A strong account of episodes that are still endemic in modern science, technology and society: the corporate misuse of scientific claims to maintain or expand profit. ( )

God knows I’ve written a few crass or aggressive reviews before but I’m not even going to review this one — I don’t know if I could stop myself from offending everyone, even those in agreement. The problem is not the book — it’s well done and probably every American should read it. It’s just that I spent 20 years of my life as a 3-pack per day smoker — of Camel unfiltered no less. I quit cold turkey in August 2006, but I’ve had a number of relatives die from the cancers they got from lifetimes of smoking and even though I was cognizant of a number of things in the book, reading this info, this tale laid out so well by the author comes close to sending me over the edge. I’m not going to say anymore except that I do recommend this book. ( )

Depressing and, unfortunately, not especially surprising. Sad that these anti-scientists now dominate the government.

> German scientists had shown in the 1930s that cigarette smoking caused lung cancer, and the Nazi government had run major antismoking campaigns; Adolf Hitler forbade smoking in his presence. However, the German scientific work was tainted by its Nazi associations, and to some extent ignored, if not actually suppressed, after the war

> by the early 1960s the industry's own scientists had concluded not only that smoking caused cancer, but also that nicotine was addictive (a conclusion that mainstream scientists came to only in the 1980s, and the industry would continue to deny well into the 1990s).

> The Tobacco Industry was found guilty under the RICO statute in part because of what the Hill and Knowlton documents showed: that the tobacco industry knew the dangers of smoking as early as 1953 and conspired to suppress this knowledge. They conspired to fight the facts, and to merchandise doubt.

> "Doubt is our product," ran the infamous memo written by one tobacco industry executive in 1969, "since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public."

> Seitz had found other allies, and by the mid-1980s a new cause: rolling back Communism. He did this by joining forces with several fellow physicists—old cold warriors who shared his unalloyed anti-Communism—to support and defend Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. … As president of the National Academy of Sciences during the 1960s, Seitz had been disgusted by colleagues' antiwar activities, and had opposed the arms control efforts of the Johnson, Nixon, and Ford administrations as well as Nixon's policy of détente—the U.S.-Soviet effort to move toward more peaceful relations … SDI was instantly controversial, creating a backlash among the very scientists Reagan would need to build it. While most physicists had long been accepting military R & D funds, they reacted differently to SDI, fomenting a coordinated effort to block the program. By May 1986, sixty-five hundred academic scientists had signed a pledge not to solicit or accept funds from the missile defense research program … Why did scientists react so strongly to SDI? One reason was that they had a charismatic spokesman in the person of Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan.

> "Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions," but it came to be known as TTAPS for the last names of its authors: Richard Turco, O. Brian Toon, Thomas Ackerman, James Pollack, and Carl Sagan. … Their conclusion was qualitatively consistent with TTAPS: "for plausible scenarios, smoke generated by a nuclear war would lead to dramatic reductions in land surface temperature." But quantitatively it was less alarming: the model did not experience the 35°C drop that the TTAPS model had. Instead, it suggested drops of 10°C to 20°C—quite enough to cause crop failure in the growing season, but not really enough to be called "winter." … Sagan's behavior—publishing in Parade and Foreign Affairs before the peer-reviewed TTAPS paper had appeared in Science—was a violation of scientific norms. Moreover, the Parade article presented the TTAPS worst-case scenarios and omitted most of the caveats, so to some scientists it didn't appear as an honest effort in public education. Some saw it as outright propaganda

> In his most famous work, Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman argued (as its title suggests) that capitalism and freedom go hand in hand—that there can be no freedom without capitalism and no capitalism without freedom. So defense of one was the defense of the other. ( )

This is the story of how some determined cold warrior, free-market scientists provided the scientific skepticism to combat the regulation of tobacco, the fight against ozone and acid rain, promoted skepticism about global warming, and even cast doubt on the work of Rachel Carson. Utilizing a lot of the documents that came to light as part of the lawsuits against the tobacco industry, the authors are able to provide great insight into the motivations of those scientists and the tactics that they use. Although this book is several years old, readers will be able to see the same tactics being attempted for discrediting the science work around the corona virus pandemic. ( )

Pretty good as a narrative history, but a bit simplistic on the technical and meta-technical stuff: science (not just the details, but the characterisation of how it is done), statistics, economics, decision theory, and ethics if that counts. The authors are keen to change the minds of climate sceptics (not so much the professionals as those who have been influenced by them), which is a noble goal, but if I didn't already agree -- or at least start from a neutral position, which must be pretty rare now that climate change has been thoroughly politicised -- then I reckon I would have remained unconvinced.

As a work of advocacy I think this needed to be either punchier or more detailed. It seems to have fallen into a bit of a no-man's-land; it's not particularly exciting or emotionally stirring, but I don't think it's rigorous enough to change the mind of someone who sees themself as a rational, independent sceptic.

Still, the authors did a valuable job in gathering together, and putting into narrative form, information about some of the repeating patterns (and common cast of characters) that show up on the contrarian or 'sceptical' side of various commercially or ideologically threatening scientific questions. ( )