Via Tim Lambert:
A talk by Naomi Oreskes on her new book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.
As with any talk by Naomi Oreskes, it is well worth a watch. Though she makes a couple of minor slips, for me there was only one bum note in the whole thing, where she suggests that ’sceptics’ as a whole are responsible for the CRU emails hack.
The banquet analogy she uses is excellent, and reminded me of a classic piece of standup from the Seinfeld episode ‘The Stock Tip’. Unfortunately I can’t find the clip on youtube, so you’ll have to settle for the script:
JERRY: Went out to dinner the other night. Check came at the end of the meal, as it always does. Never liked the check at the end of the meal system, because money’s a very different thing before and after you eat. Before you eat money has no value. And you don’t care about money when you’re hungry, you sit down at a restaurant. You’re like the ruler of an empire. “More drinks, appetizers, quickly, quickly! It will be the greatest meal of our lives.” Then after the meal, you know, you’ve got the pants open, you’ve got the napkins destroyed, cigarette butt in the mashed potatoes – then the check comes at that moment. People are always upset, you know. They’re mystified by the check. “What is this? How could this be?” They start passing it around the table, “Does this look right to you? We’re not hungry now. Why are we buying all this food?!”
The only ones who are lying about tobacco are the anti-smokers. They are guilty of flagrant scientific fraud for ignoring more than 50 studies over a period of over 20 years, which prove that human papillomavirus infects at least a quarter of all non-small cell lung cancers. It doesn’t require a university to figure out that ignoring evidence is fraud! And because the anti-smokers’ studies are based on nothing but lifestyle, they’re designed to cynically exploit the circumstance that smokers and passive smokers are more likely to have been infected, in falsely blame tobacco.
http://www.smokershistory.com/hpvlungc.htm
Furthermore, those so-called “opponents” she denounces are nothing but phonies, because they never mention HPV, or anything else that really refutes the anti-smokers. Their real job is to drown out the real critics, with the collaboration of lying media, to create the false impression of dissent, and their weak strawman arguments are intended to provoke provoke public derision. It’s the anti-smokers themselves who give the phonies a forum, and censor the real critics, and then lie to us that they presented “both sides of the issue”!
And she is concealing the fact that the same anti-smoker who lobbied for the EPA to take up the issue of secondhand smoke, John C. Topping Jr., subsequently went on to found the Climate Institute.
http://www.smokershistory.com/NCCIA.htm
And she’s concealing the fact that Seitz’ association with the tobacco industry was really to monitor Stanley Prusiner’s work on prions, which was being funded by R.J. Reynolds after the Rockefeller Institute, with which Seitz had been associated, stopped doing so. (Why was smokers’ money being used to fund prion research in the first place? Apparently purely as a crony favor.) Any so-called “historian of science” who can’t ferret out the fact that Seitz was merely doing site visits on Prusiner, and had nothing to do with tobacco research, is nothing but a propagandist hack!
http://www.smokershistory.com/prions.htm
Yours truly,
Carol Thompson
THE REAL OPPONENT WHO IS RUTHLESSLY CENSORED, WITH THE COLLUSION OF THE FAKE OPPONENTS