I was hardly expecting to like this book, let alone to give it 5 stars.

I’ve known that the Tobacco industry covered up how deadly smoking was. Most people will accept this as a fact. What I didn’t know was how sophisticated those campaigns were, how they were then used in the case of Acid Rain and Global Warming, and how they’re still being used to this day.

This book was a real learning experience. I’ve learned so much more about science, how it works, what it can and can’t do and what it means to have scientific consensus regarding an issue. The most important part for me was learning how easily a few malicious actors cast doubt upon issues that have already been solved in the scientific community. This is partly because of how science works, there is always doubt. All experiments and observations have some amount of uncertainty. This is what is exploited, but it shouldn’t be. The admission of uncertainty regarding a scientific work is not an admission that it should be ignored. We must trust the experts, because otherwise we end up giving a pathway for inaction.

I have to admit I thought there was still debate regarding Climate Change, whether it was still happening and whether human interaction was making it worse. I was shocked to find that these matters have been put to bed…since the 1990s. The tactics used to spread misinformation and to stoke up doubt when there was none –in the scientific community at least– is very similar to tactics used to obscure the facts regarding the tobacco industry – and sometimes they were used by the same people!

This is an absolute gem of a book and I will recommend it to as many people as I can.