Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes
My rating: ✰✰✰✰ of 5 stars
I work for an environmental agency, during a conference on Climate Change, the speaker recommended this book. I immediately downloaded it. It took me a while to get to it and a while to finish reading it.
This is a powerful book, it details the methods used by a group of scientists, physicists to be exact, manipulated the press, the public, and politicians to fit their agenda. To say they were a group of bitter old men is an oversimplification, but that is the feeling I am left with.
These scientists accused others of the very same things they were doing, cherry picking data and results, and molding the research to fit their conclusions.
Tobacco, secondhand smoke, acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer, global warming/climate change and the scientists that researched them were all attacked. They also attacked Rachel Carson and the ban on DDT, claiming millions of African children died of malaria, conveniently leaving out that many may have died because of their work with the tobacco companies convincing people that the connection between smoking and cancer was ‘not proven’.
As I said this is a powerful book, well researched, with quotes that actually name a source. Everyone who lives on the planet earth should read it.
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