Merchants of Doubt How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway

Merchants of doubt are people or organizations who discredit science that threatens their agenda or ideology. The first merchants of doubt were members of the tobacco industry—when scientists discovered that smoking caused cancer, it was bad for businesses. It was also bad for capitalism in general because it suggested that the market wasn’t self-regulating, and the lack of regulation was killing people. Other defenders of the free market started using the tobacco industry’s techniques, such as funding new (and hopefully more favorable) studies or calling for balanced media coverage.In Merchants of Doubt, science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway study the doubt-mongering techniques used in several other important "debates"—nuclear disarmament, acid rain, the ozone layer, climate change, and the pesticide DDT. These techniques are still in use today.