welcome to the science for the public lecture series science for the public is an organization committed to bringing science information and issues to the general public visit our website for our program recently the collapse of western civilization dr or rescue this is professor of the history of science and affiliated professor of earth and planetary sciences at harvard university dr  her ph d in geological research and history of science at stanford in one nine hundred ninety her research since has focused on earth and environmental sciences geo physics and the history of science especially on scientific consensus and dissent before joining the harvard faculty in two thousand and thirteen dr rescue us was a professor of history and science studies for fifteen years at the university of california san diego and john professor of geosciences at the scripps institution of oceanography in addition she has served as a consultant for the u s environmental protection agency and the u s national academy of sciences among other organizations she's a member of the history of science society and numerous other professional societies and editorial boards and she's a fellow of the american association for the advancement of science the numerous awards she has received include the history of science societies watson davis prize and cal tex francis bacon model medal for outstanding scholarship in the history of science in addition to her two very popular books with erik conway merchants of doubt and the collapse of western civilization dr arrests kiss has co edited an award winning book on plate tectonic and she's authored several other technical books as well as many articles and reports by the way the film version of merchants of doubt will be released march sixth this year this coming year tw will post that information on the science for the public website we are very honored to welcome naomi oreskes welcome dr f the thank you it's nice to be here and if you will please start us with the topic of merchants of doubt which i hope everybody will read it is very readable and very informative with the examples of mis information deliberately put out to confuse the public so some of those examples emergence of doubt tells the story of a group of men who i think of as serial contrarian's or serial climate change or science deniers what we discovered in our research was that there were a whole set of scientific issues of which climate change is only the most recent in which people have challenge the scientific evidence and what we discovered was that there was a pattern that the challenge took the same form in every case we don't really know the science isn't settled there's no consensus the uncertainties are very great and therefore it would be wrong and premature to do anything about it that basic strategy that sort of claims we found had been used not just to challenge the scientific evidence of climate change but also the scientific evidence of the ozone hole of the reality of acid rain of the harms of the indiscriminate use of pesticides but in the d d t and most tellingly the scientific evidence of the harms of tobacco use and what we also found was not only was the strategy used the same in all those cases but the people involved were the same too and so when we made that discovery we realize this is not a scientific debate this is some other kind of activity that needs to be researched and understood and talked about right and i would like to underscore it's still around and  the time the interested in see how this will spill out now that they have the cigarettes to replace the old cigarettes and i have just recently heard an ad for one and i'm waiting to hear we will hear i am sure these are harmless and everything is ok just exactly the sort of campaign that you have discussed so in terms of the structure you've said you know what the kinds of things that these  people do then in terms of structuring like the search so to speak for that how is that done well there's a couple of key things that are important to understand the first one is that the people involved don't have to say that is cigarettes are safe it's actually a more subtle strategy than that is to say we don't really know of course uncertainty so as to take normal scientific uncertainty because after all all science is uncertain nothing  is ever absolutely positively proven beyond any possible doubt it's demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt but the idea is then to take the reality of uncertainty and to use it against science and to say well because it's not absolutely positively  hundred percent certain therefore we don't know anything and therefore who are you to say that is cigarette should be regulated that's the movie and it's a very nefarious move because scientists can't say oh we know everything there is to know about this issue scientists are always in a way backed into a corner where they say well yes of course there is in fact a lot of uncertainty but and the next thing you know scientists are in a defensive position and if so it's all about putting science on the defensive and once you're on the defensive chances are you've actually lost the debate so scientists in a sense have lost from the very beginning once the debate is framed as a debate about uncertainty scientists you know almost always lose or at least they lose initially and so this is the strategy that we see and it's really not about doing research the organizations in the people involved almost never do their own actually original scientific research they don't do research they don't publish in peer reviewed journals what they do is to attack question raised doubts about mainstream normal legitimate scientific research the other part of the strategy that's really important to understand is what we call potemkin village science one of the ways that they challenge real science and by that i mean science done by scientists in universities and research institutes is that they will write reports which they dress up like science they create covers that look scientific they have footnotes they have references so they have all the paraphernalia of science except it isn't actually scientific research it's not done by scientists it's not peer reviewed and most important it's not actually subject to a kind of scientific spirit where whatever the results are you say well ok that's what the results are rather it's based on knowing in advance what result you want and then cherry picking the data to give you the result you want and this is very difficult for journalists and village science how do you know that it's actually fake when the answer is in most cases you don't know and that's how people get sucked into this decision for me right now in your book you talk about real scientists though and some of them very prestigious names certainly you talked about the post cold war period and i think now there's a lot of interest what happened in the shift could you go into that a little bit and why were these famous people in listed so easily so the key part of the strategy involves recruiting scientists and this is a key idea that the tobacco industry were able to recruit other scientists who were not actually experts in tobacco not actually experts in cancer non college and but who for whatever reason were prepared to make common cause with the industry and so what we tell in the book emerges of that we tell the story of a group of scientists who undertook these activities they're a physicist yes and they have a very particular personal history they're all cold war physicists they're all men who raised to positions of quite high influence and power in american science policy circles by virtue of the work they had done in the cold war on american weapons and marketing programs so they're powerful influential they have access to the halls of power they know generals and admirals and senators and in some cases even the prez the united states and they also know how to speak to the media because they have a long history of doing that as well so they're very politically savvy they're very very intelligent and they're very distinguished people but there's just this one weird piece of the story which is that they start attacking the scientific work of their colleagues and so when we were writing this book and we were thinking about how to write this is a story that would be interesting to people and not just a dry go to work for the tobacco industry and so that was the question we set out to answer and the answer the question really had to do with the politics of the cold war and particular the politics of the late cold war so you might think that when united states wins the cold war in the soviet union falls apart that these men would have been happy you might think that they would declare victory and proper champagne cork but they don't instead they look for a new enemy they're like generals who can't stop fighting the last born and the new enemy for them are the reds under the bed and those are the internal threat and those reds under the bed in their view are environmentalist who they call watermelons yes i mean on the outside red on the  because they think that environmentalism is a kind of back door to socialism through the mechanism of increasing encroaching government regulation the market and i think so it's a kind of slippery slope argument first today we control tobacco we say ok no tobacco smoking in public places then we start to regulate it maybe then we ban it and today it's tobacco but tomorrow who knows what the government will control and we're hearing that a lot right now from the right wing senators and as put out as an offense against american liberty of all sorts of things can you give us any other examples like from the bill actually the ozone hole all these several things that you addressed in there hole well because of the ozone hole is real we have to regulate the chemicals that cause it why would you deny the reality of acid rain even though you can see the damage in this well because if acid rain is real you've got to regulate the electrical utilities that are creating if why would you defend tobacco well because of tobacco kills people you might regulate tobacco use so therefore it's a government intervention the marketplace why would you deny the evidence of current change because that's the mother of everybody means everything we do every time we from the minute we wake up in the morning and turn off our alarm clock and turn on the lights to we go to bed at night we use energy in everything we do you're using energy right now so if energy if the use of energy by burning fossil fuels is creating greenhouse gases that are driving climate change that means that the government has got to regulate energy and that's the implication that these people refuse now you could say and eric cowan i do say well we could have a rational discussion about that we could say right good point so how do we know this problem how do we solve this problem without could have a rational conversation about that and the irony of the story to me the most ironic chapter in the book actually is a chapter about acid rain because in the context of acid rain republican advisers to president  have a market based mechanism that is demonstrated to work so there are ways to solve these problems without becoming coming to us but somehow that argument got lost in the shuffle and instead it became that this is a threat to liberty this is a threat to personal freedom this is a threat to the american way of life and we cannot tolerate that threat so what we do is we challenge the science right there are a couple of things before you leave that you mention i fire recall a couple of times were government agencies obscure data or something i remember once was around the s s t missions and i'm trying to think what the other one was but it was amazing that government agencies charged with responsibility also messed with thing was the first us of the book is and government agencies because that's of course a different and complicated problem but one of the things we do know that throughout this story there's been tremendous amounts of pressure on the this story about acid rain one of things we show is that actually the government agencies like the e p a were completely ready to act on the science and in fact the united states under president carter had negotiated a draft viral agreement with the caning government that had the support no all of the major relevant agencies that had an interest in the issue the reagan administration came to power and essentially made a decision to scuttle that treaty but one of the ways they did it was to try to claim that the science was uncertain so they commissioned a new report under the direction of bill nuremberg who's one of the people you have in the book and one of the most egregious things that we found in the documentary evidence on this is completely clear and it's footnoted anyone who wants to go to the archives report that said we didn't really know about many of the details the acid rain even though there were already multiple reports in the national academy of sciences e p a elsewhere that said that we did and not only that we know because there's a paper trail that shows it that a report was written that the scientists involved had signed off on that said that actually it is a problem and bill nuremberg under direct direction from george keyworth was the present science adviser and we found  shows a change the report after the scientists involved in it had signed off on it and so a kind of you know straight up corruption of scientific peer review and the scientists involved when they found out played about it that evidence as well but it was too late damage had been done because the critical congressional vote had already been taken and members of congress said after the fact that that report had been influential in their decision to vote against this bilateral treaty with canada so we have the vague conspiracy and it's funny how kind of thing oh it's funny because you know of course many people are book but don't as i read it all which is totally fine but many people i know haven't actually read the acid rain chapter because they have a sort of like old history and i last chapter we finished because i had found such frankly shocking materials and how to make sense of it and how to write about it in a calm way you know was a little bit of a challenge and so the rest of the book was  problems but it has just taken these years and it seemed like it really got off the tracks begin the eighty's with the with the reagan administration in those people carried through on this you mention a lot of these very right wing organizations how does that work and how do they fund this sort of thing and put out the word so effectively so a key part of the strategy involves think tanks yes and institute for space studies create a independent think tank supposedly independent think tank which becomes their base of operations and it's called the george c marshall institute and that's a deliberate choice because it's meant to invoke the anti communist role of the marshall plan in protecting western europe and rebuilding after world war two and they begin systematically it's created in one thousand nine hundred eighty and by nine hundred eighty nine they issued their first report challenging the scientific evidence of global warming so this is an old story that's more than one years old and they do it under the umbrella of this thing tank now who funds it was very interesting story because most people when they hear about the book they assume that this is a story of scientists who have been corrupted by money and that's really not what it is it's really about the ideology of the free market and the link between free market capitalism and american democracy jastrow sides nuremberg and a fourth scientist who they also worked with named fred singer  essentially share a set of beliefs which they interpret as the defense of american democracy so that's ok i believe in american democracy too right the question is how they go about and how they interpret it and so they begin this campaign of challenging the scientific evidence current change as a main those of the big three but science is still at that time working for the tobacco industry at the same time so the think tank plays a crucial role because the think tank makes it look independent yes makes it look like it's not just you know a shill for the tobacco industry and in some ways initially it is so one of the interesting documents we found early on was that bob joshua wrote a letter to his colleagues in wh said i don't think we should take money from industry because we do need to be independent so he initially reaches out to conservative and libertarian foundations now many of these foundations of course are funded by in his however that strategy of independence doesn't last very long and with a very short period of time within a few years by the midnight andes we see them in fact taking money from the fossil fuel industry and subsequently then the director of the marsh and she becomes b institute front years of freedom the committee for constructive tomorrow the heartland institute that when you start searching what you realize is the act is to one time i tried to make a slide with all of the ones that i could find you know the font got so small you couldn't read it so there's now a network of these organizations that i would say prime more than two dozen of them and if you ask the question who funds them well it turns out to be difficult because many of these groups are funded in ways that make it actually hard to track the funding but to the extent that we've been able to track it definitely the fossil fuel industry definitely the tobacco industry interestingly enough in recent years the cell phone industry yeah so what we're really looking at is either regulated industries or industries that are worried that they will be regulated and that's the common theme right is this issue of fighting regulation and so what you see then is a kind of toxic blend the kind of damaging and dangerous blend between a political ideology which at least on mix of money and ideology that then becomes so tremendously powerful right in that just happens to be poisoning the planet and everybody on it so that's a small but you have a right ideological cover them that's insane like right not just about yes and in fact it isn't just about greed it is about greed for the people who are funding it but it is also about some authentic political conviction by others and it's that mix i think of the authentic conviction and the financing that becomes so so powerful you have these these foundations and specially think tanks have a tremendous influence in the media as well and consulting and they do all sorts of things of people may or may not be familiar with them and not urge them to get acquainted with them in your book by all means they are very active these these think tanks in particular and so you run across them with key columnists in major newspapers and so on why isn't the media a little more savvy about this well this is a question that we got asked a lot when the book came out and usually journalists would ask me i would say you're the jury was you i we are positioned to have heard us asking me so i think this is something that the journalistic community desperately needs to be talking about more but i think the part of it that became clear to us as we were doing the work was that the journalists in got taken in by the claim that think tanks are intellectually independent so the idea of a think tank is a reasonable one it's to think right to think about it aren't they present a ideas right positions and if these thin truly independent then hearing what they had this and these issues could be legitimate but what the saw what the journalistic community got suckered into was presenting think tanks that were largely funded by regulated industry as being sort of equi t to scientists working on science and they did this because of their own journalistic ideals of objectivity and balance and they interpreted objectivity and balance as giving equal time to opposing views so they took what was  a political model and a model which you know we can argue about whether that's an effective model for political debate but at least in a two party system there's at least some plausible argument for why you might give equal time to democrats or republicans but now they transfer them on to science where it doesn't work at all because of the basic fact is that think tanks are not science they're not scientists they're not doing science and so you see the spectacle and you see it everywhere and it's not just in you know places that we might consider to be conservative or right leaning like fox news you see in the washington post you see the new newsweek all the time a scientist is being quoted talking about the science of the results that they've published in peer reviewed journals or report of the national c sciences and it's juxtaposed against someone from the cato institute often an economist or someone who we don't even know who he is right as if that were somehow you know equivalent so it's basically taking a model of political would do this and so the whole strategy was deliberately based on the idea of pressuring journalists to give equal time for their views under the rubric of balance and we found documents in which people into back on history or and tobacco industry front groups like the telling because of course again if we're talking about tobacco if a new york times reporter was reporting on tobacco and it was obvious that this was coming from philip morris they might say ok well yeah but it gets challenged her think tank the journalists get suckered into believing the think tank is independent but they're not right i'd like to add to that i hope that people are aware that this is something people complain about about public radio public television anymore they are suddenly having to give equal balanced thing and as you say you may have mr scientist right here and then cato institute as as a counterbalance here so that we are equal giving equal time and people do present content change as if it's a debate you've actually presented an inaccurate right or wrong a false presentation of what the reality is so no journalist i'd say in public that they want to present a false picture of what's going on the scientific community and yet that's exactly when you dennis and they've got from your view they've sort of got pushed into it but they should be a little more aware now then then perhaps they are right what is our situation compared what i should say what are other countries like compared to us in this regard do western european nations complain that their governments are subservient to these special interests in the interests like this to unpack that question the first part it's completely different in europe i mean for years i would go to europe and i would feel like i had travelled into a parallel universe because the whole phenomena of content change denial or especially that you or any of these things didn't really exist in europe and i think that has to do with the particular resonance of well two things the particular resonance of the idea of balance in the american media which is tied up with our notion of american democracy and free speech but also the particular relevance of these arguments about democracy and freedom and personal liberty because in europe most people by and large except that the economies of europe are a mixed economy is that there's a kind of mix of free market and regulated industries in some nationalized industries less now than it was some years ago but still you know you have train systems in germany that are essentially run by the government you have universities in europe almost all with you exceptions public institutions funded by the government so this particular argument that government intervention in the marketplace leads you into tyranny doesn't have the same kind of cultural resonance as it does the united states the other thing that doesn't really work in europe the way it does here climate change deniers like to present themselves as lonely heroes that i you know mr smith i'm the only one who has the courage to stand up and say i think of the scientific community i'm the galileo i'm the be right i think again journalist but he get really sucked into this idea of the lonely heroic individual who is right when everyone else is wrong that kind of story that kind of narrative just doesn't really work in say fr where there's much greater respect for you know the scientific education the a holes for example the government is more educated the government is more educated the whole role of elite scientific expertise is very different there so there's been no really significant climate change denial movement at all in continental europe there has been a bit in england but interesting enough in england it's totally the same as here it's an item with free market ideology it's tied up with an under conservative government conservative governments that are is in fact in europe it's so so tired with the tory deregulation model that it's been an embarrassment to the climate change deniers in europe that margaret thatcher actually was one of the first advanced in europe and as you say they're not anti regulation in fact they're hoping to get regulation that is there you know they they understand that they're going to be inundated for well if they already have think it's a twenty seven percent reduction and i forgot what the baseline is some countries are really moving ahead for an economy change that we know they're doing well right most of the european countries have actually met their targets under kyoto whereas the united states we  signed have well not only did we not sort of if we had signed we would have had to cut our emissions relative to where we were at that time our emissions have actually gobs of approaches and this is a i think there's a lot of slate of hand in this whole thing so there will be people out there who are saying how we've reduced our emissions the united states in the way they do that is by shifting baseline by comparing it back to two thousand and eight rather than back to nine hundred ninety seven which is when the original remains were supposed to  you know so you know it tricky there yes there's a lot of there's a lot of sort of working fast and loose with the numbers but the bottom line is that the european union has moved much more has taken the issue much more seriously and has moved to commit to binding emissions reductions which of course now that it's have not done right we are the real laggards and i hope people understand that we really get our feet and we're the number two i suppose well even then you know as this one of things that drives me  gets me most frustrated there's so much misspeaking and lou speaking about this issue even among people who you know are not in denial about the issue so now we hear a lot about china yet here cons they have china is now the number  one in the world well that's true if you're talking about annual emissions it is true that just in the last couple of years united states china has surpassed united states in annual emissions but if you look at historic emissions united states is still the top world per capita emissions yes so it is true that annually china now has just surpassed united states but they also have what three times as many people three of our times and so working on it well working on the problem yeah i mean you know you could say we are to sort of but the bottom line is that our missions are three or four times as high per capita as the chinese so you know it's a much bigger country with a lot more people so of course if they were to live at the exact same standard living that we live in exact same energy use of course they would have more emissions but per capita right you know so i think we need to pay a lot more attention to total historic emissions because that's what drives climate change and per capita emissions because that's where the real equity issues kick  right on all of these issues there are many more cumulating now you know beyond what you've even covered in the book but certainly climate change being the big one right now but where can the public get t like i think it's junk science something told look at to see how cleverly this is done to keep the this the public in the dark well if you wanted to get accurate information where could you go well so this is a really important question and to use a market metaphor you have to be an informed consumer yeah and what you can't do is you can't just go on the internet and google climate change because if you do that you will get your top ten hits a number of climate change denial sites and the same for acid rain or if you will you have been sound science and many of these groups are quite savvy and quite sophisticated about how they structure their websites and they come up very high in your google searches so you have to go you have to search based on the source not based on the topic and i think the most reliable way for an ordinary person do it was is to go to sources of scientific information and so for climate change the my favorite web site is the one that eric helped build and it was actually funny i found this incredibly great website it was just so clear at nasa and has a whole day out about the evidence and i wrote to eric i said by the way are you aware of this website he goes yeah i help make it was like oh no a exactly when that someone is particularly clever and particularly good about you know what is the evidence how do we know it's not volcanoes particular like the nasa site but no is reliable and on medical issues c d c center for disease control go to the within the e p a and then you'll find good scientific information and most of these federal agencies have done a much better job in recent years of having web pages that are coherent and accessible to ordinary people right there was a time when it was really hard for ordinary people to find scientific in from in a format that they could understand yes and that also opens that open the door for the descent from asian you know open the door wide for just information i think that's improved in recent years and i know that many of the federal agencies like no u s geological survey e p a c d c have become much more self conscious about the need to present scientific information in plain language simple cabaret that that is very good that's very helpful and with that you have to be really careful about newspapers sometimes unfortunate but the opinion pages in certain newspapers in particular but there is a difficulty it is worth it after reading some of these columns to leave the read the letters to the editor or sometimes where the scientists can protest if if and if there is misinformation i would like to ask also about the difference between this very deliberate misinforming of the public and a propaganda campaign as opposed to the normal doubts of scientists which you did so beautifully in your book on the tectonic plates which took well tell us the story if you know what took so long for people to accept it and many other things yes so one of the ironies of my situation is sometimes i get e mails from people who say well why should i believe scientists because look at plate tectonics you know scientists in believe that it's like i know i wrote the book so it's so my early work was about the history of plato yeah siri and i became interested in that for exactly this reason i said well look every history of science knows that scientists argue be that dissent in disagreement is a real phenomena see that sometimes it takes a long time for scientists to sort out what they think is and really evidence and get the evidence and see sometimes they change their mind and decide that what they thought previously was wrong so given that we know that particularly as a member the public who might be trying to make sense of all this stuff you know how how can we make sense of scientific information and why should we believe what scientists tell us if we know that it sometimes can change and so one of the things that i try to do in the continental drift and plate tectonic story was just to sort of to give a description of how that history had played out and what was involved and what did it take for scientists to come to the point and be able to say yes we're convinced that this is true and this is ultimately what i'm most interested in so in a way this book was sort of a weird almost inversion of that my my interest has always been when scientists say that we know something how do we do that what does it take for scientists say that there's sufficient evidence of sufficient quality to say yes we believe this is true and so in the plate tectonics book on the continent and just in plate tectonics work i tracked that and one of the things that i showed is that when the idea of continental drift was first proposed scientists didn't accept it and you might think that's a bad thing you might say well look see this shows scientists are prejudiced scientists are fallible you know they were stupid they were idiots they were prejudiced they rejected this idea obviously now know it's true but actually i don't think that's the correct interpretation so why did scientist not accept this idea well they have a big argument about evidence and they have a big are you about how the evidence is interpreted and they have a big argument about what the relationship is between evidence and theory and how you get from evidence the theory and that is actually i think the strongest argument in defense of science that scientists don't just jump on the bandwagon and just accept the first idea that comes across the transom they actually have a rather higher bar for accepting new ideas and in the case of continental drift and plate tectonics it took forty years now my own view is that some of that forty years was the interruption of world war two there was some very very interesting work being done in the one nine hundred thirty s and i actually believe now i didn't say this in the book but i believe this now if world war two had not intervened i think earth scientists would have come to something like plate tectonics by the late one nine hundred thirty s or the early forty's but that didn't happen what happened was world war two intervened the scientists who've been working on the issue basically dropped it and went to work on other things and after the war took a while before the issue could be sort of the debate could be reopened and it took new data new evidence but once they had that new evidence actually the debate the discussion got reopened rather quickly and then within a rather short period of time about ten years the scientific community said oh yes we think this is right so what does this tell us it tells us that scientists are intrinsically conservative that they don't change their minds easily that they have a high bar for new ideas and the more radical the ideas the bigger the consequences the higher that bar is so what that tells us is two things first of all that of scientists tell us that they are have a consensus that something is true chances are they did a lot of work to get there and that work that actual work of it is probably the single biggest reason to believe it and so then the question i think that's very important to ask is what how of scientists are working on this and how much work has there been because if i did gets put forward that's only a couple of years old there hasn't been much work behind it then i think we actually should be suspicious and one of the problems of the media is that often they run with some new idea that one hundred or thousand or ten thousand yeah so it's really important to ask those kinds of questions how much work you know how many papers how many scientists how long have they been working on this how many different kinds of data how many different groups how many scientists and how many countries so one of the things i like to say about climate science is if you look at climate science you see a couple of important things that the press almost never tell you first of all scientists i'm working on this since the  yeah right right a second of all climate change isn't just an observation that we're trying to make sense of it's a prediction that came true scientists predicted in the one nine hundred fifty s that if c o two increased the climate would change and it was because of that prediction the dave killing who was my colleague when i was in san diego started doing this work it was to test whether or not that prediction would come true so here we are more than fifty years later and what stance or yeah it's come true and how do we know it's come true because we have so much data we have one hundred fifty years of instrumental data we have eight hundred thousand years of ice core data we have scientists in over one hundred countries who have published more than i think the number now is something like twenty thousand scientific papers  peer reviewed journals and does that mean that everything in the peer reviewed journals is correct no of course not does that mean that scientists won't adjust what they think about some of the details in the future of course they will are there things about the current system we still don't know absolutely but is there an overall picture that's supported by a very large quantity and quality of diverse data and evidence and have scientists been working on this for a long time answer no those questions is yes i'd like to point out before we close we have to stop so that people can talk to you a little bit in the audience but that you are probably in the top rank of people who have analyze my so modeling for science is a very tricky business and this is one of the experts in the world so who's done analysts work on this and we do appreciate it thank you for telling us how to think scientifically and i will now stop and let you talk to the audience thank you very much thank you in the collapse of western civilization i think i sort of missed the idea that it's being written from somebody in china in the say so that's my bad but the question is you say that  china actually is doing an awful lot in regard to not creating a lot of greenhouse gas emissions but they're just a short period where they're going through an excessive amount because of rapid development was that supposed to be just like a political thing because you're writing from there or is it actually factually true the central argument of the book the collapse of western civilization and the new book with our economy is is a question about why the liberal democracies failed to act on climate change and about the political and ideological obstacles and the argument we were trying to make was that the merchants of doubt the kind of change deniers argue that they're defending liberty but we wanted to make the point that if you really care about liberty you ought to be doing as much as possible to see that we act on climate change because if we don't act on common change it could well very be that very well be that we end up seeing really terrible damaging effects food riots famine you know disruptive weather events that will invite a heavy handed government intervention and so the premise of the book is that actually when things go really bad it's the authoritarian governments like china that are in a better position to mobilize troops move people you know commandeer the national guard all those sorts of things that happen when there are natural disasters so it's not an argument in praise of china it's not a pro chinese argument it's an argument it's a kind of it's meant to be a sort of you know cautionary tale that if we don't do something soon authoritarian regimes will be in a better position to deal with the consequence than liberal democracies in terms of what's actually happening in china right now i think it's a very mixed picture i think the evidence of what's happening in china is kind of all of the above on the one hand we're seeing this very rapid and dust rose ation a lot of use of coal that screen tremendous air pollution problems you know staggeringly high rates of increases in greenhouse gases in the last ten years there's no denying that the industrial growth of china in the last ten years has been incredible and with that has been incredible increases in pollution both greenhouse gases and other forms of pollutants but at the same time we also see that china is investing very very heavily in renewables solar nuclear power you can argue what you think about nuclear power so it appears that what the chinese are doing is a kind of all of the above strategy they're using coal but they're also developing renewable and they're also developing nuclear one has to hope that the chinese government will begin to shift from the cold side of the equation to the renewables and there is some evidence from this latest pact you know th that may indeed be happening but like any treaty you know the proof is in the pudding and i mean the united states is committed to certain things under that treaty to know whether or not we'll actually do those things whether or not we'll be able to do those things well time will tell and future historians will comment on it you know some specifics about it i mean i know a few specifics and it's on the subject of web sites the white house actually has a rather good website with the details so if you go to white house dot gov and there are some interesting specifics including a major plan by the chinese to invest in research and development on carbon capture and storage and i think that's really telling because carbon capture and storage is a potential technology that really many scientists think could make a big difference if it if it were shown to be technically feasible and i think that americans should be quite shocked that we're not leading the way on this and that we're actually yielding this territory to china i mean i find it shocking actually the republicans are ok with that because you think about american american history and american history of technological leadership innovation that seems like something that both democrats and republicans could get onboard together about and i think almost all americans think that technological innovation is biologic good thing and the idea that we would see that ground to china and say sorry we're so busy arguing that we can't get our act together but the china you do it i mean that actually seems to me rather shocking and i'm surprised that  yeah absolutely i think that's exactly right and as i said it's both and it's both the ideology and the money and the money is crucial for this spread of the ideology it's crucial for the traction that it gets the advertising as you say the four white papers the grade papers you know but both are important because the ideology also explains the traction because you know i've i've looked at all across united states and there are many people in the united states who don't you know are not c e o s of a fossil fuel company and who don't even necessarily have shares in fossil fuel coming but who still are really you know not sure about climate science sort of buy into the doubt mongering and you ask yourself the question why would that be why would this argument be persuasive to ordinary people who have no financial stake in exxon mobil or coal and there i think the answer is in the ideology of personal liberty and the idea that this is a threat to your own individual liberty so i think it's really under important to understand both because i think that without that  you can't really speak to to those people who don't have a financial interest in exxon mobil or or people call however tanser the second part of your question absolutely i can't believe for a minute that the heads of these major corporations don't understand the science i mean if you think about a company like exxon mobil or chevron are shell i mean these companies have thousands of scientists working for them including thousands of geoscientists you know this and i say like a cliche but some of my best friends work for chevron when i was at stanford my office mate had worked for chevron one of my favorite professors i mean i actually have a lot of friends mill and gas industry my former college boyfriend worked for british gas so i don't believe for a minute that the heads of these corporations don't understand the science but i think there's two things that are going on i think one of them is that at the very highest level there is this kind of profound cynicism which is the cynicism of delay yes we know that sooner or later there's going to be  shell pretty much said that just recently and the c e o of exxon mobil is kind of implied at all we just don't think it's going to happen by the way we think that oil and gas remain good investments for the foreseeable future and you know therefore it makes sense for us to continue to invest in oil and gas so i think there's a kind of there is a strategy of delay there's a strategy of the longer we can put off the the price on carbon or whatever the regulatory structure is the better it is for us and our shareholders right and that's totally what the tobacco industry did it's also what we know certain pharmaceutical companies did when they had evidence that than drugs were you know hurting people right so we know that that happens but there's also sort of this sort of level down from that a notch or two down which is say people who work for these companies but aren't necessarily the c e o s and vice presidents and then i think there's a lot of rationalization and we have a lot of evidence from this from the history of tobacco there were a lot of people who worked for the tobacco industry who did not know what the c e o s knew the c e o s knew that their own scientists were telling them that tobacco was killing people the c e o s knew that their own scientists were time there's no such thing as a safe cigarette and the c e o s knew that their own scientists were telling them that nicotine was addictive but there were lots of people who work for those companies who didn't know that because all that information was hidden from their own sales forces and in fact one of the most telling documents that i looked at was a document that basically said we can't let our salespeople know this because if we did they get demoralized and they might even think that the time had come to find a different job so there was a kind of decision for internal dissent from ation campaign that took place of trying to persuade the rank and file inside these companies that the science was unsettled we didn't really know and i i think the evidence suggests that those internal campaigns were quiet affective and so there are many people who work in the oil and gas industry today who work in coal who and sometimes i meet them on airplanes you know who really do think that the science is unsettled and they've bought into that argument because it's been what they've been told and because it makes it possible for them to continue to do the work that they do look you know the media side of the pictures thing right you got to believe that there's a lot of smart people in the media and they know that this there are you know the balance suppose a balance of having two lot of movement in the math mean i think actually the mass media coverage of climate has changed a lot just in the last year or so and i think the evidence for that if you look at how major newspapers covered the synthesis report the i p c c this report that just came out it's quite  how they were covering it even two three four years ago even different from how they covered the fifth assessment report even some cases different even from how they cover even a few months ago so i think there's been a shift in the media landscape but at the same time and at the risk of offending friends in the media i have said i've been shocked by what journalists don't know about science and maybe i shouldn't be shocked because of course there journalist i haven't studied it but it is incredible to me how many journalists have said things like whoa isn't and it's amazing to me how many how many journalists have been sort of this kind of a stunt science science when i say that and i think a lot of journalists really don't know anything about how science operates and i think a lot of journalists have been actually quite naive even mean you know we had journalists who read this book and initially wanted to argue with us about it but then when they read the book and they looked at the documents and they realized you know i think that was an awkward moment for some journalist because no journalist wants to admit that he's been snookered or she's been sno but i think that to some extent some journalists were now there's another part of this you know this book is not about journalism it's about the scientists and the way in which science can be misrepresented but we talk about journalism a little bit in the end and stand glance who did some of the most important work on the history of the tobacco industry and tobacco discern from ation he said he thought that we were way too soft on not so much the journalist writing the stories but the editors and the publishers because he thinks that at least the case of tobacco the way and the power of tobacco advertising was sufficiently great that this played a major role in the editorial decisions  publishers and that may well be true we didn't really research that so we don't really have the evidence to make a judgement one way or the other it's certainly plausible and when you think about the advertising can you know that we see i mean for how many years of the new york times published you know on that op ed page big advertisements from exxon mobil telling us we didn't really know when the climate science was so you know the idea that that maybe had some influence doesn't seem to be completely implausible