Naomi Oreskes

Naomi Oreskes
Born	(1958-11-25) November 25, 1958
Fields	History of science, Economic geology
Institutions	Stanford University U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Dartmouth College Harvard University New York University University of California, San Diego
Alma mater	Imperial College, University of London Stanford University

Naomi Oreskes (born November 25, 1958) is an American historian of science. She became Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University in 2013, after 15 years as Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She has worked on studies of geophysics, environmental issues such as global warming, and the history of science. In 2010, Oreskes co-authored Merchants of Doubt which identified some parallels between the climate change debate and earlier public controversies.

Background

Oreskes is the daughter of Susan Eileen (Nagin), a teacher, and Irwin Oreskes, a professor. She received her Bachelor of Science in mining geology from the Royal School of Mines of Imperial College, University of London in 1981, and worked as a research assistant in the Geology Department and as a teaching assistant in the departments of Geology, Philosophy and Applied Earth Sciences at Stanford University starting in 1984. She received her PhD degree in the Graduate Special Program in Geological Research and History of Science at Stanford in 1990. She received a National Science Foundation's Young Investigator Award in 1994.

She has worked as a consultant for the United States Environmental Protection Agency and US National Academy of Sciences, and has also taught at Dartmouth, Harvard and New York University (NYU). She is the author of or has contributed to a number of essays and technical reports in economic geology and science history in addition to several books.

Oreskes was the Provost of the Sixth College at the University of California, San Diego.

Scientific methods and model validation

Oreskes worked on scientific methods, in particular model validation in the Earth sciences.

In 1999 she participated as a consultant to the US Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board for developing a repository safety strategy for the Yucca Mountain project, with special attention to model validation.

Science and society essay

Oreskes wrote an essay on science and society "Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change" in the journal Science in December 2004.

In the essay she reported an analysis of "928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 and published in the ISI database with the keywords 'climate change'". The essay stated the analysis was to test the hypothesis that the drafting of reports and statements by societies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, American Association for the Advancement of Science and National Academy of Sciences might downplay legitimate dissenting opinions on anthropogenic climate change. After the analysis, she concluded that 75 percent of the examined abstracts either explicitly or implicitly backed the consensus view, while none directly dissented from it. The essay received a great deal of media attention from around the world and has been cited by many prominent persons such as Al Gore in the movie An Inconvenient Truth.

In 2007, Oreskes expanded her analysis, stating that approximately 20 percent of abstracts explicitly endorsed the consensus on climate change that: "Earth's climate is being affected by human activities". In addition, 55 percent of abstracts "implicitly" endorsed the consensus by engaging in research to characterize the ongoing and/or future impact of climate change (50 percent of abstracts) or to mitigate predicted changes (5 percent). The remaining 25 percent focused on either paleoclimate (10%) or developing measurement techniques (15%); Oreskes did not classify these as taking a position on contemporary global climate change.

Merchants of Doubt

Main article: Merchants of Doubt

Merchants of Doubt is a 2010 book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. Oreskes and Conway, both American historians of science, identify some remarkable parallels between the climate change debate and earlier controversies over tobacco smoking, acid rain, and the hole in the ozone layer. They argue that spreading doubt and confusion was the basic strategy of those opposing action in each case. In particular, Fred Seitz, Fred Singer, and a few other contrarian scientists joined forces with conservative think tanks and private corporations to challenge the scientific consensus on many contemporary issues.

The conservative Marshall Institute has been critical of the book, but most reviewers received it "enthusiastically". One reviewer said that Merchants of Doubt is exhaustively researched and documented and may be one of the most important books of 2010. Another reviewer saw the book as his choice for best science book of the year.

A film with the same name was released in 2015.

Bibliography

Books

• The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science, Oxford University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-19-511733-6
• Plate Tectonics: An Insider’s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth, Edited with Homer Le Grand, Westview Press, 2003, ISBN 0-8133-4132-9
• Perspectives on Geophysics, Special Issue of Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 31B, Oreskes, Naomi and James R. Fleming, eds., 2000.
• Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Bloomsbury Press, 2010
• The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Columbia University Press, 2014

Important papers

• Colin N. Waters et al.:The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene. In: Science 351, No. 6269 (2016) doi:10.1126/science.aad2622.
• Jan Zalasiewicz et al, When did the Anthropocene begin? A mid-twentieth century boundary level is stratigraphically optimal. In: Quaternary International 383, 2015, 196–203, doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2014.11.045.
• Stephan Lewandowsky et al, The “Pause” in Global Warming: Turning a Routine Fluctuation into a Problem for Science. In: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 2015, doi:10.1175/BAMS-D-14-00106.1.
• Stephan Lewandowsky, Naomi Oreskes, James S. Risbey, Ben R. Newell, Michael Smithson, Seepage: Climate change denial and its effect on the scientific community. In: Global Environmental Change 33, 2015, 1–13, doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2015.02.013.
• Risbey et al, Well-estimated global surface warming in climate projections selected for ENSO phase. In: Nature Climate Change 4, 2014, 835–840, doi:10.1038/nclimate2310.
• Keynyn Brysse, Naomi Oreskes, Jessica O’Reilly, Michael Oppenheimer, Climate change prediction: Erring on the side of least drama?. In: Global Environmental Change 23, Issue 1, 2013, 327–337, doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2012.10.008.
• Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway, Defeating the merchants of doubt. In: Nature 465, 686–687, doi:10.1038/465686a.
• Naomi Oreskes, Science and public policy: what’s proof got to do with it? In: Environmental Science & Policy. 7, 2004, S. 369-383, doi:10.1016/j.envsci.2004.06.002. (Link)
• Naomi Oreskes, The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change. In: Science. Vol. 306, 4. Dezember 2004, doi:10.1126/science.1103618. (Link).
• Naomi Oreskes, Kristin Shrader-Frechette, Kenneth Belitz, Verification, Validation, and Confirmation of Numerical Models in the Earth Sciences. In: Science 263, No. 5147, 1994, 641-646, doi: 10.1126/science.263.5147.641, Link.
• Murray W. Hitzman, Naomi Oreskes, Marco T. Einaudi, Geological characteristics and tectonic setting of Proterozoic iron oxide (Cu-U-Au-LREE) deposits. In: Precambrian Research 58, Issues 1-4, 1992, 241-287, doi:10.1016/0301-9268(92)90121-4.

Selected awards, honors, and fellowships

• George Sarton Award Lecture, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2004
• American Philosophical Society Sabbatical Fellowship, 2001-2002.
• National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, 1994-1999.
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers, 1993-94.
• Society of Economic Geologists Lindgren Prize for outstanding work by a young scientist, 1993.
• Ritter Memorial Fellowship in History of Marine Sciences, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 1994.
• Listed, Who's Who in American Science and Engineering, Who's Who in the West.
• Elected a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, 2015.

External links

• Oreskes' home page at Harvard University
• Why we should believe in science. Lecture in TED-Salon New York, May 2014.
• The Collapse of Western Civilization. The Science Show, ABC Radio National, 16 August 2014.
• SILA – The Competing Interests Shaping the Future of our Planet. Panel Discussion, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 18 March 2014. (Transcript.)