Picture CC by World Economic Forum at Flickr
“The debate is over. We know what science says. We know the risks and we know that the time to react has arrived.” With these words in June 2005 the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, announced the beginning of his battle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Schwarzenegger was right. From the mid-1990s the scientific community had gained a basic consensus on global warming, and in 2001 the independent agency Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had already declared without hesitation that “the majority of the observable climate change in the last 50 years is directly related to human activity”. Yet doubt is still widespread. A significant percentage of public opinion in North America, and even in the Old Continent, along with a few distinguished scientists, such as physicists Fred Singer, consultant to the White House during Reagan’s second administration, and Frederick Seitz, who, among other things serves as a consultant to the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company as well as to the EU, are convinced that either there is no concrete proof for global warming, or that even if this is real, it is not dependent on human activity. Therefore, nothing can be done to prevent it. But how is this possible? Is it no longer possible to trust what science says?
Naomi Oreskes seeks to respond to this issue in her book Merchants of Doubt, written with Erik Conway. As a science historian at the University of San Diego, Oreskes described the way in which small groups of scientists, through high political and economic connections, launched a very effective campaign, that was able to distract public opinion from the real dangers revealed by medical and environmental science on the effects of smoking, the existence of acid rain, the size of the ozone hole, and most of all, on the consequences of global warming. By shedding light on the dark corners that exist in the United States’ scientific community, Oreskes discovered the tangible connections among scientific research, politics and big business, and investigated both the philosophical facets of doubt and those aspects that have to do with social engineering in order to create uncertainty and spread ignorance. Oreskes, determined to descend from the proverbial ivory tower of the academic world, came to the conclusion that ignorance is not simply a negative state, a lack of knowledge, but can also be the result of a positive process of constructiong doubt and areas of uncertainty.
Oreskes reveals the strategy behind well known conservative Think Tanks such as the Marshall Institute, whose exponents, directly or indirectly connected to the Republican party and to big tobacco, chemical, and oil industries, cast ongoing doubt on the scientific results whenever they happened to interfere with their economic or political interests. In the end, at least in the case of global warming, these constructors of doubt have not directly attacked the empirical issues but they rather focused on launching arguments in favor of non-conclusiveness and incomplete scientific data on climate. The effects of this strategy have been devastating, since doubt has successfully delayed political decisions and influenced legal controversies, such as those on the dangers of smokingsmoke-related danger.
Like Oreskes, we should ask ourselves if it is possible to identify the boundary between science and non-science. “I don’t believe it,” she responds on the sidelines of a recent conference held at Harvard, “and this is the circumstance that manufacturers seize to take advantage of the power of doubt. It would be much simpler if we could establish unequivocally what counts and what does not count as a ‘fact’ in a scientific analysis. But unfortunately, things are never so clear.” Oreskes strongly insists on this false view of science that serves as a basis for denying scientific discoveries on second hand smoking and global warming; it is the childish idea that science has to be the voice of absolute truth providing irrefutable evidence, an idea far from reality. Science is a historical process. “Scientific activity is a rather complicated affair. It is a human activity in which progress and expert judgment is fundamental. What we call scientific knowledge is the result of collaboration, research, proof, and consensus, however partial, from a community of experts that formulate informed judgments, though they are still subjective, on the information they gather, and eventually draw conclusions about their meaning. In certain environments society almost comes to depend on these types of experts. But every single informed and expert scientist can always say, ‘I don’t agree with you.’ This is exactly what the people we have mentioned did. However, in our book we have also demonstrated that while it was scientists who intervened, they were not experts in that particular field. For example, in the case of acid rain, the scientific data questioned by nuclear physicists– who could absolutely not be considered to be on the same level of competence on the subject– have been considered by the media and the public opinion as coming simply from authoritative scientists. Obviously if you have a doctorate in physics you cannot claim to be an expert in oncology, and the people who are funded by big businesses have consistently sought to do just this: to blur the lines between the areas of specialization. They say, ‘I am a scientist, I have a doctorate, I attended the meetings of the National Academy of Sciences, and I do not believe that global warming truly exists.’ The damage has been incalculable because people have begun to believe that there is no general consensus on global warming within the scientific community. Oftentimes we complain about the excessive specializations in science, but it is not always bad to maintain clear boundaries among the single disciplines and to listen to those who are truly competent.”
Obviously, the strategy of doubt will exploit this gap that exists in complex societies between highly specialized knowledge and the knowledge of common people, the non-scientists. The existence of this chasm raises questions on the relationship between experts and the public, or between science and democracy. Media play an important role as a link between technical knowledge and common knowledge, and can certainly be the site of the most dangerous forms of manipulation. “The system of the media,” claims Oreskes, “has a key role. The multinational tobacco industry provides defensive strategies, which are to address and influence the media. In particular, what they try to do is to take advantage of the requirement that the press and media in general have towards objectivity and balance, and insist that the same space is given to all the different points of view. Many journalists find objectivity to be synonymous with balance, in the sense of equal airtime and space for each of the positions at play. The media is thus in a particularly vulnerable position against the tobacco companies, who understand very well what they can do with this”. The issue of the interpretation of objectivity is a potential step towards a non-paranoid critique of the role of the media. “I do not think that there has been a conspiracy by the press to hide data on global warming or the dangerous effects of second-hand smoking, but rather that the media have been skillfully used and manipulated. I think that journalists should stop and reflect for a moment on what it means to be objective: if you grant the same space to two opinions that are not equally supported by scientific evidence, you create a false equilibrium. After all, if a person is telling the truth and the other one is lying, of course we do not think they deserve the same space! Furthermore, on scientific issues there are not merely two sides.”
Let’s try to enlarge the horizon. On the table we have the problems of the high degree of specialization of a kind of scientific knowledge that is very technical and thus separated from common experience, along with the problem of the phenomena, analysis and scientific predictions that have an immediate political value and can have large-scale effects on the masses. The temptation to transfer these issues to the field of the current financial and economic crisis is strong, and we wonder if Oreskes has ever thought of applying her studies on doubt and ignorance to the field of economic knowledge. She responded by saying: “Well, in a certain sense the financial crisis and our failure to combat global warming have the same cause, the ideology of neo-liberalism, or as we technically defined it in our book, ‘free-market fundamentalism.’ Over the last thirty years we have been hypnotized by its ideology, according to which the most important thing is to ‘free’ as many markets as possible, to minimize the regulations, and to let the magic of self-regulation run its course. This ideology took hold in many different areas, one of which is the financial market. Not everything, but most of what we see today and what we call ‘crisis’ is linked to this systematic deregulation and to the idea that banks and markets are regulated by themselves – I know it now seems like an absurd idea, but until a short while ago, many people were ready to believe it.” It could be argued that the logic behind the issue of global warming is very similar. “Surely the deregulation policies in particular areas may be reasonable, but it is clear that pollution coincides with the failure of a market that was left too free, in which there is no need for structure and rules.” After all, almost all scientists involved in the production of doubt share the political conviction that the real and hidden goal of climate awareness advocates would be to undermine the free market mechanism, and point to a restructuring of the government in a socialist direction.
As Oreskes has demonstrated, these are people who have never really gotten out of a Cold War way of thinking. “In the U.S. we had the carbon market, which worked quite well, even at the beginning of the first Bush administration. But in the end, it was attacked because even if it was a regulation through the market, it was still a regulation, and the ideological shift against any regulative economic idea ended up completely breaking down even that moderate mechanism. Now we are disarmed, and we see an annual growth of about 2 degrees Celsius, which will cost billions of dollars in terms of measures to be taken at State level to limit the damage, which in turn is likely to become a second Great Depression. These are the predictions of ‘experts’, including Nicholas Stern, former World Bank Chief Economist, who is not exactly a radical activist”.
(Interview by Emanuele Bompan and Paolo Savoia)
Related content
- The site of the book Merchants of Doubt, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway
- The American Denial of Global Warming – Perspectives on Ocean Science,
a video presentation by Naomi Oreskes