Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway (2010) Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. 368pp.

This essay continues my series of monthly posts in which I select one ‘climate’ book to highlight and review from one of the 44 years of my professional career in climate research (starting with 1984, my first year of academic employment). The series will end in September 2027, the month in which I shall retire. See here for more information about the rational for this series, and the criteria I have used in selecting my highlighted books.

This ‘2010 essay’ can be download as a pdf.

[correction added 1 April, 11.30am, about ownership of Twitter, WhatsApp and Instagram]

Widespread public awareness and concern about climate change grew-up alongside the emergence of the internet. The World Wide Web first became publicly accessible in 1993, and Wikipedia was launched in 2001, around the time that on-line blogging first became a cultural phenomenon. A few years later, in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook, with Twitter (2007), WhatsApp (2009) and Instagram (2010) following, all three initially as independent start-ups. These rapid developments in digital connectivity and social media during the period from 1993 to 2010 had a profound impact on the way in which publics around the world made sense of climate change.

Many regarded these technological developments as emancipatory and democratising. They opened-up access to knowledge and offered platforms for people to have their voices heard on all sorts of matters. For example, in March 2012, The Observer newspaper in the UK editorialised about the booster power of the internet. Noting that Wikipedia had launched just a decade earlier, the editorial argued that “there has been an extraordinary democratisation of knowledge … The global accessibility of instantaneous general knowledge is one of the wonders of our age … The internet … makes the argument for the power of collaboration over competition, for openness over secrecy, which might begin to break down some of the guarded and protective behaviours that have long characterised professional science.”

Others, however, worried about what these developments were doing to the nature of expertise, especially scientific expertise. In a short book published in 2014, ‘Are We All Scientific Experts Now?’, sociologist of science Harry Collins coined a term to describe this new sense of empowerment for citizens when it came to ‘who knows what’.[1] He called it “default expertise”, that is “the expertise, or at least the right to judge, that ordinary citizens feel they possess” because of this new access to knowledge. In the years since Collins wrote his book, the ‘crisis in expertise’ in modern societies has only become more acute.[2]

This “democratisation of knowledge” over the past three or four decades has sharpened long-standing questions about the role of scientific knowledge in relation to political decision-making and public policymaking. Is scientific knowledge reliable? Are scientists trustworthy? Does science determine policy? How should science relate to democracy? These questions are especially pertinent for debates about climate change and in 2010 a book was published that examined the influence in the USA of what the authors viewed as ‘bad faith’ actors on public understandings of science. The book was subsequently turned in a film and went on to have a sizeable influence on many public debates about science, ideology and politics. I have therefore selected Naomi Oreskes’ and Eric Conway’s ‘Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming’ as my 2010 Climate Book of the Year. 

Oreskes (b.1958) is a historian of science at Harvard University, having moved there in 2013 from the University of California, San Diego. Her work as a historian has been applied to the science of geophysics, continental drift in particular, and to environmental issues such as climate change. Her co-author, Erik Conway (b. 1965), is a historian at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at CalTech, and has written widely about the history of aviation and of NASA as an institution. Their book, Merchants of Doubt, set out to identify significant parallels between the antagonistic public debate about climate change, then raging in the USA, and earlier public controversies, notably the tobacco industry’s campaign to obscure the link between smoking and serious disease. (A few years later, Oreskes and Conway were also to collaborate in writing ‘The Collapse of Western Civilisation’, a fictional account written by Chinese historians in the year 2393 CE, recounting and explaining the climatic events of the imaginary “second Dark Age” of the twenty-first century.[3])

The origins of ‘Merchants of Doubt’ are interesting. Oreskes and Conway (O&C) first met at a history of meteorology conference in southern Bavaria in 2004. Oreskes talked there about some of the ad hominem attacks she had been receiving—threatening phone calls, hostile emails—following a short essay she had published earlier in the year about the climate consensus.[4] She found this experience odd, upsetting and frightening, but Conway was immediately interested and asked her, “Do you know the names of the people attacking you?” When Oreskes told him, he said, “Naomi, those are the same people who attacked [American atmospheric chemist] Sherry Rowland over the ozone hole. When I get home, I’ll send you some materials I have on this.” Returning to the US after the meeting, Oreskes and Conway followed up these parallel attacks on different areas of science and soon found the common link: the same people using the same arguments to discredit science or at least to sow confusion about the veracity of scientific evidence on hot-button policy issues. The outline of their book, ‘Merchants of Doubt’, began to form.[5]

The book tells the story of how a small group of senior scientists and scientific advisers ran effective campaigns over a period of four decades to mislead the public and derail policymaking by challenging well-established scientific knowledge on issues such as missile defence (Reagan’s so-called ‘Star Wars’ initiative), passive smoking, acid rain, the ozone hole, global warming, and DDT. The book’s title comes from the words of one tobacco executive explaining that “Doubt is our product.” This small group of conservative scientists—the merchants—would supply the product. “For years”, wrote O&C, “the press quoted these men as experts, and politicians listened to them, using their claims as justification for inaction.” [p.8].

The longest chapter in ‘Merchants of Doubt’, at 50 pages, is given over to “the denial of global warming.” Here, O&C document specific examples of how physicists such as Robert Jastrow, Bill Nierenberg, Fred Seitz and Fred Singer, sowed doubt and misinformation about the scientific evidence for human influence on the climate. There had been books before—for example Ross Gelbspan’s ‘The Heat Is On’—and books after—for example Peter Stott’s ‘Hot Air’[6]—which dissected the (mostly American) climate contrarian movement. But O&C’s intervention in 2010 was significant because they were the first to situate organised resistance to climate science within a longer and deeper historical narrative about influential American conservative libertarians.

What the book didn’t accomplish so thoroughly was to interrogate the motivations and worldviews of the various scientists who form the centrepiece of the story. For this, a study published a few years later offered an interesting series of insights. By interviewing many of the same climate sceptical scientists at the centre of ‘Merchants of Doubt’, Myanna Lahsen, an anthropologist of science, identified the political and sociocultural reasons why this group of white American male scientists, who mostly had started their careers during the decades of the Cold War, adopted such critical attitudes to climate science. Lahsen noted that many of them were physicists or empiricists, not modellers, and for these reasons they were inclined to question elements of climate science, in particular climate models. This skepticism meant that they were more open to enrolment in anti-environmentalist conservative movements as authoritative spokespeople against mainstream climate science.

‘Merchants of Doubt’ was very widely reviewed at the time by assorted academic journals and by more widely read outlets such as—to take two examples from different political viewpoints—The Economist and The Ecologist magazine. The former called it “a powerful book which articulates the politics involved and the degree to which scientists have sometimes manufactured and exaggerated environmental uncertainties”, while Phil England in The Ecologist praised the book for the rigour of its research and detailed focus on key historical incidents. Reviewing the book for Nature, the sociologist Brian Wynne also admired O&C’s detailed excavation of the paper trail identifying the obstructive tactics of this small group of scientists.

But Wynne also drew attention to a telling point which the book failed to address, namely why scientific doubt is vulnerable to being weaponized in the first place. Wynne wrote that placing science at the heart of challenging and divisive public policy issues is a form of “scientism”—it makes “science vulnerable to the dogmatic amplification of doubt” such as that documented by O&C. In Wynne’s view, their analysis should “have gone further in asking how scientific uncertainty should be interpreted in policy and how science can be led to overreach itself in arbitrating public facts.”[7] Wynne’s critique resonates with patterns of climate policy advocacy where campaigners have sought to short-circuit policy debate by arguing that politicians should simply follow the scientists.[8]

Other reviewers noted similar limitations in ‘Merchants of Doubt’. For example, Reiner Grundmann noted that the book’s central thesis was that more progress would have been made in policymaking “had not a bunch of contrarian self-stylized experts tried to undermine faith in the knowledge base for regulation”.[9] But in his view, O&C failed to recognize the dynamics of political decision-making and the policy process which never proceeds cleanly from scientific evidence to policy implementation.

In fact, O&C trod a fine line between trust in science and scepticism about its claims. In the book’s Epilogue, ‘A New View of Science’, O&C quoted the British civil servant C P Snow as arguing that “foolish faith in [scientific] authority is the enemy of truth.” But so too, said O&C, is a foolish cynicism. [p.274] (Oreskes would later write a separate full-length book defending science against its critics.[10]) They also recognized the limitations of scientists’ expertise with respect to public policy: “Scientists have no special purchase on moral or ethical decisions” [p.273], which suggests they would have agreed with Wynne’s caution about science’s overreach in relation to public policy. By leaning so heavily on science to justify their policy advocacy, climate campaigners handed their political opponents a ready-made weapon which the ‘merchants of doubt’ happily exploited.

‘Merchants of Doubt’ has had a huge impact on a generation of scholars, analysts and advocates. It has received over 8,900 citations according to Google Scholar, including 900 in 2025, and its citation rate is still on an upward curve. For obvious reasons the book has an entirely US-focus, but it should be recognised that the relationship between scientific evidence, public trust, policymaking, campaigning and politics plays out very differently in different political and historical cultures. This has meant that it has contributed to a general “over-weighting” of the political dynamics of US climate scepticism in the international scholarship and analysis of these issues.

The film version of the book was launched in August 2014, and the Internet Movie Database (iMDB) gives ‘Merchants of Doubt’ a crowd-sourced star rating of 7.6 out of 10, good but not very good. One reviewer of the movie wryly observed, “the film as a whole expresses the faith that reason and facts can defeat propaganda and falsehoods. There is plenty of cause for skepticism on that matter, unfortunately.”

© Mike Hulme, April 2026

Other significant books published in 2010

Fred Pearce (2010) The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth About Global Warming. London: Guardian Books. 266pp.

In November 2009, over a thousand emails exchanged between several prominent climate scientists, some dating back a decade or more, were released onto the internet after being hacked from a computer server at the University of East Anglia in the UK. The story immediately went viral online, with lurid accusations of deception and illegality, and was soon picked up by mainstream media. The contents of the emails were skilfully used by internet commentators and some journalists to imply scientific malpractice, thereby casting doubt on the overall integrity of the scientific evidence pointing towards human influence on the climate system. A prima facie reading of some the emails lent support to these inferences, triggering a crisis of public trust in climate science over the following 12 months and more. The controversy was dubbed Climategate. In June 2010, just a few months after the initial furore, The Guardian journalist Fred Pearce published a pacey and dramatic account of the whole episode. In his words, Pearce “thought an old-fashioned journalistic investigation could be useful.”

Pearce had been covering the climate change story since the late 1980s. ‘The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth About Global Warming’—his title echoing ‘the Watergate files’ of that eponymous 1972 political scandal—drew upon his own journalism about Climategate, together with the opinions of critics and defenders of the scientists involved and of climate science in general. Pearce devoted a chapter to the several official inquiries that were subsequently commissioned which, although dismissing the most egregious accusations of their critics, did not give the scientists involved a completely free pass.

Commenting a year later, I wrote in The Guardian that Climategate had “shown brutally that the social, political and cultural dynamics at work around the idea of climate change are more volatile than the slowly changing and causally entangled climate dynamics of the Earth’s biogeophysical systems.” Pearce’s own reflection on the controversy, in particular on the refusal of climate scientists to share their data openly, was that “The fuss over Climategate showed that the world is increasingly unwilling to accept the message that ‘we are scientists; trust us’. Other people want to join the scientific conversation.” Scientists interested in finding truth, wrote Pearce, “should want to encourage them, not put up the shutters.”

Paul N. Edwards (2010) A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data and the Politics of Global Warming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 528pp.

Climate models have been part of the scientists’ tool kit for investigating the changing climate since the late 1960s. Incremental developments in the design and application of models have occurred at various stages of the past 50 years—the first ocean-atmosphere coupled model (in 1975); the first transient model simulations (1988); the first use of model ensembles (1992); the inclusion in models of the effects of aerosols (1995); the incorporation of a dynamic carbon cycle model (2000). By the year 2007, when the IPCC delivered its Fourth Assessment Report, there were 23 different climate models from around the world available to be assessed. Many of the most heated arguments about climate change—whether about the science or the politics—have involved different interpretations of the role of numerical climate models, and their results, in policy formation.

In 2010, shortly after the IPCC’s AR4, an important book about the nature and development of climate models was published by historian of science Paul Edwards, ‘A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data and the Politics of Global Warming’. At the time, Edwards was at the University of Michigan (although now, a recently retired historian of science and former director of the Program in Science Technology & Society at Stanford University). Given the importance of climate models in public and policy climate debates, he wanted to “write a book that almost anyone could read or understand” [p.xxi]. His book explained how climate models are “a global knowledge infrastructure”, the result of a large technological system that “links various disparate systems in an attempt to control, central and standardise how atmospheric information is produced and handled”.[11] This technological system was his ‘vast machine’ which gave the book its title.

In Edwards’ account, climate models were not just the result of physics, mathematical equations and computer codes. They were socio-technical infrastructures, the result of observations, physical theory and computer technologies combined with sociological networks of organisation, trust and communication. One consequence of Edwards’ deep reflection on how climate models are constructed was his realisation that their projections of future climate would always be deeply uncertain. He dispensed with the idea that ‘better’ models at higher resolution, operating on higher performing computers, would converge on a single ‘correct’ future climate trajectory. The best we can get, he wrote, are “a shimmering mass of proliferating data images, convergent yet never identical.” [p.431]. Climate models do not remove uncertainty about the future, but they do try to quantify it. What we do with that uncertainty is all politics.

[1] Collins,H. (2014) Are We All Scientific Experts Now? Cambridge: Polity. 144pp.

[2] Witness books such as Eyal,G. (2019) The Crisis of Expertise. Polity Press; Nichols,T. (2017) The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. Oxford University Press;

[3] Oreskes,N. and Conway,E.M. (2014) The Collapse of Western Civilisation: A View From the Future. New York: Columbia University Press.

[4] Oreskes,N. (2004) The scientific consensus on climate change. Science. 306: 1686

[5] Naomi Oreskes pers. comm., January 2026.

[6] See for example: Gelbspan,R. (1997) The Heat Is On: The High Stakes Battle Over Earth’s Threatened Climate. New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company Inc.; and Stott,P. (2021) Hot Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change Denial.  London: Atlantic Books.

[7] Wynne,B. (2010) When doubt becomes a weapon. Nature. 466: 441. 22 July.

[8] Campaigner Greta Thunberg is a good example of this sort of rhetoric which elevates science and scientists to being the arbiter of climate policies.

[9] Grundmann,R. (2013) Debunking sceptical Propaganda. BioSocieties 8: 370-374.

[10] Oreskes,N. (2019) Why Trust Science? Princeton University Press.

[11] p.295 in: Lusk,G. (2014) Review of Edwards. Annals of Science 71(2): 295-298.