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

During the acid rain politicization, the public became aware that “human activities might be damaging the Earth’s protective ozone layer” (107). Commercial airlines were attempting to design an aircraft that could fly faster than sound(supersonic transport or SST) and discovered the threat posed by chlorofluorocarbons. There was concern that the water vapor dispersed by this fleet of vehicles would deplete the ozone, although there was research on both sides. Ozone depletion was known to correlate to an increase in UV radiation, which in turn correlated to an increase in skin cancer, making this depletion problematic. Similarly, although it was originally thought that nitrogen oxides did not cause ozone depletion, after a conference it was concluded that more research was necessary to understand the concentration of nitrogen oxides in the stratosphere and in turn better understand the effect of further radiation therein. One scientist, Harold Johnston, wrote a sensational paper which was rejected by peer review because it was highly biased and made unfounded claims, such as widespread blindness.

Although Johnston rewrote this paper, the original version was leaked to the press, which led Congress to fund the Climate Impact Assessment Program, involving a thousand scientists. CIAP found that SSTs could deplete the ozone by 10-20%, but the Department of Transportation whitewashed the Executive Summary to suggest that a technologically-improved SST would not deplete the ozone.