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 …