Books, Books, Books

It wasn't my intention when I started this blog to devote the majority of it to books I have been reading, but I have found some wonderful ones and I would like to share their titles with you.  The first one is called Merchants of Doubt.  It concerns a group of cold war scientists and their efforts to deny a variety of scientific phenomena that have been going on for the last forty or so years.  When the Cold War ended, they had to fasten on other issues.  They got a variety of grants from conservative think tanks and funders to do this.  They followed the playbook of the tobacco industry, which for forty years worked very hard to muddy the waters and confuse the public about the proposition that smoking causes cancer.  They started with acid rain, denying that it was taking place and denying, if it were, that it caused important harmful effects.  They moved on to the issue of the growing ozone hole, with the same purpose and the same tactics.  Then they moved on to the issue of global warming, denying that it is taking place and that it will have disastrous effects.  They were not above actually telling lies and openly trying to deceive the public, as this book describes.  The latest focus of their denial concerns DDT.  They quote the conservative political commentator Thomas Sowell as claiming the the ban on DDT in the United States resulted in 50 million deaths, mostly in Asia and Africa.  A few instants of thought shows this to be false.  The banning of DDT was a law in the United States.  We do not legislate for other countries.  Other countries obviously remained free to make their own decisions about whether or not to use DDT.  The folks responsible for sowing doubt about these issues did it in a variety of cunning, devious ways, and it should be of interest to everyone just how they achieved what they achieved.

I highly recommend this book.  It is thoroughly researched -- it has something like 70 pages of references for the information in it.  It is very well written.  I found it so interesting that I reread much of it twice, underlining parts and actually studying it.