Quotes from Naomi Oreskes

and that greater use of pesticides was the key to wiping out world hunger (although most social scientist disagree, pointing out that there is plenty of food in the world; the problem we face is one of unequal distribution.)

The "real" agenda of environmentalists—and the scientists who provided the data on which they relied—was to destroy capitalism and replace it with some sort of worldwide utopian Socialism—or perhaps Communism. That echoed a common right-wing refrain in the early 1990s: that environmental regulation was the slippery slope to Socialism. In 1992, columnist George Will encapsulated this view, saying that environmentalism was a "green tree with red roots.

No one in 1993 would have argued that the EPA was a perfect agency, or that there weren't some regulations that needed to be revamped; even its supporters had said as much. But the tobacco industry didn't want to make the EPA work better and more sensibly; they wanted to bring it down.

In 2006, U.S. district judge Gladys Kessler found that the tobacco industry had "devised and executed a scheme to defraud consumers and potential consumers" about the hazards of cigarettes, hazards that their own internal company documents proved they had known about since the 1950s.

assumptions are not perceived as such."98 They are so embedded as to go unrecognized as assumptions, and this is most likely to occur in homogeneous communities.

It wasn't the Sierra Club that tried to pressure the National Academy of Sciences over the 1983 Carbon Dioxide Assessment; it was officials from the Department of Energy under Ronald Reagan. It wasn't Environmental Defense that worked with Bill Nierenberg to alter the Executive Summary of the 1983 Acid Rain Peer Review Panel; it was the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. And it was the Wall Street Journal spreading the attack

When scientists discovered the limits of planetary sinks, they also discovered market failure. The toxic effects of DDT, acid rain, the depletion of the ozone layer, and climate change were serious problems for which markets did not provide a spontaneous remedy.

Accepting that by-products of industrial civilization were irreparably damaging the global environment was to accept the reality of market failure. It was to acknowledge the limits of free market capitalism.

This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through … a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. —Lyndon Johnson Special Message to Congress, 1965

So industry executives made a fateful decision, one that would later become the basis on which a federal judge would find the industry guilty of conspiracy to commit fraud—a massive and ongoing fraud to deceive the American public about the health effects of smoking.24 The decision was to hire a public relations firm to challenge the scientific evidence that smoking could kill you.

A third of all Americans think that Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks on September 11.3 Nearly a quarter still think that there's no solid evidence that smoking kills.4 And as recently as 2007, 40 percent of Americans believed that scientific experts were still arguing about the reality of global warming.5

The four company presidents—as well as the CEOs of R. J. Reynolds and Brown and Williamson—had agreed to cooperate on a public relations program to defend their product.25 They would work together to convince the public that there was "no sound scientific basis for the charges," and that the recent reports were simply "sensational accusations" made by publicity-seeking scientists hoping to attract more funds for their research.

Santer and his colleagues have shown that the troposphere is warming and the stratosphere is cooling. In fact, because the boundary between these two atmospheric layers is in part defined by temperature, that boundary is now moving upward. In other words, the whole structure of our atmosphere is changing. These results are impossible to explain if the Sun were the culprit. It shows that the changes we are seeing in our climate are not natural.

They would not sit idly by while their product was vilified; instead, they would create a Tobacco Industry Committee for Public Information to supply a "positive" and "entirely 'pro-cigarette'" message to counter the anti-cigarette scientific one. As the U.S. Department of Justice would later put it, they decided "to deceive the American public about the health effects of smoking.

Russell Seitz and the defenders of tobacco invoked liberty, too. But as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin sagely pointed out, liberty for wolves means death to lambs.124 Our society has always understood that freedoms

We take it for granted that great individuals—Gandhi, Kennedy, Martin Luther King—can have great positive impacts on the world. But we are loath to believe the same about negative impacts—unless the individuals are obvious monsters like Hitler or Stalin. But small numbers of people can have large, negative impacts, especially if they are organized, determined, and have access to power.

We've noted how the notion of balance was enshrined in the Fairness Doctrine, and it may make sense for political news in a two-party system (although not in a multiparty system). But it doesn't reflect the way science works. In an active scientific debate, there can be many sides. But once a scientific issue is closed, there's only one "side." Imagine providing "balance" to the issue of whether the Earth orbits the Sun, whether continents move,

Historian Robert Proctor has recently documented the creation of newsletters, magazines, and journals—including journals with ostensible peer review—in which the results of industry-sponsored research could be reported, published, and then cited, as if they were independent. These included Tobacco and Health, Science Fortnightly, and the Indoor Air Journal.13 It was a simulacrum of science, but not science itself.

When posed to journalists, however, the loaded questions did the trick: they convinced people who didn't know otherwise that there was still a lot of doubt about the whole matter. The industry had realized that you could create the impression of controversy simply by asking questions, even if you actually knew the answers and they didn't help your case.41 And so the industry began to transmogrify emerging scientific consensus into raging scientific "debate.

How are we to evaluate the truth claims of science when we know that these claims may in the future be overturned? Elsewhere I have called this problem the instability of scientific truth.16 In the 1980s, philosopher Larry Laudan called it the pessimistic meta-induction of the history of science.17 He observed (as have many others) that the history of science offers many examples of scientific "truths" that were later viewed as misconceptions