I'm only 65 pages in, and I'll likely post more as I go, but I'd like to post this passage first:
"Seitz then summarily dismissed the models as bad science [...] having dismissed the . . . model as unscientific and casting doubt on the objectivity of its authors by linking them to liberal and environmental organizations, Seitz completed the picture for his readers by alleging ulterior motives. 'Political considerations subliminally skewed the model away from natural history . . .'
. . .He insisted that [it] was not science at all: it was left/liberal/environmental politics dressed up as computer code. 'No one who is familiar with the malleability of computer projections can be surprised at the result.'
. . .Finally, Seitz expanded his attack to encompass all science, and the scientific establishment itself . . . Seitz insisted that scientists had betrayed the public trust. Citizens regard 'the scientific profession as a bulwark of objectivity and credibility in an otherwise untrustworthy world," he noted, but they shouldn't.
. . . Seitz insisted that 'science bears little resemblance to its conventional portrait.' Instead, scientists are guided by such 'non-rational factors as rhetoric, propaganda, and personal prejudice.'
You would be forgiven for thinking that the above passage is referring to the late Frederick Seitz and his quixotic tirade against anthropogenic global warming. In fact, it's about Fred Seitz's cousin Russell Seitz, and his attack on the theory of nuclear winter that was being proposed by Carl Sagan and other prominent scientists during the late 1970s/early 1980s. The Wall Street Journal even gave Seitz a full 2400 words on its front page to attack science and scientists on the issue of nuclear winter.
It's a theme you'll see over and over again, and the central theme of Oreskes' book. Time after time, you'll see the same people, the same think-tanks, and the same tactics being employed in the manufactroversy over climate change. It started with the cigarette industry, it continued with SDI, nuclear winter, acid rain, and the ozone hole, and it's still going on today.