Merchants of Doubt

Merchants Of Doubt is a truly fascinating new documentary. By now, we all know the big tobacco story. You know the one about the cigarette manufacturers who knew, even prior to the surgeon general's 1964 declaration, that cigarette smoking was physically harmful and addictive? Then when scientific studies proved that, in fact, smoking does cause cancer, heart disease, and so forth, big tobacco testified under oath that the science community was wrong. They even called "expert" witnesses who cast doubt on the results of these studies, and called for even more testing – just to be sure. Later, when the results were simply beyond doubt, big tobacco and its "experts" continued to request no restrictions be placed on smoking, claiming our freedom was being infringed by so-called "big government" (read "big brother"). They developed the phrase "smokers' rights," to convince the rest of us that poor addicted smokers had no choice but to continue smoking, and that the rest of us should simply leave them alone. Lapdog "big government" bellyachers like Rush Limbaugh bought into this argument.

Then came scientific studies bemoaning the dangers of second-hand smoke. And the experts came to the rescue again, first casting just enough doubt on the science to prolong the inevitable, and buy more time for the cigarette manufacturers. Eventually, fifty years after big tobacco first acknowledged (in private in-house memos) that cigarette smoking was harmful, the CEOs of the tobacco corporations were forced to go before Congress and admit they intentionally and systematically lied to America about the known dangers of their products.

Now, just who were these so-called "experts" used by big tobacco to prolong the eventual demise of a once-powerful industry? A new documentary by filmmaker Robert Kenner attempts to shed some light. Merchants Of Doubt is based on the 2010 book of the same name, by Harvard professor Naomi Oreskes and NASA historian Erik M. Conway. Oreskes and Conway draw a fascinating correlation between the half-century of denial thrust upon us by the tobacco industry and the now-thirty-year denial of climate change by the oil and coal industries, particularly Exxon/Mobil. Ironically, some of the very same "experts" used by the tobacco industry to discredit the results of the scientific smoking studies are now being used to discredit the results of scientific climate studies.

Oreskes researched every climate study published since the mid-1980s – almost a thousand different scientific works – and found the same thing Al Gore alluded to in his 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. 100% of climate scientists agree that global warming is not only real, but is man-made. Those who disagree may have science degrees, but they do not make their livings studying the earth's climate. Specifically, Merchants Of Doubt cites Fred Singer, a rocket scientist, and Fred Seitz, who helped develop the atomic bomb. Singer and Seitz, both of whom are interviewed in this film, were the very same physicists used by cigarette manufacturers to dilute the science condemning smoking. They have also cast doubt on the harm of acid rain, and the ozone hole. What do they have to gain by testifying against the rest of the scientific community? Money and fame.

Singer, Seitz, and a very small handful of other scientists and marketing gurus have made a living by forming conservative thinktanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, and using them as a front for fossil fuel companies like Exxon/Mobil. For example, if a Sunday morning news program featured a climatologist arguing the science behind global warming with the CEO of Exxon/Mobil, no viewer would believe the CEO to be an independent voice. He'd obviously have an agenda. But if a "senior fellow at a prominent Washington thinktank" were to argue against the climatologist, the debate would now appear to be non-biased. And that's exactly what the big oil companies have done to buy time – just as big tobacco did throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

Merchants Of Doubt takes the additional step of implicating the media for not investigating climate change more thoroughly, and for giving equal voice to these political thinktanks. As a former member of the media myself, I am continually disappointed in what has become of our once-great political watchdog. When Walter Cronkite visited Vietnam in 1968, then returned to the CBS Nightly News to declare there was "no light at the end of the tunnel," America listened. America took note. "If Cronkite says this war is a lost cause, then it must be," we thought. Who carries that kind of weight now? Heck, name one television news journalist who has the courage to personally investigate both sides of the global warming debate, then declare that climate change is real and must be addressed immediately, even if that means the eventual death of the American fossil fuel industries.

If there is a light at the end of the proverbial climate change tunnel, it is addressed at the end of Merchants Of Doubt. The Tea Party movement was an outgrowth of perceived excess government regulation. Many Americans, under the guise of capitalism and free markets – don't want their government to regulate anything – even industries destroying our earth. As in the tobacco narrative, this is the final stage of denial before big oil is forced to admit they knew all along their products were ruining our atmosphere. Unfortunately, as Dr. Oreskes states, "This time we don't have fifty years." As documentaries go, Merchants Of Doubt is somewhat dry. To me, it's not as interesting a topic as Robert Reich's "Inequality For All," and it's certainly not as entertaining as a Michael Moore picture. But I loved it anyway. It brought to light nothing I didn't know (or at least nothing I didn't suspect), yet it still held my interest throughout, and, dare I say, fascinated me. That's the mark of a great documentary. You owe it to yourself to see this one.

The doc is enlightening, and timely. I worked in the tobacco litigation and this film gets it spot on. In the face of near universal consensus, tobacco companies hired marketing firms and paid scientists to poke holes in prevailing well established theory, attempting to cast doubt where anything less than 100% certainty exists, which in science, it essentially always does.

Now the climate change deniers come out, in the face of 97% worldwide consensus, peddling the same nonsense. The doubters don't contest the data, which is indisputable. They instead attack the motives of 97% of the climatologists in the world. And their intended audience buys it hook line and sinker yet again.

Reasonable doubt is essential to science, and in that meritocracy, the best explanation wins. Here, decades of data have made the situation clear. Yet, climate denier laymen, for some reason, choose to believe the 3% of scientists who are largely funded by the interests most likely to suffer financial harm should alternative energy be explored in full.

You can't fix stupid.

A documentary like Merchants of Doubt should be mandatory in schools. Just so that the kids can open their eyes about the influence of the media on the brainwashed Americans, lobbyists of all kind and maleficent greedy people. I already did not have a great view about certain humans before watching this documentary and at the end it certainly did not improve. The power of those greedy bastards from the petrol, tobacco, and guns lobbies is just sickening to watch. The amount of conservative people that will take anything for granted if it comes out of their mouths is just frightening. Republican rednecks, I just can't stand them. Most of them are so stupid you wonder how it is possible to be that ignorant. Anyways, this documentary is really a must see if you are interested in the future of our planet. I already know the vast majority of rednecks won't change their opinion because they are just not smart enough to see the truth or they are just to stubborn to admit they were wrong. Bottom line, I hate a lot of humans on this planet.

I want to begin with what usually comes in the final paragraph in any review that it is a must see film. No matter who you are, whatever your profession is, you must not skip it for many reasons. The film was based on the non-fiction book of the same name by Naomi Oreskes and directed by the Oscar nominated documentary 'Food, Inc.' filmmaker.

Recently I read somewhere that 'there are more fake flamingos in the world than real ones'. I thought it was a stat that makes clear there are very less flamingos than we presumed. But the point is it gives a different meaning when the same line used as a reference for this film. It is going to be big stride, yes it is. It all began after the WWII and carried out throughout 50 years during the Cold War, but just recent decades everyone realised its seriousness.

When someone interferes with our personal thing, stating that he's an official from the respective field, we ask for the identity proof. But what if it is a conspiracy, how we are going to know it. The common people are always falling prey for such tricks because of the corrupted ministers and the powerful giant corporates. Like, we're the sheep herd and they are the wolves in the sheep's skin. This film is not trying to expose them their entire wrong doings, but on a particular topic, and that is the Global Warming.

The media and press plays a crucial part here, but some of them opted a wrong path. Maybe because of the poor knowledge and investigation, or influenced people around them. So the story opens with the cigarettes, how the tobacco companies fooled people in the 60s, 70s till the 90s. The book this movie adapted was written by an American historian, so it's all about the things that happened in the States. But it is still very much the world's concern too, as America is one of the top countries to export modern science and technology to all the corners, especially the third world countries.

"We're leaving our children and grandchildren, the legacy of people who failed to lead."

Today's world's hot topic is, the climate change. Because of human there are plenty of species gone extinct than the natural extinct happened in the presence of human alongside. So, the biggest them all is he's posing a same threat to himself. If that happens, the human will be wiped out. The earth will recycle itself over the thousand years of evolution and the life will be restored, the new kind. Human is the only animal on the earth who do stuff for pleasure and those pleasures comes in many ways. One such thing is the money.

Science is not one hundred per cent perfect, not yet, but that is the closest estimation that we have today to predict anything advancely. The world is not the same compared to 100 years ago, the religion is no more threat to the science. The evolution in science is taking place at a brisk pace, lots of stuffs were studied, understood, discovered in the last two decades than over two thousand years. Those who are doing their work is constantly interrupted by the new kind of troublemakers. Those people are the hired counterparts to the scientists who claims they are experts, but why they are doing it is a disgusting truth.

It is a very good message movie. You might probably realise from now on who to believe and why, because that was this documentary's notion that makes people open their eyes to the truth and reality. If you're still in your blindfold, then you're on the wrong side with the wrong people. I want to make you clear on one final thing that this documentary is not trying to prove the Global Warming theory, but it was a debate between the people who tried to stop it and the people who tried to prove it was not a hoax. It is about exposing the dirty works.

9/10

I wasn't thrilled with the magic tricks being blended in to this excellent expose of science denial funded by big business. It just distracted from the excellent content showing strategic manipulation of the public and legislation by unbelievably conscience-less minions, starting with big tobacco and followed by flame retardant chemicals and climate change science. As a movie I would rate it lower but the material presented was worth more, thus the 8 stars. One tidbit from the film: the average American sofa contains 2 POUNDS of flame retardant chemicals. These of course escape into the bodies that use the furniture and into the air around the furniture, resulting in American babies being born with HUGE levels of these chemicals compared to babies born in any other country on earth. It also showed how the "lessons" learned by big tobacco's 50 years of successfully suppressing science has been replicated repeatedly across many industries. If there is a hell, this film highlights several folks who should end up there.