Our climate is in the midst of dramatic changes, driven largely by human activity, with potentially enormous consequences for humanity and other species. That's why science tells us, anyway. But there is an influential contingent, especially in the United States, who deny that reality, and work hard to prevent policy action that might ameliorate it. Where did this resistance come from, and what makes it so successful? Naomi Oreskes is a distinguished historian of science who has become, half-reluctantly, the world's expert on this question. It turns out to be a fascinating story starting with just a handful of scientists who were passionate not only about climate, but also whether smoking causes cancer, and who cared deeply about capitalism, communism, and the Cold War.
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Naomi Oreskes received her Ph.D. in Geological Research and History of Science from Stanford University. She is now a professor of the History of Science at Harvard. She is the author of numerous books and scholarly articles, many on the public reception of science. Merchants of Doubt, co-authored with Erik M. Conway, was made into a feature-length documentary film.
Click to Show Episode Transcript
0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. As you've heard, climate change is happening. The Earth is getting warmer and various other aspects of our climate and our ecosystem are being affected, and human activity is an extremely important, the most important cause of it. This much is scientifically clear. But as you've also undoubtedly heard, not everyone agrees with this. Not everyone accepts the scientific evidence. This is especially true in the United States, where there's a powerful movement that denies the scientific consensus on climate change. You can even go to Wikipedia and there's a whole page on climate change denial.
0:00:37 SC: So one can ask the question, "Where did this come from? Why especially here in the United States?" And today's guest, Naomi Oreskes, is an historian of science who has investigated this question. She's the co-author of a very influential book, Merchants of Doubt, which was later made into a documentary film, and I'm not gonna give away too much of what we talked about, because it's a fascinating road to go down, but one of the most interesting aspects of the story is that a lot of the climate denial movement can be traced to a small number of scientists who were also involved in other denialist movements, like denying that smoking causes cancer. Why did these people choose to make this their life's cause? The story is tied up with issues of capitalism and communism and the Cold War and it's just an incredibly interesting, intricate story that was worth following up on. So we're gonna talk about that. I talked about that with Naomi and also how things have evolved since Merchants of Doubt was published. It's a very important look at how our discourse is shaped, one that is only gonna become more relevant to social policy and communication policy as time goes on. So let's go.
[music]
0:02:09 SC: Naomi Oreskes, thank you so much for being on this podcast.
0:02:11 Naomi Oreskes: You're welcome. Pleasure to be here with you.
0:02:13 SC: Now, you work in areas about the history of science, but specifically disinformation, controversy, people going against the consensus and these days, we're in a world where a lot of people are talking about fake news and controversies over what's the scientific fact and so forth. It gets a little depressing at some point, right? I mean, how did... Did you get into this intentionally or did you just kind of stumble into it or were you dragged into it?
0:02:36 NO: Nobody grows up saying, "Oh, when I grow up, I'm going to work on disinformation."
0:02:40 SC: That's what I thought.
0:02:41 NO: The way that I do now but no, no, I definitely... And I don't really think of myself as working on disinformation. I think of what I work on as actually knowledge production. So I became a historian of science about 30 years ago. I started out as a scientist, but I was interested in what we would broadly call broader questions about science and society, and one thing I became interested in early on was the question of how do scientists decide when they have enough evidence, when we have enough evidence to say that we know something, because when you're studying science, you're presented with all this information. You're told there are these interesting different things going on, but nobody really ever talks about how scientists decided, "Okay, we know this thing now," right?
0:03:25 SC: Is there's some threshold...
0:03:26 NO: Yeah, is there some threshold.
0:03:27 SC: Who decides.
0:03:28 NO: Who decides.
0:03:28 SC: Who votes...
0:03:29 NO: Who votes, exactly. And science isn't an election, right? And as it happened, I started college in 1976. I'm dating myself now. You can do the arithmetic. But the interesting thing about 1976 in earth science was... It was just a few years after the plate tectonics revolution, and so it was a very interesting time to be an undergraduate, because our professors were all very excited and told us how lucky we were to be coming into this field now that this huge new great theory had been developed and there were so many things we understood properly now that we didn't understand before. And I remember thinking, "Oh, but I actually feel like that means we've come late. It would have been better to have been there while it was happening."
0:04:05 SC: While it's happening, yeah.
0:04:07 NO: But that's actually not how the professors presented it, interestingly enough. But then, I had the opportunity to travel and study abroad and I discovered an interesting fact, which was that the same idea, the idea of moving continents, had been proposed in the 1910s by Alfred Wegener and the idea had been rejected, and so that was kind of an interesting thing. Well, why did we reject this idea 60 years ago and now we're saying it's right? And I also found that in England, people viewed plate tectonics much less as a revolution and much more as a kind of evolution from the continental drift debate. So a few years later, when I was in grad school, I decided to just take a philosophy of science class.
0:04:50 SC: There you go.
0:04:50 NO: As you said you did, only in my case...
0:04:52 SC: Down the rabbit hole.
0:04:52 NO: Yeah, exactly. [chuckle] And so I had to write a term paper and so I proposed to my professor that I would like to write a paper about this question. Well, 10 years later or more than that, my first book, that ended up being my PhD and my first book project. And so that's what I'm really interested in. What does it even mean to say that something constitutes scientific evidence? Why do scientists like some kind of evidence better than others? And the other thing I experienced in graduate school was that scientists sometimes get very hot under the collar about the right way to do science, and often those opinions seem to me to be quite poorly substantiated by history or philosophy, or any kind of real intellectual argument.
0:05:35 NO: People would say, "Oh, don't do that, that's bad science." Or you would hear professors say or sometimes you'd hear physicists dismiss the entire field of geology, you know, as "stamp-collecting, descriptive blah, blah, blah." And I thought, "Well, this is... First of all, this is ridiculous. Geology is a science. We're clearly a science and we deserve to be treated with respect, even if we do things differently." Darwin, one of the greatest scientists of all time, was inspired by geology, originally wanted to be a geologist, and actually considered himself to be a geologist. So to say that you can't do rigorous work in an observational mode flies in the face of the history of science, but yeah, you would hear some people, not to bash physicists, but...
0:06:14 SC: Physicists were the worst, go ahead. Especially...
0:06:16 NO: Very opinionated about methodology. And so I just thought, "Well, this is interesting. This is something that should be studied. Why do they have these strong opinions? And why do geologists feel defensive about what we do, even though what we do is important and interesting, and we have successfully explained a heck of lot of important things about the world." So, anyway, one thing led to another, and that's what I did and that's what I do.
0:06:41 SC: Did you come to a conclusion about this question of how we decide that something is true? Is there a threshold or is it just come and go?
0:06:48 NO: No, it's really a matter of consensus, and that's why I got interested in the problem of consensus. So what I would argue now is that scientific knowledge is the things that scientists have agreed on, and the conditions under which they get to agree are very historically and socially contingent. So you really cannot answer the question of why we've decided we know enough to say, "Yes, this is true," without actually understanding the social context in which that discussion takes place.
0:07:14 SC: But it's always interesting to me because, as a good Bayesian, I think that you should never be 100% sure about any scientific claim. But on the other hand, you can be so sure that you're not gonna bother to listen to contrary claims either, right?
0:07:27 NO: Right. Or sure enough that it's not a good use of your time.
0:07:30 SC: Exactly.
0:07:31 NO: And if somebody would come up with some strong counter-argument based on evidence, then as a good scientist you're really compelled to listen, and in a sense that is what happened in the plate tectonics debate. Scientists rejected the idea of continental drift for a variety of reasons, some good, some in my opinion, not so good. But in the 1950s when new evidence came about, they did re-open the debate. And so you could say that actually science worked pretty well, because in fact we did get it sorted out. You could say maybe not so well, because there was this 30-year hiatus.
0:08:06 NO: But in my new book that's coming out, I actually feel that 30 years later, I've actually sorted out this question, if that doesn't sound too bold of me, but I actually now think that it would have been sorted out by the late 1930s, and it nearly was sorted out. There were some scientists doing some work that they presented at a major conference in 1936, in which they pretty much had all the pieces of what would later be called plate tectonics. But then World War II broke out, and all of the key people started working on classified military work, so they got diverted onto other things. And of course, this is a perfect example of historical contingency. The war breaks out. They get asked to work on other things. They do. They are loyal Americans. They want to support the war effort, and then that, but that it's... But when the war ends they don't just go back to what they were doing before. They've now been sent on a different pathway.
0:08:55 NO: It's not until the 1950s that a different group of scientists in the United Kingdom come up with some new fresh evidence, mostly from geo-magnetism, and they re-open the debate. And at that point one of the key people who had worked on this in the '30s, then he gets back involved, and then very quickly, within a very short period of time, we have plate tectonics. So, my argument now is that actually the hiatus was really a socially contingent, historically contingent thing that was really related to World War II, and that if World War II hadn't broken out I think we would have had the theory of plate tectonics, let say, by the 1940s, so the whole thing would have taken maybe 20-25 years, and that's pretty normal for science, yeah.
0:09:37 SC: That's okay, right, oh, yeah.
0:09:38 NO: So it's not like there's some big epistemological failure here. It's more like no, scientists work in the real world like the rest of us, and they're affected by social pressures, political developments, economic issues, and so there it is.
0:09:53 SC: It almost seems trite to say that, but it's also something that a lot of scientists don't do...
0:09:57 NO: Deny.
0:09:57 SC: Yeah, they deny it explicitly or implicitly, right?
0:10:00 NO: Right. They either don't think about it or sometimes they actually deny it explicitly.
0:10:03 SC: Yeah, and we'd like to think that science eventually gets the right answer, but it's not immediately that it gets the right answer.
0:10:08 NO: No, it's never immediately, because there's no way it could be, because it takes time to sort out, to sort through all these different questions and to have the arguments and counter-arguments that you have to have. So getting back to your point, absolutely, no person should ever be too enamored of their own conclusions. In the 1920s, there was a phrase people used to use, auto-intoxication. [laughter] It is such a great word, right? 'Cause we all have colleagues who are auto-intoxicated.
0:10:34 SC: Yes, yes.
0:10:34 NO: We all know what that looks like, and that's not a good thing. So it's really important in any branch of intellectual work to always be aware of the idea that you might be wrong, but if scientists have been working on an issue for 50 years and they've pretty much looked at it from lots of different angles and come to the conclusion that the evidence is overwhelming that this is correct, and maybe looked at some key issues like with climate science. Back in the '90s, scientists sorted out this issue of whether the observed warming could be the sun. These questions had been addressed and answered.
0:11:06 SC: Right.
0:11:07 NO: So at that point, then two things happen. First of all, it would frankly be a waste of time to be doing the same thing over and over again. You want to move on. That's part of why science progresses, if it can be said to progress, because we don't keep arguing the same points all over again. And also because in this case, we have serious decisions to make based on climate science.
0:11:27 SC: There's a ticking clock.
0:11:28 NO: There's a ticking clock, and the longer we delay, the worse the consequences become.
0:11:32 SC: So this is like an out of left field question, but what you're saying is making me think about things like the individual scientists, not only do wars get in the way, but they have intuitions, they have preferences, they have things that they think are right, and so there could just be intellectual resistance, all in very good faith, but just like this doesn't feel right to them, so they're not going to accept it. Have you ever thought about how something like that plays out in something like physics or cosmology? Like with superstring theory?
0:12:00 NO: Oh, absolutely. Sure, yeah. Well, this is the biggest argument, I think, for diversity in science. And by that, I don't just mean demographic diversity but intellectual diversity as well. I think we have good evidence from the history of science, that when scientific communities are non-diverse, either demographically or intellectually, and when they are closed and tend to be sort of a closed group of experts only talking to each other, that that is not entirely healthy. And so that's one of the reasons, it's one of the reasons why we have conferences, and why we have peer review. We have mechanisms in science to say, "Okay. Well, Sean Carroll has this theory. He thinks he's right and that's fine." You can be as enthusiastic about your theory as you want and to some extent, being enthusiastic is good.
0:12:44 SC: Sure.
0:12:45 NO: But now, we're not going to take his word for it. We're going to send this to some other reviewers, preferably to people who aren't his friends and hopefully they'll review it. It'll be a tough review, but if they say, "Well, I don't really like those Caltech people, but... " [chuckle]
0:13:02 NO: Then that's sort of the whole point of peer review. And so, as long as that is happening and as long as you really do have independent peer review and you have a diverse community where different perspectives can be heard, then I think most of the time, we're in pretty good shape.
0:13:15 SC: Yeah. I think that that sounds 100% right to me. I think that the practical issue is that if you're a department hiring people and you're deciding which areas to hire in and you're in principle in favor of intellectual diversity, in practice, you think no, the people are working on this are just smarter and more correct than the people working on that. It's just very hard for people to say, "Well, we think this person is working on less interesting things, but we should hire them anyway, because of diversity reasons."
0:13:42 NO: Yeah. Well, that's right. It is hard to do that. And so you might not expect any one department to achieve that, but the physics community as a whole can achieve that. And if people are not open to the idea that some other approaches could be valuable and important, then that can be a problem. And I think, you know, you raised string theory. I'm not an expert in string theory, but we both know that there have been some pretty vocal debates about whether string theory is a good way to go or not, and that's good that that debate is taking place. It would be bad if it weren't, in a way, right?
0:14:12 SC: Yeah. I find myself in a weird position, 'cause I'm pro-string theory. I think it has a lot to offer, but I think there's maybe a bit too much of it. I think that it's hard for those people in the string theory community, who by now have been divorced from experimental data for decades, to say, "Well, we need some non-string theory voices in." They don't say that. They think they're on the right track.
0:14:31 NO: So I think that there's a pretty strong argument from history that, that there's a strong counter argument against that. And especially what you said, the bit about being divorced from experimental data, because you could be doing your thing and be very convinced that you're on the right track, but as long as you have some other people doing experimental data or some ground truth, then there's some kind of tension, if I can use that word, a healthy productive tension that you're forced to engage with these other lines of reasoning or evidence from other sources.
0:15:00 SC: It's the best reality check.
0:15:00 NO: Right. Exactly.
0:15:01 SC: That's the data.
0:15:01 NO: And I talk about that in a lot of my work that in the 19th century William Whewell developed his concept of consilience of evidence and EO Wilson has popularized it again recently, and I think that Whewell was right about that. That we can feel pretty confident about our conclusions when we have lots of lines of evidence that stand alone independently, preferably collected by different people, maybe in different parts of the globe or at least different universities.
0:15:25 SC: Maybe they don't even like each other, right?
0:15:26 NO: Maybe they don't like each other. Maybe they're from MIT. [laughter] But if even when people who have different views and don't like each other and use different methods still come to the same conclusion, then you've got some pretty good grounds to feel like this is probably pretty good. But if you've only got one group of people and they're all doing the same thing, then maybe that's not so great.
0:15:44 SC: And I thought that, so one of the things that you've figured out, noticed, found in your research, is that just a small number of people having contrarian views can be put to use by these social forces that we mentioned. So how did you first get into this specific line of research that led to Merchants of Doubt?
0:16:01 NO: Well, like most important things, it was an accident. So I was working on what was going to be my full professor book, a big book on the history of Cold War oceanography, looking at the question of what difference did it make who was funding the science. Because oceanography in the United States went from being almost non-existent in the early 20th century to being a very well-developed science by, say, the 1950s. And that was almost entirely the result of military funding during the Cold War, because of the significance of oceanography for anti-submarine warfare.
0:16:30 NO: So that seemed like... You know, in history, we don't have controlled experiments, but that was sort of as close to one as I could get, where you had this very clear change. So I was working on this, and one of the things, the narrative arc sort of begins at Woods Hole and Scripps where they're very small since they have almost no money and then it begins to change as the Navy begins to fund it. And I tracked this arc from the 1930s to the 1980s, where the reverse problem begins to happen, the Navy begins to dial back its support and the scientists are worrying about how they're going to fund their science going forward.
0:17:08 NO: And I discovered a cache of letters of a group of scientists at Scripps, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, some of whom I knew personally, in which they were talking about this issue and they were actually going to the Dean at the time, who I also knew, saying, "We need to figure out what the next big source of funding for our work is going to be and we think it's climate change." And so these letters are being written in the 1980s. And so I thought that was pretty interesting because that's before most of us were really aware of climate change as an issue.
0:17:38 SC: I am just gonna ask, it's hard for me to remember what I was, I was in college or whatever. But the debate had begun about that time.
0:17:45 NO: Not really, Jim Hansen testifies in Congress in 1988.
0:17:49 SC: Okay.
0:17:49 NO: The IPCC is created in 1998.
0:17:51 SC: So we were talking about acid rain and ozone holes, but not yet global warming, okay.
0:17:54 NO: Climate change hadn't really come into the public sphere, but here these scientists were talking about it. So I thought that was interesting just by itself, like, "Oh, that scientists were actually... " And in a way, it made sense because Hansen had testified in '88, so obviously he must have been working on it for some period leading up to that. So it made me interested in the sort of earlier history and I started digging in a bit more about what did scientists know about the question of man-made global warming back in the '60s, '70s, '80s and found a much richer, more complicated story than I had previously known. But also, I remember thinking, "Well, this seems a little opportunistic."
0:18:30 NO: And at the time the contrarians were claiming, "Oh, this is just a big excuse to get money for your research." And I was like, "Oh, well, I mean, this is maybe not an excuse, but it is being put forward as a reason to get money for their research." And so that made me think that it just needed a little more investigating. So how serious was this threat? Were they exaggerating the threat to get funding? Because certainly during the Cold War, many historians would argue people did exaggerate the Soviet threat to get money for scientific research and other things. So it didn't seem completely impossible that that was happening here. But when I started digging into it, I found that actually it seemed to me, if anything the scientists had underestimated the threat. And when I started looking about how much we actually already knew about this issue, even in the 1970s, there were reports from the National Research Council, there was a very significant report that I found that had been written by the JASON's.
0:19:27 SC: Oh, yeah.
0:19:28 NO: The World Meteorological Organization had had a big meeting in 1976, I think '76, '77, something like that. So actually, there was quite a bit of evidence already at that point that this was potentially a quite serious issue. And so then I just started looking a bit more into it, and so now, so I'm doing two things at once. I'm researching this earlier history trying to understand how scientists came to say that climate change would be the next big scientific issue in the '80s, but I'm doing this work in the early 2000s when climate change denial is already a thing. And right around the time I was doing this, President George W. Bush responded to an NRC report by saying, "Well, I really don't think there's a consensus on the issue." Right? And there was this notorious sentence where he got asked about this report and he said, "Oh, I read the report put out by the Bureaucracy."
[chuckle]
0:20:23 NO: Yeah, right? So, yeah.
0:20:25 SC: Maybe, yeah, those reports are completely unreliable.
0:20:27 NO: Yeah, they're just a bureaucracy, what do they know. Anyway, so I decided to try to answer the question, well, is there a consensus? Because the President of the United States was saying there wasn't, but all the scientists around me seemed to be agreeing about the issue.
0:20:42 SC: And the President's father when he was president was actually very interested in combating global warming.
0:20:46 NO: Correct, that too. Correct. So anyway, trying to make a long story short, that led to my publishing my paper on The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change in 2004, which was the first paper that analyzed the question of whether or not there was a consensus among scientists. And little beknownst to me, I guess some people would now say that I actually invented the methodology of consensus analysis, which I wasn't doing deliberately, but I guess maybe I did. Anyway, so I published that article and I really thought, I was naive enough to think that people were just confused about the issue.
0:21:19 SC: You would explain to them about this consensus.
0:21:20 NO: About this consensus, it wasn't consensus, show them the data, do a quantitative analysis, objective science citation index, blah, blah, blah. And I even made a point of saying in the paper, "Knowing there's a consensus about the reality of climate change does not tell us what to do about it. The policy questions are another set of questions and that requires a different kind of expertise." So, I was really quite clear about that. I thought I had been a very responsible scholar.
0:21:47 SC: Right.
0:21:48 NO: And then I got slammed.
0:21:49 SC: Yeah.
0:21:50 NO: Just slammed. Threatening phone calls, hostile email, attacks by the senator from Oklahoma. I mean, really crazy stuff and...
0:22:00 SC: So, this is mid-2000?
0:22:00 NO: 2004. And I say this was my Alice Through The Looking Glass moment, it was like I had gone down some weird rabbit hole into a parallel universe [chuckle] with a lot of people who thought that climate change was a liberal conspiracy and who knows what other things. And so at first it was frankly worrisome, scary a little, frightening. Getting death threats is no fun. And I'm thinking, "I published a paper in Science magazine. I'm getting a death threat. This is like there's something has to be explained here, right?"
0:22:31 SC: Can't imagine telling your parents, "I would like to be a historian of oceanography," and them saying, "It's a very dangerous... "
0:22:38 NO: Yeah, exactly. I know, exactly, who would have thought, right? I just got back from giving a talk in Texas where I had an armed guard with me the whole day. Now, I was told they do that for all their visitors, but...
0:22:49 SC: They just like being armed.
[chuckle]
0:22:52 NO: Anyway so, exactly. This was just a very strange experience so... And I feel in this moment, it was a nice piece of luck, I guess. I remember thinking, "Well, if I were a scientist, if I'd stayed being a strict geologist, I wouldn't really be able to investigate this, because it wouldn't be geology. But I'm a historian, so if something is happening, I can just follow it where it leads," and that's kind of what I've done for the last now 14 years. There's just been a set of leads and I've followed them, and so I'm not really doing any geology anymore, and a lot of what I'm doing is only tangentially related to some of the original questions that I started out interesting in, although obviously it all kind of circles back in the end, but I just started thinking, "Well, who are these people? Why are they attacking me? Why is what I said threatening? And why does the President of the United States think there's no consensus about climate science when there clearly is?" And that set of why questions led to us writing Merchants of Doubt.
0:23:53 SC: And I know a little bit about the controversy, of course, but still, I guess I didn't know too much about it, 'cause only while reading your book, did I realize that not only was there a kind of epistemological connection between the arguments over climate change and other arguments, like tobacco or whatever, acid rain, but it's the same people, there's a handful of people literally you can count on the fingers of one hand, and these characters show up over and over again.
0:24:20 NO: Exactly.
0:24:21 SC: So tells us, tell our podcast audience about this whole story.
0:24:24 NO: Sure. Also this was the big discovery that Erik Conway, my co-author and I made, and it was really Erik who first realized that something was going on here, because I went to a conference in Germany, a very important, famous group, the International Commission for the History of Meteorology, so a very small, very obscure, and I gave a talk on a small element of the history of climate science, some work that was done in the 1960s, but at the end of the talk in the Q&A, it came up that I was being attacked, and I had mentioned by name one of the people who was attacking me, and later that day in the bar over beer, Erik Conway, who was at the meeting, who I hadn't met yet, came up to me, and as it turned out, he was writing a book on the history of atmospheric science at NASA, and a whole section of the book was about NASA's work on the ozone hole, on ozone depletion, and he had come across a whole stash of materials of people who had attacked the scientists who worked on the ozone hole, including particularly Sherry Rowland, who shared in the Nobel Prize for that work, and so he...
0:25:27 SC: Sorry, she was being attacked.
0:25:28 NO: Right. He... Sherry Rowland was...
0:25:30 SC: Sherry Rowland is a he.
0:25:31 NO: Is a he. So yeah, Sherwood Rowland. I wish that she was a woman, but no, although Sherry was a great guy, but would have been even greater if she was a woman. So back in the '80s, Sherry... '80s, and early '90s, Sherry and his colleagues had been attacked for their work on climate, on the ozone hole. Erik said to me, "Well, you know, the people who are attacking you, it's the same people who attacked Sherry Rowland." And I knew enough about that history, not about the attacks, but about the science, to think, "What? That so weird." And then I thought, "Wait, did you just say my name in the same sentence as Sherry Rowland, Nobel laureate, one of the greatest, most important scientists in the 20th century without whom we would all be like dying of ozone depletion-related cancer?" Anyway, he said, "Yeah, when I go home, I'll send you some stuff." So he sent me this package of materials that he had, and it was like, do you remember the game Mad Libs?
0:26:28 SC: Oh, yeah.
0:26:30 NO: Right, where you just substitute the words?
0:26:30 SC: Yeah.
0:26:31 NO: It was like exactly the same.
0:26:33 SC: There was a template.
0:26:34 NO: There was a template and you could take out global warming and put in ozone hole, and it was identical, and it was the same people.
0:26:39 SC: Wow.
0:26:40 NO: And one of them was Fred Seitz. And as you probably know, Fred Seitz was an extremely famous 20th century physicist.
0:26:46 SC: Well, that was the other thing. It's not like a merry band of little crackpots. These are big names that are banding together.
0:26:52 NO: Right. So, I'm thinking, Fred Seitz. So, I was enough of a historian of science to know that who he was, and to think why is Fred Seitz doing this, right? And so, I just started digging a little bit trying to find out a little bit more about him, and then I hit what I think of as kind of the big reveal was the discovery that he worked for RJ Reynolds Tobacco. And so at that point I called another colleague, my colleague Robert Proctor at Stanford, who's done a lot to work on the history of tobacco, and I said, "Robert, have you ever heard of Fred Seitz?" He goes, "Oh, have I ever heard of Fred Seitz." So two days later another package comes in the mail. It's a big stack of documents about scientists' connections to RJ Reynolds. Same thing. This time take out climate change, put in tobacco, right? And so then we began, thought, "Oh, there's a story here."
0:27:38 SC: Yeah.
0:27:38 NO: It's not just that the arguments sound similar, it's that they're actually the same arguments being made by the same people and that, "Okay, there's some story here that has to be told." And so I put aside the oceanography book, put it on back burner, said, "I'm gonna work on this," and...
0:27:53 SC: And one of your questions was, like you said, these are Fred Seitz and the others are big names. They are famous scientists. That's not that they misunderstand the science.
0:28:03 NO: Correct.
0:28:03 SC: There has to be some other set of reasons.
0:28:06 NO: Right. And that was one of the really important things we really realized early on that in a way was good, that there was just no possibility that this was scientific illiteracy, right? Because many people at the time were assuming that if people didn't accept climate science, it was because they didn't understand the science, and therefore, if you just explained the science better, more clearly, fewer graphs, less jargon, that you would get through to people. And this blew that argument out of the water, right? This had nothing to do and so then that question became, "Well, what does it have to do with?" And it took us time. We spent several years digging through a lot of materials, but then when we began to find these linkages to these various libertarian, right-wing think-tanks, then the story became clear that this was ideologically motivated, it was driven by anxieties about communism, and the fear that government regulation of the marketplace was a kind of slippery slope to socialism, and we actually found places where they said exactly that in their own words.
0:29:04 SC: Yes, let's fill that out a little bit. When was the argument about smoking happening? The '70s?
0:29:10 NO: Well, so it's a little bit complicated. The original argument about smoking really begins in the 1960s with the Surgeon General report, and by the '70s, it was pretty clear smoking caused cancer and a host of other terrible diseases, and by the '80s people... There were bans on smoking in public places. People were starting to win lawsuits against the tobacco industry. In the early '90s the US Department of Justice filed suit against them for conspiracy to commit fraud against the American people. So, this played out over a period of time, but beginning in the '60s and running through the '90s. Fred Seitz started working for the tobacco company in 1979. So this is well after the bulk of the scientific evidence is clear.
0:29:54 SC: The science had been done.
0:29:54 NO: The science was basically done at that point. So question one, why would he make common cause with the tobacco industry. And then there's a kind of second round that Fred Singer gets involved with in the early '90s over the issue of second-hand smoke, and that's, it's interesting. The tobacco industry was never admirable in its behavior, but it became even less admirable at this point, because this is when the rubber really hit the road, because up until this point they had been arguing that smoking is a personal choice. That if smokers know the risks and choose to take those risks, that's their choice. And in a free society we don't want the government making that choice for us. And up to a point that's a reasonable argument.
0:30:38 SC: It's an argument. You can make it, and it fits in with...
0:30:40 NO: Fits in with the freedom.
0:30:41 SC: Freedom, capitalism.
0:30:41 NO: Correct. So it's not crazy and it's not a lie, right? It's a judgment about what role you think the government should or should not play in protecting consumers from dangerous products. But in the late '80s, the scientific evidence became overwhelming that second-hand smoke also killed people, and at that point the argument about personal choice is blown out of the water, and that's when the tobacco industry got really nasty and did some of the more ugly and nefarious things they did, including one project they had which they called Project White Coat, which was... Who wears white coats? Scientists. It was to recruit scientists to defend tobacco, because they began to realize that the industry had lost credibility, but if they could have scientists defending it that would have more credibility, and particularly journalists, they could get journalists to present both sides of the story, and this technique was highly effective. So if you look at, say, articles in the New York Times from the '80s, very much like, "Well, scientists say this, but this other guy, this other scientist... " And very often, it's not made clear that the scientist defending the tobacco industry is in fact on the payroll of the industry.
0:31:53 SC: Well, it is one of the things about how science works, in combination with how law works and legislation works and journalism works, is that even if there are 100 people on one side and two people on the other side, it's still two sides. And so...
0:32:09 NO: Exactly right.
0:32:09 SC: You'd like to...
0:32:10 NO: So it really isn't, right. Yeah, you say, "Alright, let's get a representative from one side and the other." And so, just a small number of scientists who are willing to say that second-hand smoke is not so bad, or there's no warming up can have an outsized impact for that reason, right?
0:32:23 NO: Exactly. And the tobacco industry recognized that and they exploited it, and so that was their whole strategy was to create this impression of a debate, and they realized that they only needed a few people to help them do that. If they had Fred Seitz, Fred Singer and a few others, they could very quickly create the impression of a significant scientific debate. And of course, we've seen that re-capitulated now with climate science.
0:32:45 SC: Yeah. You mentioned 1979, which makes me think of my days in high school and college, and Ronald Reagan was president. And it might be hard for the youthful podcast-listening audience out there to put themselves in the mindset of there was a real threat of nuclear war, that at least there was an impression that this is something that could realistically happen. We need to defend ourselves. And it was really not just a rivalry between two countries, but a clash of world views of the sort of collectivist communist view and our individualist freedom view. And therefore, and suddenly there's a chain of logic that says that government regulation and restriction on industry is sort of a slippery slope towards communism.
0:33:26 NO: Right. Well, that's exactly right. And I think there's two important points I'd like to make about that. So one is that, one of the big problems with much of the thinking that we criticize in Merchants of Doubt is this dichotomization, Manichean, Cold War mentality, and it is understandable. I'm old enough to remember the Cold War. It certainly is understandable that in the context of the Soviet threat, it was easy to slip into a kind of Manichean world view, but the reality, of course, is that our choices are not simply totalitarian collectivism on one hand and total free market libertarian chaos on the other. There's a lot of choices in between. And of course, there are many countries in the world, particularly in Western Europe, that have a different balance of free market principles and government involvement than we do.
0:34:14 NO: But it became very difficult to have that conversation during the Cold War, and I would say that Ronald Reagan is part of the reason for that. Reagan made it worse, that there was a period under Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, particularly under Nixon, when we had detente, we had... We saw Perestroika in the Soviet Union, there was a kind of relaxation of hostilities, and an increasing degree of trade with the Soviet Union, an increasing degree of conversation. You know, that one of the tragedies of Richard Nixon was that he actually had some very significant foreign policy successes in lessening the tensions with the Soviet Union, and also had some significant interventions in the marketplace here in the United States, including really important pieces of environmental legislation. So there was a kind of middle ground that we actually were moving to in the 1970s.
0:35:05 NO: But Reagan stopped that and he really dialed it back and dialed up the rhetoric much more to something more like what we had seen in the 1950s, where the Soviet Union was the evil empire, there was no compromise, and it was all or nothing. And that kind of all-or-nothing thinking made it much harder then to talk to conservatives about something like the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or the Montreal Protocol, because they saw these things as collectivist, communistic, and a threat, and that made it hard for them to recognize that ozone depletion was also a threat and may be actually a worse one.
0:35:44 NO: And then the second point about this has to do with nuclear winter, which is a much forgotten but very important debate from this time period. And actually in our book, one of our early chapters is about nuclear winter, but it's the chapter I think nobody reads, because nobody really sees what does nuclear winter have to do with this. It seems like a little out of place, but actually it's usually important, because many of the people who later became involved in climate change denial were also involved in the nuclear winter debate. And part of the reason was because Reagan's... Nixon's response to the threat of nuclear war was arms control, and to try to dial it back, decrease the size of the stockpile, lessen the threat level on both sides.
0:36:21 NO: Reagan rejected that. His argument was the opposite, it was that we should build up our defenses and make the cost of a nuclear war that much greater, so sort of a return to the MAD philosophy, the mutual assured destruction. And again, you could argue... Nobody really knows, only God knows which strategy was better. So it was arguable, but what Reagan did that was very troubling and upsetting to many scientists was that he began to talk about the possibility of a winnable nuclear war, and that was absurd, because all of the scientific evidence suggested if we had a massive exchange, nobody was gonna win. We would all be incinerated and there was no way to even conceptualize...
0:37:04 SC: What does it mean to win?
0:37:04 NO: What does it even mean to win, right, exactly. I once found a memo in the archive where an oceanographer was proposing to equip a submarine to protect the President and the Vice President in the event of a massive nuclear exchange. And then I remember reading this and thinking, "And then when they came back up, what would they govern over?" [laughter] It was just like...
0:37:24 SC: Yes.
0:37:24 NO: Right. But there was a lot of that kind of strange thinking during the Cold War. So when Reagan began to do that, a lot of scientists spoke up against it and said, "This is ridiculous. There's no such thing as a nuclear war." And the nuclear winter argument was part of that argument. So then, a group of scientists, including Carl Sagan and a number of others, Turco, and others, did this modeling work to calculate what would be the effect of a massive nuclear exchange in terms of its, all the dust and particulates that would be left in the atmosphere afterwards. And what they showed was that it would lead to a very dramatic cooling of the atmosphere, so much so that it would potentially push the Earth into a nuclear winter, a major crop failure, so that even if you survived the initial exchange, which you probably wouldn't, but even if you did, maybe you were in some outlying place, you were up in the Yukon or something, in Australia, you would still be affected, that the whole globe would be affected, there'd be no escaping the consequences.
0:38:22 NO: And this drove the Reagan administration crazy. And so it was one of the early examples of where scientists are doing science, but it has policy ramification. And so, the Reagan administration conservatives went on a pretty strong campaign to discredit that work, they attacked the work, attacked Carl Sagan, and Seitz was part of that too. And so there's some early hints of this later story in that debate. So it really does go back to Ronald Reagan. And it's really an important... The Reagan administration is a really important node in this history.
0:38:54 SC: And you can see how politicians have their predilections about how to run the global order, and also corporations wanna make money and wanna avoid being regulated. But the scientists here, even if they were on the payroll, I'm gonna guess, and tell me if I'm right, they weren't... Even the crazy minority scientists who are acting against the consensus were doing so because they believed it was true, right?
0:39:17 NO: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right.
0:39:18 SC: They weren't actually in it for the money.
0:39:20 NO: No, no. I think that's one of the important points of our book is that most of this is not actually about money. I mean, behind the scientists, yes, there are industries that have great financial stakes and certainly, the tobacco industry, it was all about money. But I don't think that for Fred Seitz, when he goes to work for RJ Reynolds, it's not primarily about the money. I mean, he's getting paid, I'm sure that plays some role, but the ideological justification is also really important, if not more important.
0:39:46 SC: Yeah. And they really got organized, they started the George Marshall Institute, was it?
0:39:52 NO: Correct. They created a think tank. They named it after George C. Marshall of the Marshall Plan, because of its role in fighting communism, so that's already a clue about how they're thinking about this. Although, personally, I don't think George C. Marshall would have agreed with what they did, but that's just my opinion.
0:40:07 SC: He's not around.
0:40:07 NO: He's not around to say one way or the other. Yeah, so they created a think tank. And they organized a series of programs designed... Particularly aimed at the press, to persuade the press that there was a big debate, that scientists didn't have a consensus, and also to influence public policy, so they sent reports to the White House. And they played a significant role during the administration of George HW Bush. Because as you said, our first President Bush accepted the scientific evidence of climate change. He was really the last major Republican political leader, apart from John McCain, to be on board about the science. And he went to Rio de Janeiro for the Earth Summit in 1992, and he signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. But already there were people in the Bush administration who did not want him to do that, and there was, in fact, a big fight in the White House about whether or not Bush should go to Rio and Nierenberg and his colleagues played a significant role in getting... They had written a report, an early report published in '89, that challenged the scientific evidence. They got that reporting to the White House via Sununu...
0:41:10 SC: John Sununu.
0:41:11 NO: John Sununu, I keep forgetting his name 'cause his son is now in politics. His son is Chris Sununu. John Sununu, who was White House Chief of Staff, I think, at the time. So through Sununu they get this report to the White House and it circulates and there was one White House staffer who said, "Oh, yes, everyone has read it." I remember when I read that I thought, "Oh, well, there you go." So Bill Nierenberg, because of his position, he's Director of Scripps, he's done all these important things, he has access, he has friends in the White House. Most scientists don't have that, right? So a lot of my scientific colleagues were sort of moaning and groaning about how politicians didn't seem to understand climate science, and I'm thinking, "Well, yeah." So look at this story, and they're getting this from Bill Nierenberg, who's a scientist, seems credible, right.
0:42:00 SC: So it is the same people there from tobacco and second-hand smoke, and then the acid rain controversy, and the ozone hole controversy, and eventually climate change. Am I missing a controversy?
0:42:13 NO: No, that's it. In the book we have one extra chapter that was like a slight diversion, but we thought it was important, about DDT.
0:42:20 SC: Oh, yeah.
0:42:21 NO: Seitz, Nierenberg and John Sununu didn't actually get involved in the DDT debate, but some of the people they worked with did, and we thought it was important to include that, because it's one of the places where you see some of the more outrageous accusations being made, in which they actually take a debate, a scientific debate that has been already settled for decades and try to reopen it. And so, we were thinking, "Well, why do they wanna reopen the debate about DDT?" Well, because if they do, they can discredit the EPA, which was partly created because of the DDT story, and then that can... I mean, look at where we are today, right?
0:42:55 SC: Rachel Carson is the world's greatest murderer.
0:42:57 NO: I know, I mean, completely insane, right, completely insane. I remember when I first saw that, saying to some people, like when I give public lectures, saying, "Well, it was Richard Nixon, who created the EPA, so I mean, why don't they say that Richard Nixon is the murderer? That he has blood on his hands?" So it's also very sexist. It was laden with all kinds of gender bias as well. So that DDT story seemed important in terms of the larger political context and how these tactics then spread into the broader community.
0:43:26 SC: And one of the amazing things is just how effective that these tactics are and I think that, presumably we need to go beyond certain individual journalistic or legislative tactics to just the human psychology of why so many people come on board. You've found graphs about the different fraction of Democrats and Republicans who believe that human activity is causing global warming. There's no reason for there to be any correlation between that political position, but there clearly is.
0:43:57 NO: From a scientist standpoint there's no reason, but from a cultural standpoint of course there is, and so that's part of what we're trying to understand here. And so... So I think there's a couple of different things going on. So one thing is, nobody likes bad news. So if I tell you, "This is really bad, we have to spend a lot of money now fixing this problem," and someone else tells you, "Oh, no, it's fine, don't worry," who's got the better message, right? So scientists have a real uphill battle with trying to persuade people to take climate change seriously. And if someone comes along and says, "Oh, you don't have to worry," many people are gonna take that. And that's whether they're Democrats, Republicans, independents, whatever. Then there's wishful thinking. I think wishful thinking plays a big role in people's lives and sometimes it's a good thing. Optimism is a good thing.
0:44:39 SC: Yeah.
0:44:39 NO: So again, I say, "This is a really serious problem. We need to have a price on carbon, make the price of gas more expensive." Someone else comes along and says, "Oh, don't worry. Technological innovation will solve it." Once again, who's got the better message, right? So, we're optimistic. We're Americans. We believe in technological progress. So, let's just wait. Technology will solve the problem. And the thing is, sometimes it does, right? Again, it's not crazy, but do you sit around and wait for the magic technology or do you take some steps in insurance, right? So that's a third. And then the third thing is the subject of my new book. So, shameless plug. [chuckle]
0:45:17 SC: No, no, that's why we're here.
0:45:19 NO: Yeah, yeah. So, Erik Conway and I have just started working on a new project which is really an attempt to answer this question: Why does this argument about freedom, freedom, freedom, regulation is bad, government's bad, taxation's bad, the market is good, why does that argument have so much resonance with the American people? When in fact, we know that markets fail. Pick up any elementary economics textbook, market failure's a real thing. Great Depression of 2008, housing bubbles, tulip crisis, there's lots and lots of examples of market failure, small and large, throughout the entire history of capitalism. So, the idea of market failure shouldn't be a big deal, and yet somehow it is. We somehow don't assimilate the idea that, yes, markets are often efficient, but sometimes they fail and sometimes really badly.
0:46:06 SC: Well, and a failure of the market is sort of a failure on its own terms to make its people money, it doesn't even work at that. But there's also just markets causing bad outcomes.
0:46:15 NO: Well, that's the second thing. So the first thing is markets failing even on their own terms, like a housing bubble. And then the second thing is what economists call "external costs." The market could be functioning well as a market, but not accounting for some damaging effect. And climate change is that, right? So, buying and selling oil, gas, fossil fuels by themselves, not necessarily a bad thing, until we discover that there's this really serious, unintended side effect. And that's called an "external cost." And again, this isn't economics textbook, this is no secret. And yet, somehow we operate and we talk and we speak as if external costs, well, they're external, somehow they don't count because they're external to the market and that doesn't make sense.
0:47:00 NO: And then there's the whole freedom thing, because of course we want freedom. Of course, freedom is a good thing. But, there are competing freedoms. My freedom to do certain things impinges on your freedom to do other things. I don't have the freedom to dump my garbage in your backyard, so why should you have the freedom to dump your garbage in the atmosphere? And yet, the first one we know is no good, right? You could have me arrested if I came and dumped my junk on your lawn. But somehow, the freedom of corporations to dump pollution in the atmosphere, well, we've put some limits on that, but not as many as we need. So these are issues of competing freedom. And again, there's a big philosophical literature about this. Isaiah Berlin once famously said that, "Freedom for wolves can be death for lambs."
[chuckle]
0:47:45 NO: I used that line once at a conference at Yellowstone and I thought, "Oh, maybe that's not the best metaphor to use here."
[chuckle]
0:47:51 NO: I'm always looking for those good metaphors, but metaphors are very socially contingent. Anyway, so the point is, these are all things that can be discussed, need to be discussed, and we have a framework through which we could discuss them, and yet somehow, that hasn't happened. Instead, we have this really pervasive cultural story about the efficiency of marketplace, the magic of the marketplace, that makes it very easy to persuade people, "Just let the markets handle it and don't let the government interfere. Government is bureaucratic, government is inefficient, government is bad." And so, Erik and I became interested in trying to figure out, "Where did that story come from?" And especially the government piece, because government's good. We need government. The reason we have government is 'cause if we didn't, life would be nasty, brutish and short, right?
0:48:35 SC: Not what Ronald Reagan taught me.
0:48:37 NO: Right, but that's the point. Reagan was all about, "Government's the problem, not the solution." So we became interested in trying to figure out where that came from. Especially because if you think about the Founding Fathers, this country was built on the premise of good governance. That government is essential and we wanna do it right and not just put it in the hands of a monarch or a dictator, but have a kind of structure that will ensure that governance goes forward in a reasonable manner, that the majority rule but with respect to the views of minorities, all those good things. But yet somehow, again, we've lost that, and now we're in this thing, we just think of government as being bad.
0:49:13 SC: And somehow the explanation has to involve the fact that this divergence of attitudes happens over time. And also, more in the United States than in other similar Western countries. It's not just purely a human psychological reaction.
0:49:27 NO: Correct. And that's a really important point, right, exactly. It's very local because climate change denial now is essentially an American phenomenon. It exists a little bit in a few other places, but not much.
0:49:36 SC: Probably 'cause they're listening to us, right?
0:49:38 NO: Exactly. Well, in Australia, we know it came from the United States and was pushed out to Australia. But in France, Germany, Switzerland, China, Brazil, climate change denial is just not a thing. Argentina, Chile, Japan, Tanzania. So, this is a very particularly American story. And so, any explanation there has to be about that. So this is one reason why I'm a little skeptical of the human psychology analyses. Yes, of course, there's a psychological component, that's certainly true. But that doesn't explain why 90% of Germans accept that climate change is real, irrespective of whether they're conservatives or liberals. And yet in the United States, 50% of Republicans don't, right? So this is a cultural thing that needs a cultural explanation.
0:50:22 SC: My very first podcast guest was Carol Travers, who is a social psychologist, and we talked about cognitive biases, cognitive dissonance, tribalism, and how when you pick a side, you're driven to ex post facto invent reasons to support your side. Is there some snowball effect that when people from the George Marshall Institute were effective enough in getting some policy makers to buy into this picture, then that sort of shifted the political discourse in a way that the country followed along?
0:50:52 NO: Yeah, and I think that's definitely true, definitely. And that's, I think, where the psychological elements do come in. But at the same time, if you are looking to change the situation, then the tribal story doesn't really help you figure out how to change it very well. But if you remind people, "Well, Republicans didn't always think this." Like you say, if we go back to Nixon and Bush, they were pro-environment, and there's a long history of Republican environmentalism in this country. So, part of my goal is actually to find some way to recreate that spirit of Republican environmentalism, which I actually agree with really strongly. And I go back and I read Gifford Pinchot, I'm like, "Gifford, where are you now?"
[chuckle]
0:51:29 NO: Or even more recently, I spent a bit of time at the Library of Congress a few months ago in the papers of Russell Train, who was the first head of the Council of Environmental Quality under Richard Nixon. What a great man. Some of his speeches, you could dust them off and you could use them right now and they would still be pertinent. And he talks about all the reasonable things that, it seems to me, we should be talking about, about is a serious problem. It doesn't go away by ignoring it or pretending it doesn't exist, but we wanna find efficient ways to deal with it. He was a great man, he was involved in a lot of different forms of conservation, including... Well, he got interested in environmentalism initially through wildlife conservation, like Africa big game conservation, but he also talked about how ordinary people have the need to be in beautiful places. And after the urban riots in the 1960s, he gave a big speech in which he showed that some of the Commissions that had looked into the causes of the riots, people had talked about the fact that they didn't have parks in their communities, they just didn't even have a place where they could sit under a tree.
0:52:32 SC: Right.
0:52:32 NO: So it wasn't just about preserving elephants, but it was also about just the way in which nature and natural environments are important to people on a daily basis. And he saw that and I thought, "Such a great, great man, his notion of conservation is so capacious that it ranges from protecting the elephants in Africa, to making sure that people in Watts have parks." I was like, "Oh, Russell, where are you now?"
[laughter]
0:52:58 SC: Well, speaking of shameless plugs, another recent podcast guest was Joe Walston of the Wildlife Conservation Society, and he makes the case that almost all environmental movements started in cities. The people who miss being out there in the environment that become activists about trying to protect it. And he's cautiously optimistic that there's a new equilibrium in our future. If we can get enough people to live in cities, then we can leave nature alone and it can actually rebound a little.
0:53:24 NO: Well, that's interesting. Well, I hope he's right. But that's certainly true. Right, if you live out in the country or a rural area, it's easy to take it for granted. But with the rise of urbanization, the original environmental movement in the United States with Gifford Pinchot, John D. Rockefeller, Teddy Roosevelt, was all about responding to urbanization and the impacts they thought that had on American life.
0:53:43 SC: So when you go back into the past looking at these things, I know this is part of your new book, do you have a title for the new book, by the way?
0:53:49 NO: Yes, it's called The Magic of the Marketplace: The True History of a False Idea.
0:53:54 SC: Very good, yes. And is this gonna last? I know publishers always want to mess with your title. So is this set in stone?
0:54:00 NO: I don't know. Well, it's never set in stone. But our publisher really likes this title, so I'm thinking that this one has a good chance of surviving, yeah.
0:54:06 SC: So you go back, 'cause I just heard you talk about this yesterday, for those who are listening, I know that... Now, you go back and there's a long history in the United States of this battle between corporations and the government trying to regulate them a little bit, right? And child labor is one of them. And I was struck by the fact that maybe the first incident on your slide was the emancipation, right?
0:54:32 NO: Yes.
0:54:32 SC: And for many reasons, one of which reminds me, this is still the original sin of the United States. So many things go back to the fight over slavery.
0:54:40 NO: Yes, well it's true. And I threw that in to be deliberately provocative. The book is going to focus on the 20th century, we're not going to talk about slavery. But it is really important to recognize that the marketplace gave us slavery, right? And that's an extreme example, but it's an important one, because it's a reminder that we don't actually consider it acceptable to buy and sell all things. We do put limits, we've always placed limits on the marketplace. And the great fight of the 19th century in this country, which we are still dealing with, is that some people thought it was legitimate to buy and sell other people and other people didn't. And so we had to make a choice and that wasn't a choice that the market by itself could solve, right? There was no magic of the marketplace to resolve the problem of slavery. And ultimately, it was the federal government that put an end to slavery through the Emancipation Proclamation. So that's an extreme example, but I think sometimes those extremes are important for us to kind of put to frame the problem. And then in the book, I think we probably won't talk about slavery, 'cause it would be kind of a diversion, but we will start with the debate over child labor. And I think that's a really great example, because almost no one in the United States today would defend child labor.
0:55:50 SC: Right.
0:55:50 NO: Although, interestingly enough, I actually did a little Googling to see if I could find someone who did, and they're out there.
0:55:55 SC: I would have predicted that.
0:55:57 NO: They're out there.
0:55:58 SC: They're there.
0:56:00 NO: But...
0:56:00 SC: They will send you emails after your book comes out.
0:56:01 NO: They probably will. Although this particular one I found was actually someone relatively prominent who defended it in third world countries, on the grounds that they need it because they're so poor. Which I think has the argument backwards. I think you get out of poverty through education and you can't educate your children if they're working in factories. But nevertheless, the point is the vast, vast majority of us would not sanction child labor. And so, it's important for us to realize that, well, but we had to fight for that, because the free market sanctioned child labor. And so how do we end child labor? Through regulation, through laws that said no, and it starts modestly, it starts with restrictions for children under 12, it starts with certain industries like mining. It's staggering to think that in the 19th century you had four-year-olds, five-year-olds, six-year-olds working in mines and those children, almost none of those children made it to adulthood. So today we wouldn't consider that socially acceptable.
0:56:56 SC: And one of the things he said was that it was more dangerous to be a child working on the railroad than to be fighting in World War I.
0:57:02 NO: Yeah, isn't that a scary thought?
0:57:04 SC: Yeah.
0:57:05 NO: Yeah, so...
0:57:06 SC: But it did happen and, you know, your example of the foreign countries, child labor in foreign countries makes me think that there is kind of an interesting game theory aspect to this, like if your philosophy is, you should let every individual or every family do whatever they want, then sure, there will be circumstances under which an individual family is forced to send their kids to labor because that makes them more money, but you can also imagine changing circumstances so that that is not the best thing for them, and that kind of logic leads you directly to say that we need some kind of intervention in the market.
0:57:41 NO: Correct. And I think invoking game theory is useful here, because it's a reminder that you can end up in a race to the bottom. And in a sense, that was what happened with manufacturing in this country early on, when people... When states first tried to pass laws, the manufacturers objected because they said, "Well, we'll be disadvantaged relative to the state next door," and that was true, right? So that's why ultimately we needed federal legislation to create a level playing field so that a company that didn't hire child labor wouldn't be disadvantaged against another company that did.
0:58:10 SC: But then... But it's also, there's a little optimistic side of it, which is that we don't have child labor any more, we correctly got rid of that. And another great example is smoking, of course, and second-hand smoke. You can't smoke on airplanes anymore, and that was the example of a fairly rapid transition from, no, this is my absolute right to... How could you ever imagine...
0:58:31 NO: Correct. I know, and so that's a great example because it's a reminder that things can change and sometimes they change faster than we might expect, and that's my hopeful conclusion about climate change. We are in a pretty bad spot right now, we've wasted 30 years, we're really behind the eight ball particularly in terms of technological innovation, 'cause we've lost a lot of useful time, but at the same time we also know that if we really commit to this, reject denial, get serious about doing something, then things can happen pretty quickly, and particularly once technological innovation gets going, then it can have a kind of positive feedback effect.
0:59:08 NO: And you see that already here in California. For me, just coming back to visit having been living in Massachusetts for the last five years, there are so many more electric cars here than there are in Massachusetts, and some of that is weather, but a lot of that is the social contagion of your neighbor's got a Tesla and starts raving about what a great car it is and how much money they're saving and you think, "Oh, well, I could do that too, or maybe I can't afford a Tesla but I can get this new... " What is it, the Bolt that has a 300 mile range to it, and you begin to talk about it and it begins to seem plausible. And then because there are more electric cars, there's more charging stations, which then makes it more feasible and then you're in a virtuous cycle.
0:59:47 SC: And certainly with solar power, there have been several articles recently about trying to explain how it came to be the fact that solar power has gotten so much cheaper so quickly and the answer is, well, you put a lot of effort into developing it. That's both because of incentives and also because of demand and it's really changed the picture of it.
1:00:05 NO: Exactly. And the regulatory incentives make a big difference. There's been some good work on this, that one of the key items that helped contribute to the decline in the cost of solar power was the German feed-in tariff, because when Germany... So Germany passed a law saying that any consumer who generated solar power would be guaranteed that they could sell it into the grid and be paid for it. When that happened a lot of consumers wanted to do it, then knowing that there would be a market, some of the big companies like Siemens then got involved in solar power production. Once you get a big company involved, then the efficiencies...
1:00:37 SC: A big market.
1:00:37 NO: Right, then the market starts to work, right, the efficiencies of scale and stuff, but you needed that boost, that initial incentive and the guarantee of market share, or not guaranteed, but the likelihood of market share, through the regulatory structure and then once the market gets going off and it is efficient enough and it does work well, but often you need some kind of boost to get it over the initial hump.
1:00:58 SC: Well, and also you made the point that there's this picture that it's either the market or it's central planning and if that's the battle, then you can easily see why people would favor the market, because the market is really good at finding clever solutions to, you know, maximizing whatever it's trying to maximize, but the government can play a role without central planning in figuring out what you should be maximizing...
1:01:21 NO: Exactly. And a feed-in tariff is a beautiful example, because it's hardly totalitarianism to live in a country where you have a feed-in tariff. [laughter] And in fact, they have feed-in tariffs in Texas.
1:01:31 SC: There you go. So what would you say that you've learned strategically from all this? In terms of the battle about climate change is very far from over, obviously. From looking back into the origins of this contrarianism and so forth, does that suggest in any way that those of us who believe that climate change is a real problem should be acting?
1:01:54 NO: Well, that's a big question, of course, but I guess the main thing that I always come away with is the realization that if you want to have change, social, technological, cultural change in an issue that involves scientific evidence, where the science plays a large part or the whole part of making the case for why this change is needed, then you have to do both together, the science and the social change have to work hand in hand. It's not enough just to give people scientific information, because if they don't like that information then all the psychological factors we already talked about kick in. But if you don't give them the science, then there's no reason, then they're like, "Well, why should I even be bothering about this?" And the tobacco story is the clearest evidence of that. So we did get social change in tobacco and it was a combination of scientific evidence that clearly showed smoking killed people, including their innocent children and bartenders and flight attendants. But also, you had a social movement to communicate that information. It wasn't really the scientists who drove the social change, right?
1:02:57 SC: No.
1:02:58 NO: It was groups like the American Cancer Society who had advertising campaigns, the Surgeon General, and also communities that began to pass ordinances to ban smoking in public places, lawyers who took on lawsuits to file suit against the tobacco industry. So, a whole set of different groups, of which science was an important part, it was a crucial part, but it didn't do it on its own. And so I think that's a really important lesson for scientists to realize that scientists need to work in conjunction with activists, politicians, business leaders, lawyers, Justice Department officials, whoever it is, right? And conversely, activists have to be smart about the science, they have to do their homework, learn the science, make sure that what they say is correct. That they don't neither underestimate nor overestimate the threat, but be honest about what we know. And I always say you don't have to exaggerate the threat because the truth is bad enough.
1:03:54 SC: Yeah, and it's a tough lesson a little bit. I think that scientists are very willing to hear what you have to say if you say, "Well, what we need is more scientific education and critical thinking."
1:04:01 NO: Right, right.
1:04:02 SC: And, but when you say, "No, we actually have to organize and get our hands dirty politically," it's hard, institutionally, places like the National Academy of Sciences don't want to get too political, right?
1:04:14 NO: Exactly.
1:04:15 SC: But if the Earth is in danger then maybe something needs to be done.
1:04:20 NO: Exactly, [chuckle] right. And Ralph Cicerone, to his credit, before he passed said something along those lines. Yeah, it goes against the grain for scientists because we've been taught that we shouldn't do that, that we... To be objective means we have to be not political, and that it threatens our objectivity. And most scientists just don't really like politics, you go into science because you like the idea of clear answers. There's a definite answer. Two plus two equals four, not somewhere between three and five. [chuckle]
1:04:47 SC: The truth will win out.
1:04:47 NO: The truth will win in the end, right, exactly. I still believe in evidence and all these good things, that are all very lovely and wonderful, but in the real world they don't suffice. It's not that they're not, it's a necessary, but not sufficient condition and that's just really hard for the scientific community, I think, to really take on board in a serious way. But Ralph Cicerone went through the whole ozone debate, and he came around to feeling that that was the case, and that the scientific community did need to be involved because the facts don't speak for themselves, and there are lots and lots of people out there who want to reject the facts.
1:05:21 SC: And you mentioned being objective, which reminded me of one other point I just wanted to bring up. In some sense we've been giving grief to conservatives here, right? Because those are the ones who are allied with these particular denialist strategies. Liberals are not always perfectly rational. [chuckle]
1:05:37 NO: No, of course not, but in recent years science has been much more on the side of liberalism [chuckle], I think so.
1:05:42 SC: I think so, I wanna make both points, right? Of course liberals could be just as crazy and wrong and maybe, I don't know, the anti-vax controversy is an example.
1:05:52 NO: Well, that's a really important one, though, to be clear about because there have been some people who have been tempted to say that anti-vaccination is the left-wing version, and that's false. We have data on who opposes vaccination and it just, it doesn't really line up with Democrat, Republican, conservatives.
1:06:06 SC: It's a stereotype here in LA...
[overlapping conversation]
1:06:08 NO: Yeah, but that's false, that's false. And it's been promoted, I think, by some people who should know better. I think sometimes what happens is people like ourselves who want to make the point, of course, no, it's not just conservatives. But in this particular issue that we're dealing with for a set of cultural and ideological reasons, it's turned out to be conservatives, and in principle, it could be liberals too. So then we look for an example of that and so the anti-vaccine thing looks like it could be that, because certainly Marin County has a high rate of anti-vaccination, but the evidence actually doesn't support that.
1:06:42 NO: Anti-vaccination is a kind of interesting mixture of conservative Christians, home-schoolers, hippy liberals, people who've had some bad experience with the medical establishment in some other... It's just, there's a lot of different reasons that have come together and then you have celebrities who promote it. So it's a bit of a different kettle of fish, but in a way that's good because it's a reminder that there can be many different reasons why people reject science. I've studied this particular phenomenon where conservative pro-market ideology has led people to reject climate science, but there are many other things that could lead people to reject science. And so if and when we find liberals turning against science, then we'll have to deal with that too.
1:07:27 SC: Yeah, even if we try to be as fair as possible, it's just if you look at the political leadership in the two parties, there's an imbalance. One of them is...
1:07:35 NO: Right, a huge imbalance, right, exactly, we don't find, in general, Democratic leaders telling us that climate scientists are just in it for the money.
1:07:43 SC: Yeah, that's true. And so in that case, and maybe it's the final question, you mentioned that both scientific knowledge and political activism is the kind of strategy you need. Is there any more purely political, legislative, get the leaders of the Republican Party on board kind of strategy here? Are they too invested now in this message that they can't give it up even if internally they don't believe it?
1:08:12 NO: Well, I think they are very invested and I think a lot of them have backed themselves into a corner, but on the other hand, people can change, and it's a little tricky using Richard Nixon as an exemplar of anyone, because he's not generally viewed as one of our more successful presidents, but... And he had a certain fatal flaw that led to his downfall, but if you for the moment separate Watergate from the rest of his presidency, Richard Nixon was one of the most virulent anti-communists in American politics in the 1950s and was famous for really unprincipled, hostile attacks on political opponents, famously Helen Gahagan, who was not a communist, but he accused her of being... And yet he was the one who... He went to China, and he could...
1:08:58 SC: Only Nixon can go to China...
1:09:00 NO: But exactly, and that was what people always said, that he could do it because he had this reputation of being so anti-communist, that if anyone could do it, it would be him. So that actually gives us an interesting suggestion, right, that actually, some of the most virulent climate change deniers have an opportunity here now to do something big and actually to be heroes, and even to find people like me being grateful to them.
[laughter]
1:09:27 NO: Because we need...
1:09:28 SC: The world would be grateful.
1:09:30 NO: Correct, and so there is an opportunity to get themselves out of the...
1:09:33 SC: My question is whether there is any light in between doing that but just committing political suicide, within the...
[overlapping conversation]
1:09:38 NO: Well, that's the fear... Right, that's the big fear. Nixon was President when he went to China, so he had the position to do that, and it's obviously much more difficult for someone lower, at a lower rank, but it's not impossible to imagine a coalition of Republican governors or a coalition of Republican mayors or a coalition of Republican members of Congress stepping out and doing this and have it not be political suicide.
1:10:03 SC: We're allowed to dream, right?
1:10:04 NO: We're allowed to dream.
[laughter]
1:10:05 SC: Alright, Naomi Oreskes, thanks so much for being on the podcast.
1:10:07 NO: Yeah, thanks, great talking to you.
[music]
1) I noticed that Naomi Oreskes never actually said what the climate scientist’s consensus *is*. That climate change is occurring? The extent climate change is due to human activity? She did mention that “Germans accept that climate change is real, irrespective of whether they’re conservatives or liberals. And yet in the United States, 50% of Republicans don’t, right? ”
Actually, it’s 36% of Republicans and 8% of Democrats. Here are the results of an extensive survey of 1860 climate scientists that was taken in 2015:
Q: “What fraction of global warming since the mid 20th century can be attributed to human induced increases greenhouse gases?
More than 100%… 17%
76% to 100%……….32%
51% to 75%………..17%
26% to 50%………….5%
0% to 25%……………7%
Unknown…………….9%
I don’t know…………8%
Other…………………. 3%
So half of the 1860 climate scientists think human induced increases in green house gases account for over 75% of the temperature increase and 63% of climate scientists think humans are responsible for over 50% of the temperature increase. There is clearly not a consensus in terms of the degree to which humans are responsible.
https://www.pbl.nl/sites/default/files/cms/publicaties/pbl-2015-climate-science-survey-questions-and-responses_01731.pdf
2) Sean Caroll said that there have been “several articles recently about trying to explain how it came to be the fact that solar power has gotten so much cheaper so quickly…” yet solar power hasn’t gotten much cheaper quickly. Modern solar power began to be used by NASA in the 1960s and grew exponentially cheaper to 1970 when the cost had decreased to $100 per watt. This exponential trend continued quite smoothly over decades down to the current $0.35 per watt with many incentives to get the cost marginally lower each year.
Naomi Orskes said that solar power needs a regulatory structure but “then once the market gets going off and it is efficient enough and it does work well, but often you need some kind of boost to get it over the initial hump.” As a continuously exponentially decreasing cost curve over decades shows, however, is that there is no such thing as an initial hump and no need for an initial boost. As expected, Germany subsidizing solar power only played a very small, but non zero, role in reducing solar costs further.
Great podcast! Sean is a master interviewer and I appreciate his consistently insightful and entertaining guest’s.
AMIGA3000: you forgot to add the following to your statistical analysis: 80% of the sampled climate scientists believe human activity contributes to greenhouse gas emissions.
Sean: I’m enjoying your podcast very much. Great range of topics. Thanks for the effort you put into this!
How did I forget when I clearly stated all the categories?
66% of the 1800+ climate scientists think human activity has caused over 50% of the temperature increase in recent decades, 12% think it is less than 50% and another 20% say it isn’t known or can’t be known. This is why Orskes repeated claim of a consensus rings hollow. A consensus of *what*?
AMIGA3000: Thanks for the reply. How would you characterize the degree of agreement from this survey? What kind of survey result would constitute a consensus? I’m not a climate scientist and would appreciate your opinion.
AMIGA3000, you are citing data from 2012.
Here are more recent statements, and studies;
2016: https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/06282016.pdf
2016: https://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/policy/publicpolicies/sustainability/globalclimatechange/climate-change.pdf
2016: https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
Dr. Hurd,
None of the links you cite is about what I posted – what do the *climate scientists* think about the extent of human activity causing the 0.3% increase in global mean temperature? That would not have changed much since 2012. There are also about 100 other questions asked of *climate scientists*.
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Ms. Oreskes wrote a piece a few years ago claiming that climate scientists that thought 100% renewable energy was highly unlikely and we need to support nuclear power, were “deniers”. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/16/new-form-climate-denialism-dont-celebrate-yet-cop-21 . Ms. Oreskes referred to this as a “new form of denial” because they don’t trust Marc Jacobson’s work, I suppose, which she seems to (or at least did when her “new form of denial” article was published) https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-jacobson-lawsuit-20180223-story.html . Perhaps you would be willing to have Joshua Goldstein as a guest on an upcoming podcast to discuss his point of view https://www.c-span.org/video/?457382-1/a-bright-future & http://www.brightfuturebook.com/