like ‘Green trees with red roots’ to one another. And when science conflicts with their ideology, they set out ruthlessly to undermine science itself. Often with unctuously hypocritical publications like Bad Science: A Resource Book of 1993, websites like http://www.JunkScience.com, or institutions like The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), whose links to the Philip Morris tobacco company were deliberately obscured.

I have a personal interest here, because a common thread in much of my own writing, indeed inherent in the title of my first book, The Paradox of Progress, is my passionate antipathy to excessive, intrusive, humanity-sapping regulation. But these ‘Merchants of Doubt’ are threatening to bring even moderates like me into disrepute. The truth is that I am also passionately committed to science; my father was secretary to the British Association for the Advancement of Science for heaven's sake; it is in my blood. And I don't try tricks like the one that was played on the University of East Anglia, not mentioned in the book, but which is still working its poison. The only real ‘scandal’ here was the way this manufactured smear was reported around the world in such absurdly inflated terms – James Delingpole's Spectator article calling it ‘the greatest scientific scandal in the history of the world’1 being not atypical – and the way the subsequent multiple exonerations of the Climate Research Unit have been hardly reported at all, and have made so little impact on the public consciousness. Indeed James Delingpole was still using the ridiculously inappropriate term ‘Climategate’ on the recent Horizon programme referred to previously, and clearly still hasn't twigged the extent to which he was duped.

As Aaron Sorkin said recently, ‘Nothing is more important to democracy than a well-informed electorate’.2 It is a curious paradox that just when electorates have unprecedented access to information they also have unprecedented power to select the information they listen to. The world is dividing into enclaves which talk only within themselves and in that environment the most extreme ignorance can feed upon itself and thrive.

The importance of this book can hardly be exaggerated. Its complex story is told with the pace of a thriller. I never read the Da Vinci Code and I'm not going to bother now, because this is the real thing, The vitally important thing, and for once it is no exaggeration to say that, is that we all learn the techniques of the professional deniers that this book exposes, so that we can recognise them when we see them, and guard ourselves, our society, and our world, from their malign power.

• © British Journal of General Practice, January 2011