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Customer Review
Reviewed in the United States on February 3, 2016
The Merchants of Venice is a rollicking read, an imaginative tour de force in history-escapism. Gelbspan and now Oreskes-Conway have staked their claim as the Michael Baigent and Dan Brown of climate, respectively.
All of Oreskes’ best work (like her 2004 “Essay” in Science) defies genre, and this novel is no exception.
The story ostensibly takes place in an alternative world where neutral pH is 6, “prions” are simply “folded proteins”, common words like “refute” mean something different (the reader is never told what), and humanity has lost all interest in the pursuit of knowledge, reducing science to a kind of colosseum for the playing-out of old ideological and moral grudges.
But every so often the authors add a little touch of realism to make the reader wonder: is this Earth really so different from our own? For example the antagonists, a tight-knit cabal of skeptical scientists who’ve been pulling the strings of world opinion from behind the curtain of history, have names like Fred Singer, Fred Seitz, Emmanuel Goldstein, William Nierenberg and Robert Jastrow.
Nudge nudge. Yep, Those People are up to their old business-savvy tricks again. And you'll never guess what they've managed to turn into a profit this time: *doubt* itself.
The premise, as I recall, is that to understand why half the population of the developed world—muggles and scientists alike—are unable to admit the compellingly obvious future fact of catastrophic AGW, we have to go back.
Way back. To a period archaeologists call the Tobacco Wars.
According to a memo dated 1969—unearthed by top historians and immediately surrendered to Ross Gelbspan for safekeeping—a history-changing meeting took place that year.
(This document, opening with the famous words 'Doubt is our product,' is known as the Protocols of the Merchants of Doubt.)
The major cigarette corporations are taking a hammering from the increasingly-good oncological evidence against tobacco. They need to attack lung-cancer science, but without *looking* like they’re attacking lung-cancer science.
Their solution: to send an élite team of top scientists forward in time, to a point long after the Tobacco Wars are over, when everyone knows smoking causes lung cancer, the miniskirt has given way to the upskirt, Global Cooling has become Global Warming, and the last thing anybody will be expecting is a guerrilla marketing attack from nicotine shills.
It’s a plan so incoherent, it just might work!
To carry out this suicide mission they choose 4 brilliant, easily-corrupted scientists, of whom only one is still alive today to take legal action.
Their orders: to attack Science at its weakest point, sowing confusion and ambiguity in the public mind.
And what point could be weaker than climatology, the unprotected groin of science?
Once the man on the street saw that there was no connection between empirical reality and what mainstream scientists were saying, he’d start to question everything—even whether smoking was bad for you!
“If an irretrievably-politicised, hand-waving, grey-literature-based, unfalsifiable, decline-hiding, nebulous and innumerate ‘Consensus’ about the future state of the Earth’s climate isn’t credible, then obviously neither is the redundantly-copious, endlessly-reconfirmed epidemiological evidence that smokers have a Relative Risk [RR] of 23.0 for respiratory neoplasms—or the fact that I’ve watched my own relatives die of emphysema!
"It’s all just speculation!”
And that, boys and girls, is why there are Bad People who don't want to fight ‘carbon pollution.’
All of Oreskes’ best work (like her 2004 “Essay” in Science) defies genre, and this novel is no exception.
The story ostensibly takes place in an alternative world where neutral pH is 6, “prions” are simply “folded proteins”, common words like “refute” mean something different (the reader is never told what), and humanity has lost all interest in the pursuit of knowledge, reducing science to a kind of colosseum for the playing-out of old ideological and moral grudges.
But every so often the authors add a little touch of realism to make the reader wonder: is this Earth really so different from our own? For example the antagonists, a tight-knit cabal of skeptical scientists who’ve been pulling the strings of world opinion from behind the curtain of history, have names like Fred Singer, Fred Seitz, Emmanuel Goldstein, William Nierenberg and Robert Jastrow.
Nudge nudge. Yep, Those People are up to their old business-savvy tricks again. And you'll never guess what they've managed to turn into a profit this time: *doubt* itself.
The premise, as I recall, is that to understand why half the population of the developed world—muggles and scientists alike—are unable to admit the compellingly obvious future fact of catastrophic AGW, we have to go back.
Way back. To a period archaeologists call the Tobacco Wars.
According to a memo dated 1969—unearthed by top historians and immediately surrendered to Ross Gelbspan for safekeeping—a history-changing meeting took place that year.
(This document, opening with the famous words 'Doubt is our product,' is known as the Protocols of the Merchants of Doubt.)
The major cigarette corporations are taking a hammering from the increasingly-good oncological evidence against tobacco. They need to attack lung-cancer science, but without *looking* like they’re attacking lung-cancer science.
Their solution: to send an élite team of top scientists forward in time, to a point long after the Tobacco Wars are over, when everyone knows smoking causes lung cancer, the miniskirt has given way to the upskirt, Global Cooling has become Global Warming, and the last thing anybody will be expecting is a guerrilla marketing attack from nicotine shills.
It’s a plan so incoherent, it just might work!
To carry out this suicide mission they choose 4 brilliant, easily-corrupted scientists, of whom only one is still alive today to take legal action.
Their orders: to attack Science at its weakest point, sowing confusion and ambiguity in the public mind.
And what point could be weaker than climatology, the unprotected groin of science?
Once the man on the street saw that there was no connection between empirical reality and what mainstream scientists were saying, he’d start to question everything—even whether smoking was bad for you!
“If an irretrievably-politicised, hand-waving, grey-literature-based, unfalsifiable, decline-hiding, nebulous and innumerate ‘Consensus’ about the future state of the Earth’s climate isn’t credible, then obviously neither is the redundantly-copious, endlessly-reconfirmed epidemiological evidence that smokers have a Relative Risk [RR] of 23.0 for respiratory neoplasms—or the fact that I’ve watched my own relatives die of emphysema!
"It’s all just speculation!”
And that, boys and girls, is why there are Bad People who don't want to fight ‘carbon pollution.’
