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AutCuddly Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Phillida Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

konayoda First let me start off by saying that burning of fossil fuels for energy is stupid. The energy this planet gets from the sun (which causes the wind) is more than we'll ever need. All we need to do is learn to harness and store it economically and efficiently.Every human caused global warming / climate change "scientist" says essentially the same thing, "the last 20 years have been the warmest on record". But the record that they refer to is only the last 150 years. They ignore EVERYTHING we know about the ENTIRE climate history of the planet, as you will find by googling "geologic climate history". Your research will show you that the earth has been unusually cool for the last 35 million years. This is like saying that the last week of March has been the warmest all month, and ignoring all of the other 11 months, the cycle of the seasons etc. Merchants of Doubt starts off with the deception of the tobacco industry, which is irrefutable, throws in a little about the fire retardant industry for good measure, then tries to show a correlation to global warming. REAL science never ignores ANY facts, yet global warming scientists ignore the majority of facts. The fact that the most abundant life in Earth's history was during the Jurassic period, when the average global temperature was 14C higher than it is now, compared to 1C lower pre-industrial level, and CO2 levels were over 4,000ppm, compared to today's 450ppm and the 300ppm pre- industrial levels; that the polar ice caps have melted and reformed many times, and extended as far south as Missouri just 500,000 years ago. That the Antarctic Ice Sheet is 2 miles thick and growing. Merchants of Doubt doesn't get into the science. Instead it tries to get you to discount REAL science, by making you believe that anyone who shares real scientific information is merely doing what the tobacco industry did.

Joshua DeVoto Merchants of Doubt Of course, there are scientists on both sides that exaggerate, but everyone knows that climate change is real, and that humans are the main cause. Ice core matches up perfectly with the start of the Industrial Revolution-(hint: that's the big one), as well as other volcanic eruptions that date further back in history; which also caused the climate to change. So that's not even a question anymore. Go back to school if you don't believe me. It's never too late. Take some environmental science courses. That way, you can just argue all your bs to the teacher. And when s/he kicks you out of the class for holding everyone back, you'll still be a hero somewhere in Texas.Weather is analyzed on a day to day basis. Climate is the study of those patterns over a long period of time. Climate change is probably a better term to use than global warming, only because people can grasp the meaning better. The United States had the hottest summer on record last year. It also had the coldest February, this year, than it has had in the last 80 to 100 years, in most states. Climate change does not mean it's just going to be hot all the time. It means the climate will change more often. We will see severe patterns of weather more frequently. I like how this documentary ties in the PR aspect. The only reason climate change became a political issue is because of the effects it has on business.Merchants of Doubt

questionagw First, a note that my February 2, 2015 'pre-review' of the movie has completely disappeared. No matter, I have a screencapture of it for posterity, and it was a speculation on what I expected to see in the movie from having read the book it was based on.So, having now seen the movie, it's my opinion the movie succeeded in its intended goal, if that was to professionally and entertainingly present a story about the corruption of skeptic climate scientists. This was not a dull movie in the least, it even contained some genuinely moments of humor that were intended to be humorous. No doubt the few others in the theater with me would agree on that impression, and if they only had a passing familiarity with the enviro-activist side of the issue, they would also say the movie contained devastating material.But I am fully aware of both sides of the movie, and could easily do a start/stop presentation of it on my own, playing it for a short time and then stopping it to point out its egregious misdirections. Take for example the bit where Michael Shermer claims he pointed to a graph to make his pronouncement about global warming, and then said his debate opponent used the same graph to come to a different conclusion. And that was all that were were allowed to see, not a full context view of what really happened. Skeptic debaters do use their opponents' graphs, to show how a false conclusion is derived from lopping off inconvenient sections of the graph.I could go on at length, but in short, one of the people appearing in the movie essentially gave a misrepresentation of when and how he discovered the 'corruption of skeptic climate scientists', the claim about multiple fake names in the Oregon Petition Project is misdirection, Shermer's question of "where's the evidence?" from skeptic scientists is misleading, details are left out of James Hansen's predictions are missing, assertions about the 'attacks on scientists' such as Michael Mann are misleading, on and on. If I or anyone else was to do a start/stop routine with the movie, it could easily double the length of the whole presentation.By all means, I openly encourage people to view the movie, but they should also seek out video presentations of the skeptic side of the issue and compare them side-by-side and come to their conclusions about which side makes a better case. But they should also take into consideration just how hard the people within this movie try to prompt the public to ignore skeptics via an overall character assassination effort that has yet to provide a scintilla of evidence to prove skeptic climate scientists are paid and instructed to lie to the public and to fabricate false climate assessment reports.In going through that exercise, I believe objective people will see this movie as a slick presentation which ultimately fails to tell the whole truth about the politics surrounding the global warming issue. Much like other efforts having the same goal, misdirection only undermines any given agenda, and when people do catch up with what is going on in this case, as one of the people ironically suggested in the movie, it could torpedo the entire so-called global warming crisis.

CleveMan66 "There are two sides to every story and truth is usually somewhere in the middle." That's my version of the famous quote. No matter how honest the person telling the story, as a human being, he or she will almost inevitably choose to relate and interpret the facts in such a way that supports the speaker's point of view and will leave out or distort facts that might support the other point of view. I've never known a person to be completely honest and unbiased in explaining a controversy or relating an incident in which certain facts are in dispute. No matter who you are, your version of events will also be colored to some degree by your experiences, your memories, your perceptions or even your need to be right. Therefore, the factual, unvarnished, objective truth (assuming such a thing can be determined in a given situation) almost always sits somewhere between opposing points of view. So, the real question is, whether the real truth of the matter is closer to one position or the other. That's the question that needs to be answered by anyone trying to evaluate opposing arguments or differing versions of an event. The same question needs to be answered by anyone viewing a documentary with a clearly defined point of view, especially one on a controversial topic.Take "Merchants of Doubt" (PG-13, 1:36) for example. Based on the acclaimed book of the same name by scientists and historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, this movie tells the story of the scientists who have spoken out in favor of the predominant perspective of big business on whether tobacco smoking, acid rain, the hole in the earth's ozone layer and, especially, climate change, were real and/or harmful. The thesis of the book and the movie is that these scientists were essentially hired guns, blasting away at widely accepted scientific verdicts on each of those issues. The book's authors and the documentary's producers believe that these "contrarians" have been engaged in a deliberate campaign to muddy the waters regarding these issues in the hopes of derailing or, at least, delaying government intervention that would lead to increased regulation of business and a resulting decrease in profits for the companies and industries that would be forced to change their business practices to adhere to new government rules. In short, if these scientists are weighing in on these issues for the purpose of confusing lawmakers and the public, and are doing it for money, then they are Merchants of Doubt."Figures don't lie, but liars figure" is a good quote to summarize what the filmmakers feel these contrarians have been doing for decades. The documentary's descriptions of how scientists publicly denied that tobacco smoking, acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer were harmful are meant to establish a pattern of behavior leading up to more recent controversies over global warming and climate change. It's not that these aren't scientists. They are… or they are, at least, men with science credentials, but not necessarily in the specific areas on which they are opining and commenting. Beyond that, the contrarians are doing little or no actual scientific research themselves. Rather, they are picking over the methods, data and conclusions of others in an attempt to twist the science to fit their own point of view. Or so the movie's theory goes. The film decides that these scientists are doing it for the money they receive (often secretly) from big business and also because these scientists see increased government regulation as a threat to free enterprise. In other words, these are scientists who, in previous decades, took sides in the Cold War, with its threats to the American way of life, and are now fighting an information war against some of those same threats. The irony, claims the movie, is that helping to delay government action to mitigate the harm caused by the aforementioned byproducts of the modern industrial age makes the problems worse and eventually leads to even more government intervention to deal with even more serious problems."Merchants of Doubt" benefits from the meticulous research done by the books' authors and brings their perspective to life by way of damning facts, numerous interviews, slick graphics, and even a magician, along with certain more questionable methods. The reputations of undeniably accomplished scientists are harmed by innuendo, certain facts are assumed to apply to all similar people and similar situations, and the contrarians, although their words do appear in the film, are never given the opportunity to directly refute the claims against them. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Even though the facts and information this documentary presents make a compelling case that the truth is closer to the filmmakers' perspective, it is still not the whole truth. "B"