Thursday, February 10, 2011

Merchants of Doubt

The January 17 Issue of C&EN has a book review by Gavin Schmidt. His review is entitled, "Sowing Seeds of Doubt". The book he reviewed is entitled, "Merchants of Doubt".

In his review, Gavin Schmidt says, "Scientists such as ourselves are not immune to self-delusion, and even the brightest among us can fall prey to the substitution of wishful thinking for rigorous logic when the science points to conclusions that uncomfortably conflict with our world view". This caught my attention and possible relevancy to the topic of "Climate Change", which previously was called "Global Warming". I read Gavin's whole article, but I did not read the original "Merchants Of Doubt".

I came away somewhat confused. Who are the merchants of doubt? Gavin refers to an example in the original work whereby a handful of scientists obscured the truth on health issues of tobacco smoke. Are these supposed to be the "Merchants of Doubt"? By my logic, they are not. They were supporting a myth that there were no health issues related to tobacco smoking.

Contrarily, I am a "Merchant of Doubt". Although I never gave it much thought during the period I was smoking, I never was a merchant of doubt on the health issue. Anyone else who opposed smoking as a possible health problem, was in my judgment a merchant of doubt at that time. In other words, anyone who goes against a generally accepted viewpoint is more logically consider a merchant of doubt.

I also read recently in the Retort a very-well written article by Amanda Strickland on the life of Lavoisier. Lavoisier was an old-time French nobleman, who engaged in scientific work among other things. During his era, there was a generally accepted theory that when things burned, they gave off a material called phlogiston. Apparently, Lavoisier did not initially contradict the phlogiston theory, but in his work he found that when he burned phosphorus, the weight actually increased. How could that be? The phlogiston theory said that after burning, the weight should be decreased. While it took many years, the phlogiston idea was finally debunked as a product of imagination.

We now return to climate change. Several scientists developed some time ago the theory that carbon dioxide emissions, from burning fossil fuels such as coal, was causing global warming. While this situation was somewhat similar to the phlogiston theory, it is much more complex. During the phlogiston era, the idea just sat there. There was no financial support from government or private individuals to perpetuate it. Contrarily, the CO2/climate change gained power because of its economic importance. The federal government saw an immediate opportunity to gain new revenue by taxing the CO2 bad guy. To build on this and ultimately convince the American public of the need for CO2 control and the related aspect of tax revenue, various departments of the federal government issued grants to scientists to perform additional supporting "scientific" work.

As Gavin Schmidt has said, "even the highest among us can fall prey to the substitution of wishful thinking". In this case, the motivation to support global warming was to gain federal money for laboratory development, salaries, etc.. The way that persons fall prey to wishful thinking is through motivations, such as money. This is not to say that all scientists have been deceptive when they work in this area. It only means that they have been duped into scientific prostitution by federal funds.

With all of the subsequent "scientific" work performed by these climatologists, I have not seen one shred of evidence to support the notion that carbon dioxide is an atmospheric pollutant, which is radically changing our environment. I continue to be open to receiving such data, which would legitimize the claim but have received nothing to date. Scanning various reports from climatologists have made one thing clear. None ever face the direct problem, but skirt the edges with a load of gobbledygook, presumably intended to confuse news reporters, congressional officials, and the public at large.

Returning more directly to "Sowing Seeds of Doubt" and "Merchant of Doubt", we need such merchants in our society. Without them, we will all fall off the cliff like lemmings into the sea. There is already talk of ecological engineering, of how we can change climate through variously induced procedures involving distributing certain chemicals in the atmosphere. These are ridiculous notions which would cost untold billions of dollars in waste, on top of what is already being wasted on ridiculous "scientific research" supported by taxpayer dollars.

At one time, the general consensus of the public was that the earth was flat. This view was held for a long time, but eventually was displaced by scientific evidence of an independent nature. How would it have been if the US government had decided to spend billions of dollars maintaining the myth and then subsequently adding other billions of dollars in futile efforts to make the earth round? There were merchants of doubt at that time, among which was Galileo. We still need merchants of doubt.