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Stephanie Zhou
Instructor Gwendolyn Fish
Warren College Writing Program 10A
1 May 2020
Drowning Out Science
1988 is when Dr. James Hansen testified in congress that predictions of Climate Change
had started being confirmed (Kenner, Merchants of Doubt). It was then the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released its first report. The IPCC takes data from a vast
number of scientists. It oversees the science, and assesses climate policies (Ramanathan 15). The
scientific consensus is that humans have caused significant warming to the climate through
combustion of CO2. The Industrial Revolution is when fossil fuels usage significantly increased
(Ramanathan 14). Unless we reduce emissions significantly, Climate Change will be a major
problem for the future. Despite the consensus, the US has not taken sufficient steps to address
Climate Change. I believe the main reason for this delay in action is the spread of
misinformation by Big Corporations for the sake of their profit.
The film Merchants of Doubt d ocuments the first instance of the key strategies used to
spread misinformation. Around the 2000’s, copies of Big Tobacco documents leaked, revealing
that the company had known, since 1953, that tobacco causes cancer. By the 1960’s they had
known that nicotine was addictive. Evidence was becoming more and more ample of the severe
dangers of smoking. They could not erase the evidence from people’s minds. Therefore, their
strategy was to cast doubt, on the conclusiveness of the evidence. One of the documents leaked is
called The Playbook. The Playbook lists specific strategies to keep the public from seeing the
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truth, some of these strategies include “Manufacture Doubt” ; “Question the Science” ; “Create
Controversy”; “Find Friendly Scientists” to spread misinformation; “Attack the Messenger” of
the science, “Shift the Blame” of the harm onto something else; “Delay Regulation” of your
company ; and “Third Party Allies”--- make it appear as though unaffiliated groups have done
their own research and are conceding to your company. Big Tobacco hired many PR agents to
go on TV and say smoking may be hazardous, or it may not be. As well as say that people who
are anti-tobacco are doing so for political reasons. As a result of these strategies successfully
spreading misinformation, in 1994 the CEO’s of all the Big Tobacco companies were able to
testify to congress that nicotine was not harmful ---- which is 40 years since evidence started
coming out that tobacco causes cancer.
According to the leaked documents, many other big companies have been using this
Playbook as well. Peter Sparber was paid by Big Tobacco to pretend to be a third party. He
volunteered at the firestation and convinced the firefighters -- Tobacco’s biggest opponent -- that
cigarettes were not to blame for fires, but the furniture. It turns out Peter Sparber has worked for
other Big Companies, including Oil,Coal, and Automobile. Along with him, there was a small
group of lobbyists who also worked for Big Tobacco, and a few other Big Companies. They have
a consistent strategy: spread misinformation to drown out the science. This information must be
spread by someone who appears to be independent.
Which Big Companies are most invested in climate change denial? Particularly, Oil,
Electricity, and Automaker companies. These companies depend on energy consumption for
their profit. When the Arctic reached a temperature that caused its ice to melt, ExxonMobile saw
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it as an opportunity to drill. Big Corporations in general, have Climate Denial interests, as large
governments will take away their power.
These Big Corporations are able to quickly manufacture doubt in the public about
Climate Science. Climate Science is technical and complex. Misinformation spreads quickly
amongst laymen instead of being separated from legitimate information. Lee Raymond, CEO of
ExxonMobile tells the public “there is a natural variability that has nothing to do with man.”
ExxonMobile funded over 30 organizations to spread climate misinformation. It was not known
to the public that these organizations were associated with ExxonMobile. Bill O’Keefe is the
vice president of American Petroleum Institute, and member of the Global Climate Coalition.
The Global Climate Coalition is made up of oil, electricity, and automaker companies. Bill
O’Keefe became the CEO of George C Marshall Institute, as a secret lobbyist. He directed the
organization to spread the message that Climate Change is a myth that liberals are using for
political reasons.
Once the doubt is manufactured, it spreads quickly. The film shows a public relations
agent saiying “[the changing climate] has to do with sunspots. The wobble of the Earth”. This is
counterfeit science, but a layman cannot identify by just the sound of it, and the doubt spreads
quickly. Dr. Sherwood, who is a part of the Greening Earth Society says on TV “A doubling of
the CO2 in the atmosphere will produce tremendous greening of planet Earth [to create more
food for starving populations]”. A decade after Hansen testified in congress, debates still show
up on TV, wherein a denier is pitted against a climate scientist. Climate Science is not easy math.
Both the sides using similar-sounding language, can make it appear to a layman that the issue is
grey. The laymen start doubting that the climate scientists' side is the one that is truly right. Some
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say that the Climate Scientists are to blame for not communicating the science clearly enough.
However, the science uses many technical terms, in order to be precise about each of the many
moving parts. In this, the science is inherently vulnerable to being “drowned out” by counterfeit
reports that look equally as complex. As a result, Big Companies put out counterfeit science that
laymen cannot separate from real science.
In addition to drowning them out, companies are silencing scientists with threats.
Journalist Naomi Oreskes surveyed a list of journals published from 1992 to 2002 on Climate
Change, and found that all 928 of the papers agreed. When she published her findings, she got
violently threatening emails. She found out that the people attacking her were the same people
attacking the scientists who worked on the Ozone and acid rain. Journalist Marc Morono, known
as the “godfather of climate change denying”, started a website called Climate Depot. On
Climate Depot, he publishes the email addresses of scientists. This would cause a scientist to get
more than 200 violent messages in one day. One of the scientists, Ben Santers worked on one
chapter of the IPCC. Right after he published his work, he was bombarded by hate mail. Marc
Morono wrote what he called a “Two-part 10,000- word scathing critique on Hansen.”
Sometimes, the emails would threaten direct harm to the scientists or their families. Attacking
the scientsits with threats of such severity, prevents them from properly speaking out on Climate
Change.
The Big Corporations had managed to get renowned scientists on their side. Dr. Fred
Seitz was the president of the US National Academy of Sciences in the 20th century. He was a
highly influential physicist at that time. Dr. Fred Singer, a Princeton trained physicist, founded a
movement of people who are vehemently opposed to Climate Change. Seitz defended Tobacco
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to the public “The blame for smoking should be placed upon the smokers […] If people wanted
to believe [the lies of the Tobacco company] that’s their doing.” The public sees the credentials
of these scientists, and are inclined to think that they would not commit moral wrongdoing. It
turned out Singer and Seitz had worked on the Cold War Weapons. They both had a fear and
hatred of Communism. The Big Corporations used that fear to get them on their side. The two
scientists then began attacking issues like Climate Change, Tobacco Regulation, DDT, Acid
Rain, and a whole bunch of issues that would require large government.
Once the misinformation is out, it is difficult to clean up. The misinformation spread by
Big Corporations continues to affect us today. In 2019, YouTube began censoring videos
claiming the Earth is flat, or that tragic events, like the Haloucaust, didn’t happen. However, this
cleaning did not extend to Climate Denial. As a matter of fact, the majority of videos about
Climate Change are misinformation. Facebook has had partnerships with Denier organizations,
and hosted Denier ads on its website. When it comes to social media, algorithms feed some
content to the top more than others (Stover). This can cause a group of certain content to
suddenly get a disportionate amount of exposure. In addition, new social media posts come in so
fast each second, that it’s not practical for the staff to monitor the content (Stover). New
information comes in rapidly with one click. This allows the current internet to proliferate the
climate misinformation spread by the Merchants of Doubt.
Climate Science is a complex and precise work. Large amounts of misinformation is
spread to the public to drown out the science, as laymen cannot separate the misinformation from
the science. The silencing of scientists with violent threats, and the disguising of lobbyists as
independent parties, adds to the already loud misinformation. This misinformation remains
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today, being proliferated with social media. Information is the key to a large issue like Climate
Change. With so many moving parts, we can only make an appropriate decision if we have the
information correct.
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Works Cited
Merchants of Doubt. Directed by Robert Kenner, Sony, 2015.
Ramanathan, V. “Climate Change.” Bending the Curve: Climate Change Solutions Digital
Textbook, edited by V. Ramanathan, University of California Press, 2019.
Stover, Dawn. “Why Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter Are Bad for the Climate.” Bulletin of
the Atomic Scientists, 22 Aug. 2019, [Link]/2019/08/why-facebook-youtube-
and-twitter-are-bad-for-the-climate/.
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Acknowledgements
Thank you to Gwen Fish for helping to explain the prompt to me. Also thank you to my friend
Dana and Kathleen for having zoom study sessions with me so I can get this done.
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Cover Letter
Dear Instructor Gwendolyn Fish,
One of the strengths in my paper is that I do a good job at weaving commentary into the
facts I present. An example of this is on the fourth page, the paragraph about scientists being
silenced by threats, I put all the information in, and I only have one explicit line of commentary
at the end, but the paragraph has led up to that. Another strength is that I sometimes hit a precise
vocabulary. Such as in the conclusion paragraph, I feel like I was pretty precise there. The part
that was the most challenging for me was that sometimes I don’t know exactly what point I’m
making. Intuitively I know I have something to say, but I start to make one point and then before
I make it, I start making another point. What helped me was talking my thoughts out on camera,
but I didn’t get a chance to do that as much as I wanted to for this paper. Eventually, if I keep
writing for a long time, and reading the paper over and over again, I am able to catch all the parts
where I switch ideas suddenly, but that takes very long, I’d rather organize my brain from the
start. With the argument I made in this paper, it seemed like there were a lot of different facts
that fit under certain analysis, and I thought that something was an example of one concept when
it was actually an example of some other concept. I could have had to restart the entire
paragraph, but luckily I was able to work that paragraph in. So that’s something else that I should
work on organizing ahead of time.