Climate Misinformation and The Merchants of Doubt
From the 1980s, climate scientists have focused on giving a decisive word on climate change and the role of human activities in bringing it. While a high degree of consensus has been reached among climatologists, there are a group of “merchants of doubts” who stand against solid scientific results and spread climate doubt from 1990 onward. The “merchants of doubt” mainly consist of companies from fossil fuel industries, and “think tanks” they funded, i.e. organizations urging policies against regulation on oil production. The “merchants of doubt” have their views backed up by a few influential scientists, and such views subsequently spread through mass media, leading the public to doubt on scientific truth. Public attitudes toward climate science reflect their misunderstanding about general scientific processes, and strategies of “merchants of doubts” largely depend on such deviated perception from real science.
One of the important strategies used by the “merchants of doubt” and “think tanks” is to seek a voice from prominent scientists who were skeptics of climate change. Two physicists, Fred Singer and Frederick Seitz, who are associated with the oil industries, persistently spread disinformation about climate change. After the release of 1996 IPCC report affirming climate change, the Global Climate Coalition, a lobbyist group formed by oil companies, accused the report of removing evidence of uncertain data. Concurrently, Fred Singer claimed that data favoring uncertainties in changes of temperature has been removed and should be added to re-evaluate the models. Also, thinks tanks disguise their intentions with the name of promoting better public polices and spread doubt by gearing government’s attention away from environmental-friendly policies. According to the film “Merchants of Doubt”, one of the think tanks, George Marshall Institute, is heavily funded by oil companies, and its president William O’Keefe has been a client of oil companies. After putting on the mask of a neutral organization, think tanks could eventually affect the decision-making process of the government, and reports produced by them have constantly been shaping public doubt.
All those effective strategies prompted us to explore reasons behind the persuasiveness of claims coming from “the merchants of doubt”. A general explanation might be that the public have long misunderstood what science meant. This could be directly reflected by a trust in non-climate scientists like Frederick Seitz in mass media. These scientists who cast doubt on climate change have conducted few researches in climate science. However, the reputation brought by their research in other fields made them a credible voice in public, though their claims are mostly baseless. To illustrate, in areas in which people have no expertise in, turning to experts and take their words as reliable facts might seem a reasonable choice. Science has usually been a remote area from people’s life, and the generality and broadness implied by a single word “science” could blur boundaries between specific areas. It’s a misconception about the highly specialized nature of science that lead people to believe in words from scientists whose expertise lie in fields other than climatology, and lead the media to tie climate change topics to scientific controversies.
Except for misunderstandings in research process, lack of appreciation for vagueness and uncertainties in conclusions has pushed misinformation further. A vast majority of people expect science to be unchangeable truth, and fail to accept uncertainties in scientific conclusions. However, any scientific work must be based on a standardized data collection and present conclusions holistically. A minimum amount of dissonance in data could lead to some uncertainties. Plus, science itself is not about unchanging facts. New scientific theories are built by challenging previous 'truth' and modifying or overthrowing it, exemplified by how Newton's law replaced Aristotle’s previous theory of motion and promoted the advance of physics. The “science equals certainty” formula should be dig out from public conception and replaced with an impression that any scientific conclusion is subject to changes incurred by new data or future discoveries. Otherwise, arguments from anti-climate change scientists like Singer would still work by pointing out traces of uncertainties, an indispensable component of science, or by mentioning its “incompleteness”, which is a paradox, for the path to truth is never closed and complete.
To sum up, “merchants of doubt” interacted in ways such that corporations provided funding, scientists used their voice to lend support, and “think tanks” targeted public policies. It appears difficult to break such alliance, but people should form a better understanding toward science, and as long as erroneous views are corrected, the “merchants of doubt” will lose their ground base of opinions.
