The story begins with the tobacco companies’ long-running effort to cast doubt on the links between cigarette smoking and human health effects, including lung cancer. One of the scientists the tobacco industry recruited to this cause was Frederick Seitz. Seitz was a distinguished solid-state physicist, who believed strongly in the role of science and technology in defending the United States during the Cold War. In the late 1950s and 1960s he rose to high levels in national science policy, serving, among other positions, as president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
However, in 1979, toward the end of his career, he took a new job: running a $45 million program for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco to support scientific research to defend the “product” — that is to say, tobacco — long after scientists and physicians had come to virtually unanimous agreement on the overwhelming harm that it caused.
In the words of one industry document, Seitz’s program was to develop “an extensive body of scientifically, well-grounded data useful in defending the industry against attacks.” The goal was to fight science with science — or at least with the gaps and uncertainties in existing science, and with scientific research that could be used to deflect attention from the main event. Like the magician who waves his right hand to distract attention from what he is doing with his left, the tobacco industry would fund distracting research, such as studies on the dietary causes of atherosclerosis and the role of patients’ psychological attitudes on the progression of disease.
In 1984, Seitz took up another cause, joining with two other prominent physicists, William Nierenberg and Robert Jastrow — both also long active in space and weapons programs — to found the George C. Marshall Institute. They created the institute to defend President Reagan’s Strategic
After the Cold War, the Marshall Institute found a new enemy: environmentalists.
Defense Initiative (SDI) from attacks by the mainstream physics community. The Marshall Institute drew its funding from a handful of conservative political foundations, and it defended SDI by loud claims of Soviet military superiority, claims that were found only a few years later — when the USSR disintegrated and the Cold War ended — to have been exaggerated, at best. However, although the Soviet threat was gone and the Cold War was won, the institute didn’t go out of business. Instead, it found a new enemy: environmentalists.
In the early 1980s, Nierenberg had chaired a major National Academy of Sciences review of global warming. Scientists had formed a consensus in the late 1970s that global warming was likely to result from increasing greenhouse gases released by burning fossil fuels, and that this would have serious consequences: glaciers and polar ice sheets would melt, causing sea levels to rise and inundating coastlines and major port cities; deserts would expand, reducing food production; and rapid habitat change could lead to serious biodiversity loss. But as chairman of the panel, Nierenberg rejected the conclusions of his fellow physical scientists and recruited several economists who argued that, rather than trying to prevent climate change, we should simply wait and see what happened and then adapt as events unfolded. If adaptation proved impossible, humans could always migrate, Nierenberg concluded, ignoring the overwhelming historical evidence of the widespread human suffering that has typically accompanied mass migration.
Nierenberg also joined with another physicist, S. Fred Singer, to undermine regulatory action on sulfur dioxide, the principal cause of acid rain. In response to two National Academy reports suggesting that acid rain was real and serious, and its primary causes known, President Reagan commissioned an independent peer review of the existing scientific evidence. Most of the panel members were, actually, independent, and agreed with the National Academy that regulatory action to control sulfur
The contrarian attacks became more virulent, more unprincipled, and more personal.
emissions was warranted. However, Nierenberg and Singer worked to challenge that conclusion, adding a policy-oriented appendix by Singer — which was not approved by the entire panel — that first advocated free-market approaches to controlling pollution, and then concluded (but without a real quantitative analysis) that the cost of reducing acid rain would very likely exceed the benefits. Nierenberg also worked behind the scenes with White House Science Advisor George Keyworth to soften the conclusions of the report’s executive summary and to make them seem more ambiguous than they had originally been. (Something Nierenberg would later accuse climate scientists of doing — only in the reverse.)
Despite these machinations, the acid rain report was still stronger than the Reagan White House wanted, and the administration delayed releasing it until after Congress had defeated pending acid rain legislation. Several congresspersons later stated that had the peer review report been available when the vote was taken, it might well have gone the other way.
It took several more years before the administration of George H. W. Bush implemented an acid rain reduction program organized around a cap-and-trade system. In one sense, this program has worked, reducing acid deposition in the Northeast by more than 50 percent, and — contrary to Singer’s claims — at one-tenth of the projected cost. But it was also too little, too late. Continued work by ecologists such as Gene Likens shows that Northeastern forests are still dying.
In the late 1980s, the Marshall Institute turned to the denial of global warming. As scientific evidence emerged that warming was not only going to happen, but was perhaps already happening, the institute’s attacks became stronger and more unprincipled. These “contrarians” — because their positions were contrary to the majority scientific view — began taking evidence out of context, cherry-picking data, and misrepresenting what was actually being published in the scientific literature. For example, they distributed a “white paper” in 1989 falsely claiming that a review from NASA climate scientist James Hansen showed that recent warming was largely due to increased solar activity.
When confronted with incontrovertible evidence that their arguments and cherry-picked facts were incorrect, the deniers refused to correct their mistakes and continued to spread the same misinformation. Indeed, as the science strengthened, and the evidence of the human fingerprint on the climate system began to strongly emerge, the contrarian attacks became more virulent, more unprincipled, and more personal.
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