Shuffling my feet a bit at the self-promotion involved, I’d like to invite anyone interested to tune in to a conversation I’m going to have with Naomi Oreskes tonight.
Oreskes, for those of you who may not know, is a professor of history and science studies at UC San Diego. Our chat will center on her recent book, Merchants of Doubt co-authored with Erik Conway.
I think I’ve mentioned that book more than once here. IMHO, it’s one of the most important works published in America in the last several years. In it, Oreskes and Conway document how a clutch of cold-war scientists, many of them physicists, transformed the truth of scientific uncertainty and incompleteness into hugely damaging lies, first about the (lack of) risk associated with cigarettes, and then on just about every other major science/policy issue of the last several decades.
We’re going to talk about how these ego-ideology-and-money driven figures did that, and how their actions shaped the specific stories of tobacco, acid rain, climate change and the like.
But to me the larger story — and here’s where I think our exchange will go over the course of the hour — is the way that these self-styled iconoclasts have managed to undermine the whole idea of science as a way to gain real insight into critical policy issues. If you want to know why the GOP candidates can get away with denying climate change, it is at least in part because staged controversies about scientific “doubt” have undercut the whole idea of technical expertise or knowledge gained through specialized skills and methods.
To me that sets up an enormous personal and professional question: as a science writer and teacher of incredibly idealistic and hopeful aspiring science writers one of the goals has always been to tell stories that help to inform our civic conversation. But on the evidence that Oreskes and Conway bring to bear, we’ve lost ground on that hope over every year of my career. So one question I’ll have tonight is what can be done that will take public engagement with science beyond the cool story and into some usable appreciation of scientific habits of thought.
I do have some notions of my own on that — but these are matters Oreskes knows well and has considered deeply. So check out what she has to say.
Which means, I suppose, I should link to the venue!
That would be Virtually Speaking Science, and new weekly feature of/spin off from Jay Ackroyd’s Virtually Speaking empire. (Jay comments here, and FP’s over at Eschaton.) I’m in the rota of hosts for the show, taking on the third Wednesday of every month. You can listen to tonight’s program here Update: at 9 p.m. EDT. It’s also going to run live in Second Life, for those of you tired of your first one. You can take part in live chat through the IRC servicee. (Instructions below the fold.)
Image: George de la Tours, Cheater with the Ace of Diamonds, 1635
1. Connect to http://webchat.freenode.net/
2. Create a log-in name
3. Enter #vspeak into the channel field.
4. NOTE: ‘Relay Rinq’ is not a person but a bridge to IRC chat.
5. Type into the text field along the bottom of the screen.
6. Begin your question with ‘QUESTION’ so it’s easy to spot.
FlipYrWhig
I had a survey course in Earth Science with Prof. Oreskes at Dartmouth in 1989 or 1990. She was very young and very nervous! It was a thankless teaching gig. So, please tell her thanks…
aimai
Congratulations Tom. This sounds hugely exciting. Will it be available as a podcast? I’ve become addicted to listening to podcasts of radio lab and this american life while walking around fresh pond. I’m too impatient for radio if I’m not moving around! Great topic. I’ve been meaning to read the book for some time.
aimai
M31
A great topic! It’s interesting that she starts with the Cold War period. Could you ask her (sorry I won’t be able to participate live; wish I could) if she’s covered the history of lead poisoning? I read an excellent book a few years ago (I can’t remember the title), though I actually couldn’t finish it it was so depressing, that detailed the resistance by the lead mining industry to restrictions on lead paint, and then lead in gasoline, going back to the early 1900’s. All the elements seem to be there back in the 20’s–stonewalling, buying Congress, lobbying for weak regulation, bogus studies, creepy advertising campaigns, etc.
So was there anything particularly Cold-War era specific that led to the explosion of this, or was it just moneyed interests getting better at it?
(Seriously, the lead industry resisted calls to restrict lead paint used in candy wrappers. The workplace ‘safety’ stories will fucking curl your hair.)
MikeJ
And of course you don’t have to go through some weird irc->web gateway. Just fire up your favorite irc client.
Brachiator
You can listen to tonight’s program here. This sounds immensely fascinating. Can this be accessed later or downloaded anywhere? I can’t listen at the scheduled time.
S. cerevisiae
Sounds great! The book is excellent, but it raises my blood pressure seeing how the public is manipulated. The wingnuts have even demonized Rachel Carson now, they think DDT is da BOMB!
M-pop
What a great topic and I love Virtually Speaking! I’ll try to attend :)
jayackroyd
Here’s the itunes link: http://bit.ly/k3Ekl9
Past shows you might be interested in include Tom talking about his book Newton and the Counterfeiter, James Fallows and Bruce Schneier, Glenn Greenwald and Daniel Ellsberg, Fallows and Jay Rosen and Digby with Greenwald.
Many thanks to Tom for doing this, and I apologize for cluttering up the moderator’s thread. I don’t know what I did, but this is the information I meant to post, so no need to release them.
jayackroyd
@MikeJ: What’s your favorite IRC client?
jayackroyd
ARGH! My apologies.
Sarah Proud and Tall
@jayackroyd:
Sorry, that was me being overeager with the moderation queue. I’ve deleted the duplicates and, i hope, left the right comment up. That’s what i get for drinking absinthe for breakfast.
schrodinger's cat
Why the hating on physicists? Are physicists particularly egregious in this regard? Can you give a few examples? I know about Freeman Dyson being a climate skeptic.
barath
Tom – I’m curious what she and others think is going on with peak oil. Specifically, why isn’t it discussed by anyone. It seems in the last few weeks there’s be a merchants-of-doubt like push to discredit the notion (witness major pushes by Daniel Yergin and the Wall Street Journal to say “there is no such thing as peak oil”, etc.) while the evidence mounts day after day, year after year that oil production has flatlined and is likely to head downwards soon.
It’s puzzling to me that something with such major near-term consequences, just as climate change, is ignored to such an extent.
barath
I guess I should add – addressing your question of how to engage the public – is that it seems that since economics dominate all political and social discussions, maybe including discussion of peak oil along with climate change will make our job easier, since peak oil will have major economic impacts in the short term, and most of the sane responses to it will help mitigate climate change too.
Marc
@schrodinger’s cat:
Sort of, but he’s more difficult to pigeonhole than that. Dyson has always been a techno-optimist, so I’d think it’s fairer to characterize his views as “we can geo-engineer away any problems.” His resistance to climate change has to do with increasing costs for fossil fuels impacting the third world poor, rather than being aimed at first world oil companies, etc. I disagree with him, but he’s coming from a very different place than the typical industry-funded skeptics.
S. cerevisiae
@schrodinger’s cat: Fred Singer for one. I loaned the book to a friend so I can’t look up any other names right now but the main people behind the muddying of science were mostly old physicists left over from the cold war and fiercely anti-communist.
Read the book – it’s an eye opening experience.
gene108
Ha!
550 years ago all you science types convinced us the world was flat!
Why should we trust you now?
schrodinger's cat
@Marc: I agree, he is also an engaging writer and a first class intellect. My question was for Tom Levenson and his blanket assertion about physicists being the opportunistic skeptics. Besides Dyson being a climate skeptic (and as you explained, even he doesn’t fit the profile of someone bartering his integrity for profit) I haven’t heard of anyone else. May be I just don’t know. Hence my original question.
schrodinger's cat
@S. cerevisiae:I will look up the book. I have no idea who Fred Singer is. He is not a very well known physicist.
Lysana
You do realize that you managed to completely omit the time of this conversation from your post? It’s findable, to be sure, but that’s an interesting goof.
schrodinger's cat
OK I read Fred Singer’s Wikipedia entry, he seems like a free-market libertarian with a Physics PhD, he may be known for his controversial stances but he is hardly well known as a physicist, unlike Dyson. Also his opposition to global warming etc seems to be based more on ideology and less on science.
I am sure just like any other field physics has its fair share of cranks.
Barry
I don’t have a copy of the book handy, but the physicists she lists were prominent, from work in the 1940’s-60’s or 70’s. They weren’t Nobel Prize winners, but not third-rate hacks at Cow College U.
Tom Return of the Pretentious Art Douche Levenson
@schrodinger’s cat: Not singling out physicists in the sense I think you mean.
First — I dont’ see a blanket assertion in the phrase “many of them physicists.”
Second — in the context of the Cold War, the physicist reference was to remind folks of the atomic warfare connnection; physicists were extremely high status folks when it was thought that they could blow you up; this was a shorthand way of signalling why this small splinter group of folks had such influences.
Third — I must confess I did have in the back of my mind the occupational hazard that afflicts some, especially older physicists (and other scientists too, to be sure…but onwards). That would be the belief that training in and especially success in physics imparts the ability to grasp any “lesser” subject easily enough to be able to judge ideas and results in fields far removed from one’s own.
There’s even some truth in that belief: think of your namesake, whose What is Life is a bravura example of what the rigor gained from a life in physics can do when applied to a new problem.
But then there are the Shockleys of the world — and the Singers and Fred Seitz (a major player in the tobacco story, a physicist and former head of the National Academy) and so on.
So: no blanket indictment. For everyone of these folks there were dozens of physicists whose skepticism was the usual (and necessary) reservoir of suspicion needed to do science. But among the relatively small group of those who show up again and again in Oreskes’ and Conway’s account, many were in fact physicists.
Tom Return of the Pretentious Art Douche Levenson
@Lysana: Well. Oops. 9 p.m. EDT, for those of you keeping score at home. (I’ll insert above.
Oh and to Aimai et al — yes this will be stored and available for later listening.
schrodinger's cat
@Tom Return of the Pretentious Art Douche Levenson: Thanks for answering, sorry if I sounded a tad defensive.
Physicists do think of themselves as superior, better than other scientists. I think it was Rutherford who said that,
In science there is physics, everything else is stamp collecting.
Most of the physicists she lists seem to have been more prominent in policy circles than in physics proper.
Their motivations seems to be grounded in their politics rather than in physics or science.
catclub
There is a bit of poor-mouthing going on here. On all the issues mentioned, except for climate change, there is now wide agreement that the doubters have not reversed.
Smoking, asbestos, ozone, second-hand smoke, water pollution of rivers, have all been long term struggles, but the scientific consensus has prevailed.
What am I missing?
Two cases I can think of that are counter-examples are vaccination and fear of radiation.
There may be an expectation that with rapidly progrssing science, public acceptance of scientific consensus would accelerate as well, but it has not, due to the malign influence of corporate sponsored doubters. It may be that a 30 year ( 1 -2 generation) time scale is required for changing wider public opinion. (Similar to scientific revolutions which do not actually convince the senior scientists to change, the old ones just die out.) Cigarettes were already called cancer sticks well before 1963, but actual change of attitudes takes time.
I always am nervous making a posting like this on Tom’s threads, maybe that is good thing.
Anarchaeologist
I have a modest proposal: as many of you have no doubt noted, those souls who remain unconvinced by the evidence that human activities are changing the planet’s climate disdain the label “deniers” in favor of “sceptics” (I use the British spelling, which wordpress doesn’t apparently like, for a reason). However, scepticism is much more than simple disagreement or contrarianism. To be a sceptic, one must be willing to change one’s conclusion to accommodate the evidence. However, climate-change sceptics do not have a constant position: they refuse to believe that climate change is happening. Or that it is happening, but it’s natural. Or that it’s not catastrophic. Or that it’s going to benefit humanity. They also tend to hype any single study, no matter how tangential or preliminary (see CERN CLOUD experiment) or poorly conducted, if it seems to support their preferred conclusion. In short, the sceptics lack constancy in their positions.
Now the symbol for a constant in mathematics is “c”. “Sceptic” has two c’s. However, as we have seen, sceptics in general only have one constant, and that is: “No matter what mainstream climatology says about human-caused climate change, it is wrong.” So therefore they only deserve one c; I propose therefore that the people now known as deniers, or to themselves as sceptics, suffer the loss of one c and hereafter be known as Septics. It’s only fitting and fair.
S. cerevisiae
@schrodinger’s cat:
That was the problem, the politicians would listen to them just because they were atomic scientists and they used big words. They had influence on policy far beyond what they should have.
kdaug
1. Go. If it helps, get angry. If not, keep pushing anyway.
2. Keep the eyes on the laces of the shoes.
Martin
@Tom Return of the Pretentious Art Douche Levenson:
Speaking with such a degree in hand, and having been immersed among them, physics brings with it a sense of certainty that other fields don’t have – not even mathematics. Physics (particularly the theoretical side of the house) has a certain purity to it that if you can calculate something – the charge of an electron or the speed of light or whatever – you can then turn around and measure it to as many decimal places as you dare.
Chemists can do their stoichiometry but when you put shit in a beaker, there’s always some impurity that you can’t avoid, some molecules that stubbornly refuse to bump into and therefore react with other molecules and so on. Biology and other sciences get even fuzzier. You can get close enough to be quite certain you did the math right, but not like physics. Physics brings with it ‘fuck you I’m right’ certainty where the only way to refute it is to raise a couple hundred billion dollars for a bigger space telescope or a bigger supercollider to tack on one more decimal place that might differ from the calculation.
It’s a field that doesn’t exactly breed humility. It’s hard to step out of that kind of black and white world and into any other space and operate effectively. You never get that kind of certainty in other fields, which is why physicists can easily be climate deniers (because you’re fourth decimal place is wrong – you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about) and why they can botch policy issues so badly.
But my observation is that they’re virtually always of the denier class. It’s not that they lack a reservoir of suspicion, they overflow with it. Nobody can ever provide them with sufficient evidence to satisfy them because they’re demanding physics-level certainty, which simply isn’t feasible in chaotic, meatsack infested fields of study.
jeffreyw
@Anarchaeologist: Get them all together for a study and we can call it a Septic Tank.
Martin
Since we’re on a science/tech theme, any thoughts on Lytro’s new camera?
Sounds like a game-changer.
schrodinger's cat
@jeffreyw: Thread needs kitteh! We can has Bitsy?
eemom
Thank you for reminding me of that painting. I saw it many many years ago at the Louvre and I used to have a little postcard of it over my desk. The facial expressions are a masterpiece.
Loneoak
w00t for Science Studies!
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“You never get that kind of certainty in other fields, which is why physicists can easily be climate deniers (because you’re fourth decimal place is wrong – you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about) and why they can botch policy issues so badly.”
I don’t think there’s that many climate deniers out there who are scientists, even physicists. There are a lot of engineers out there denying climate science. (And petroleum geologists, but they’re not exactly objective observers on the point.)
But, from my experience, you don’t actually find many climate change denying staff-level engineers or scientists in the oil & energy companies. Not even in ExxonMobil.
Now, their lobbyists and executives are a different issue. But every technical person I’ve dealt with in the oil, gas & energy field for the last five years accepts AGW as real.
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“w00t for Science Studies!”
There’s an obscure journal in the UK called Science as Culture founded by former Maoists that was part of the Science Studies field and too aim, I guess as vestigal Maoism, at the notion of scientific expertise and the way it was misused in society to e.g. get those poor people living next to [name your big industrial polluting facility] to shut up.
And they had some fair points. Environmental Toxicology and Epidemiology are fields where the data is so squishy and sparse that they make sociology departments look like the NIST.
But now the same po-mo arguments they developed against scientific expertise are being unearthed against AGW by the Leninist-Maoist wing of the GOP.
Tom Return of the Pretentious Art Douche Levenson
@Sock Puppet of the Great Satan: Almost everyone with the capacity to read the papers does. The US military is making plans to confront the risks of climate change; insurance companies are starting to model AGW risk and so on. It’s the public debate that’s poisoned; the real money and power knows better.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@S. cerevisiae: Not exactly. Many physicists were opposed to the continued development and use of atomic weapons. This started during the Manhattan Project and continued after the war. A number of Los Alamos physicists petitioned for a public demonstration of the bomb before dropping it on Japanese cities, but they were rebuffed by Grove and Oppenheimer. After the war, scientists who followed the anti-communist war-mongering script were rewarded with jobs, publicity, and research money. Scientists who advocated disarmament, or entrusting nuclear stockpiles to international bodies, were rebuffed, isolated, and harried.
Scientists who advocated development of atomic and nuclear bombs (think Teller) didn’t have an policy voice that was out of proportion, they reinforced the policy line of the MIC and were part of the machine.
catclub
@Sock Puppet of the Great Satan: @Tom Return of the Pretentious Art Douche Levenson:
Oil companies’ imitation of Wizard of Oz:
Yes, there is no climate change! It is a complete coincidence that we are planning to drill for oil in Arctic waters that are free of ice. Pay no attention to that.
gulo
@martin, @jayackroyd – thank you for the thinking and the linking.
WereBear
@catclub: Of course; they don’t fall for their own propaganda.
But keeping the public confused and divided lets them handle it the way they want to.
schrodinger's cat
@Comrade Scrutinizer: I remember a panel talk on nuclear disarmament at the 100th APS meeting in 1999. Hans Bethe (Nobel for explaining how nuclear fusion powered stars) who had also worked on Manhattan project was on the panel. The characterization that physicists are war mongers and apologists for polluters is I think painting with too broad a brush.
jeffreyw
@schrodinger’s cat:
How about Bitsy the Killa Kitteh?
schrodinger's cat
@jeffreyw: Eeks jumps up on her desk
Is that a real mouse?
jeffreyw
@schrodinger’s cat: Yup, just a baby though. Toby had it first.
Tom Return of the Pretentious Art Douche Levenson
@schrodinger’s cat: Yup. See also Szilard, Leo; Einstein, Albert; Oppenheimer, Frank;and so on.
Again: in each of the controversies Oreskes and Conway examine, almost all scientists line up on the side of doing science and seeing where the data lead. A small handful don’t. Several of that handful were physicists, among whom were a number who had a direct connection to either Cold War research or politics. That doesn’t mean that they are representative even of that subset of physical scientists. See, e.g. Dick Garwin.
For the reasons cited above I don’t think it’s entirely coincidental that certain types of scientists show up in the merchant of doubt column. But there are a lot of factors that go into that, including the calculation by those that benefit from false controversy as to who will give them the most bang for their bucks. One can predict that some number of doubters will be physicists; one cannot predict that a given physicist will fall into that trap.
burnspbesq
Downloaded the introduction and first chapter to my iPad to read over lunch, and ended up buying the book before I got to my second taco. If I get enough work done today and tomorrow morning before heading for the airport, will start reading on the plane.
David in NY
@eemom: Love de la Tour also. There’s a very nice one at the National Gallery in DC.
lovable liberal
Not to rag on physicists…
Ah, hell, to rag on physicists, even though the one in my little anecdote is a dear friend…
MIT physics Ph.D.: “Why mess with chemistry? It’s all derivable from physics anyway.”
LL: “Go ahead, derive it. Win a Nobel.”
crickets…
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“Many physicists were opposed to the continued development and use of atomic weapons.”
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the Pugwash organization came out of the Manhattan Project scientists.
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
“@schrodinger’s cat: Yup. See also Szilard, Leo; Einstein, Albert; Oppenheimer, Frank;and so on.”
And unfortunately, Fuchs, Karl.
bystander
45 minutes in… This is simply an outstanding discussion. Thanks for flagging it and having it. Cannot recommend it strongly enough.
bystander
implicatory denial
I’m keeping that one.
Tom Levenson
@bystander: Many thanks. You made my night.
Porlock Junior
@lovable liberal:
Wins the thread, and the grand prize, which of course will be a fine stamp collection.
Batocchio
Great stuff, Tom, thanks.
Sock Puppet of the Great Satan
I mean Fuchs, Klaus. As Bethe said, a physicist who really changed history.