Analysis Of The Film 'Merchants Of Doubt'

The film Merchants of Doubt is a documentary from 2014 directed by Robert Kenner. It brings into light how industries that pollute and that would benefit from climate deniers hire so called experts to appear independently from their company and speak about climate change, toxins, and other controversial matters. This is not a film about climate change and how it is going to affect us, it isn’t a film on why smoking is bad or why chemicals like DDT should be banned; it is simply about the illusionary tactics used repeatedly by businesses to mislead the public about the conclusiveness of science that would be detrimental to their company’s profit. Climate scientists who are also climate change deniers are very few and in between, but somehow …show more content…
They claimed that there was no conclusive evidence or that there was no sound proof to climate change and that the idea of climate change is a huge debate among scientists. These experts are more accessible to ordinary citizens watching the news because they speak in a manner that is easier for ordinary citizens to understand; while scientists tend to be more boring and harder to understand thus losing their audiences. Due to the fact that the science of climate change in the 1980’s was hard to understand, experts were able to say that global warming was not due to human activity, and that increased CO2 in the atmosphere was a good thing because it would increase plant life on the planet, and people believed them. The hope of scientists at the time was that as more proof and science emerges the public would become more aware and then influence politicians. Yet a decade or two later after the debate began the media still portrayed as a huge scientific debate. After showing how the media looks at climate change the film then follows Naomi Oreskes who looks at current environmental scientists views on the issue of global climate change by searching all papers published from 1992-2002. She searched to see how many scientists thought that “most of the observed warming is due to increased greenhouse gas”, she found that not a single scientist disagreed with that statement thus proving the scientific consensus. Another example of the illusionary tactics used by big businesses to convince the public that climate change is not a threat was William O’Keefe and his role in the debate. The film shows how O’Keefe was the president of an environmental think tank who opposed the idea of climate change while also being a registered lobbyist for Exxon