Reddit reviews Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

The heat-trapping effect of greenhouse gases is basic physics, known for over a century. So to believe that the Earth is warming but it's not our fault, you have to believe that:

1. After 10,000 years of exceptional climate stability, the planet just coincidentally warmed up a lot right after we increased the atmospheric CO2 concentration by 43%, and
   
   
2. There's some unknown negative feedback which is countering the known warming effect of the greenhouse gases we emitted, and
   
   
3. There's another unknown natural process which is actually doing the warming.
   
   To dig into the case in more detail, the best source I've found is Hansen's Storms of My Grandchildren. He focuses on physics and geological history, rather than complicated computer models, and works through multiple lines of evidence.
   
   On another tack, a book which is often recommended but I haven't read yet is Merchants of Doubt, which documents how the fossil fuel companies are using the same tactics the tobacco companies used, to get the public to doubt well-established science.

>the problem is misinformation and lack of education to the extent where we can't even agree it's a thing.

That was by design.

They borrowed the same tactic as the tobacco industry used - create doubt and uncertainty. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

In 1977 Exxon concluded that its main product would 'heat the planet disastrously.' Exxon's response: set up fund for extreme climate-denial campaigns.

>as early as 1977, Exxon (now ExxonMobil, one of the world’s largest oil companies) knew that its main product would heat up the planet disastrously. This did not prevent the company from then spending decades helping to organize the campaigns of disinformation and denial that have slowed—perhaps fatally—the planet’s response to global warming.


Exxon is lobbying for a carbon tax. There is, obviously, a catch.
The oil giant wants immunity from lawsuits that would make it pay for the damages of climate change.

This book describes exactly who these people are, down to their names, motives, and history with doing the exact same thing with tobacco/cancer years ago: Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.

Yes, that's right. The same people who led a campaign to convince people that cigarettes didn't cause cancer are doing the same with climate change, because money talks.

There's a whole industry dedicated to offering 'reasonable observations'.....

This makes me very suspicious of remarks similar to yours. Nothing personal.

There's a recent book about the scientists who are paid to argue against the agreed upon science.

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" Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly-some of the same figures who have claimed that the science of global warming is "not settled" denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. "Doubt is our product," wrote one tobacco executive. These "experts" supplied it."

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link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003RRXXO8/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

No, the tobacco lobby did.

A fantastic resource on the links between industry and the touting of doubt about well established scientific findings is Merchants of Doubt by the science historian Naomi
Oreskes. You may also want to check out her lecture on the subject: The American Denial of Global Warming

It is the last half of the lecture that you will be most interested in; where she talks about the how various other polluting industries took lessons from the tobacco industry on how to insert unwarranted uncertainty and doubt about solid environmental science.

Some of the same characters and think tanks who now engage in critiques of the climate science now where right there in the 80's and 90's denying links to human industry and the Ozone Hole, acid rain and chemical pollution such as DDT:

(Fred Singer)[http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=S._Fred_Singer]

Fred Seitz (dead)

Here is what Oreskes has to say on the "Freds":

>From 1979 to 1985, Fred Seitz directed a program for R.J Reynolds Tobacco Company that distributed $45 million dollars to scientists around the country for biomedical research that could generate evidence and cultivate experts to be used in court to defend the "product". In the mid-1990s, Fred Singer coauthored a major report attacking the U.S Environmental Protection Agency over the health risks of secondhand smoke.

Merchants of Doubt page 11-12.

*"Him" being Ben Santer a climate scientist.

3% of them disagree it's our fault, not that the climate is changing. That is simply what is being observed.

Conservative groups that represent carbon fuel industries probably prop up that 3% and give them more voice than they would otherwise have.

If someone could prove it wasn't carbon, they'd be a hero, because we'd all be saved. Everyone wants it to not be real cause it sucks so bad. So any evidence that denies it is more likely to be trumpeted.

Skepticism is fine, but rest assured people listen to deniers all the time, and then they look at the evidence and sigh.

This book Merchants of Doubt talks about how industries try to make good science seem unreliable:
https://www.amazon.com/Merchants-Doubt-Handful-Scientists-Obscured-ebook/dp/B003RRXXO8?ie=UTF8&ref_=dp_kinw_strp_1