Naomi Oreskes (; born November 25, 1958) is an American historian of science. After 15 years as Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego, she became professor of the history of science and affiliated professor of earth and planetary sciences at Harvard University in 2013, and in 2020 was also named the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science.
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 significant parallels between the climate change debate and earlier public controversies, notably the tobacco industry's campaign to obscure the link between smoking and serious disease.
Contents
Early life and education
Oreskes is the daughter of Susan Eileen (née Nagin), a teacher, and Irwin Oreskes, a professor of medical laboratory sciences and former dean of the School of Health Sciences at Hunter College in New York. She has three siblings: Michael Oreskes, a journalist; Daniel Oreskes, an actor; and Rebecca Oreskes, a writer and former U.S. Forest Service ranger. She is Jewish.
She studied at Stuyvesant High School, New York, and received her Bachelor of Science in mining geology from the Royal School of Mines of Imperial College, University of London in 1981. She later received her PhD degree in the Stanford University Graduate Special Program in Geological Research and History of Science.
Career
Oreskes has worked as a consultant for the United States Environmental Protection Agency and US National Academy of Sciences, and has also taught at Dartmouth College, New York University, UCSD and Harvard University. She is the author of or has contributed to a number of essays and technical reports in economic geology and history of science in addition to several books.
Academics
Oreskes' academic career started in geology, then broadened into history and philosophy of science. Her work was concerned with scientific methods, model validation, consensus, dissent, as in 2 books on the often-misunderstood history of continental drift and plate tectonics. She later focused on climate change science and studied the doubt-creation industry opposing it.
She worked as a mining geologist for WMC (Western Mining Company) in outback South Australia, based in Adelaide.
Starting in 1984, she returned to academia 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.
The 1992 Hitzman-Oreskes-Einaudi paper on Cu-U-Au-REE ("Olympic Dam") deposits has been cited more than 700 times, according to Google Scholar.
She received a National Science Foundation's Young Investigator Award in 1994.
During 1991–1996, she was an Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences and Adjunct Asst. Professor of History at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. She spent 1996–1998 as associate professor, History and Philosophy of Science at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University.
As an example of studying scientific methods, she wrote on model validation in the Earth sciences, cited more than 3200 times according to Google Scholar.
She moved to University of California, San Diego in 1998 as associate professor in the Department of History and Program in Science Studies, then as professor in that department 2005–2013, as well as adjunct professor of Geosciences (since 2007). She was named provost of the Sixth College 2008–2011.
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.
Controversies
Together with Erik Conway and Matthew Shindell, in 2008, Oreskes wrote the paper "From Chicken Little to Dr. Pangloss: William Nierenberg, Global Warming, and the Social Deconstruction of Scientific Knowledge" which argued that William Nierenberg as chairman reframed a National Academy of Sciences committee report on climate change in 1983 into economic terms to avoid action on the topic. Nierenberg died in 2000 but his son co-authored a rebuttal published in 2010 in the same journal which said the paper contradicted the historical report and there was no evidence that any committee members disagreed with the report; the evidence was that the report reflected the consensus at the time.
In 2015, Oreskes published an opinion piece in The Guardian, titled "There is a New Form of Climate Denialism to Look Out For – So Don't Celebrate Yet", in which she said scientists who call for a continued use of nuclear energy are renewable-energy "deniers" and "myth" makers. She cited an article by four prominent climate scientists (James Hansen, Ken Caldeira, Kerry Emanuel and Tom Wigley) saying nuclear power must be used to combat climate change. An opinion piece by Michael Specter in The New Yorker asserted that she had branded these four scientists as "climate deniers", and that her characterization was absurd, as they were among those who had done the most to push people to combat climate change.
In 2015, news outlets reported that ExxonMobil scientists had found evidence for climate change, but had nonetheless continued to raise doubts about it, a charge that Oreskes also reported. The company criticized Oreskes and invited her and the public to read approximately 187 documents written between 1977 and 2014. She and Geoffrey Supran did so, and reported their findings, which supported the original accounts, in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research Letters in 2017.
Selected awards, honors, and fellowships
Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize for "Objectivity or Heroism? On the Invisibility of Women in Science," Osiris, 1996, 11: 87–113, awarded 2000
American Philosophical Society Sabbatical Fellowship, 2001–2002
George Sarton Award Lecture, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2004
AAAS Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2007
Listed, Who's Who in American Science and Engineering, Who's Who in the West
National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers, 1993-94
Chancellors Associates’ Faculty Excellence Award for Community Service UCSD 2008
Francis Bacon Award in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Caltech 2008
Climate Change Communicator of the Year, George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, 2011
Commencement Speaker University of California, Riverside 2012
National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, 1994–1999
Ritter Memorial Fellowship in History of Marine Sciences, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 1994
Society of Economic Geologists Lindgren Prize for outstanding work by a young scientist, 1993
Selected writings
Books
The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science, Oxford University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-19-511733-6
Perspectives on Geophysics, Special Issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 31B, Oreskes, Naomi and James R. Fleming, eds., 2000.
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
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
Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality: On Care for Our Common Home, Pope Francis, introduction by Naomi Oreskes, (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2015) ISBN 978-1-612-19528-5
Discerning Experts: The Practices of Scientific Assessment for Environmental Policy. Michael Oppenheimer, N. Oreskes, D. Jamieson, K. Brysse, J. O’Reilly & M. Shindell, University of Chicago Press, 2019, ISBN 978-0-226-60201-1
Why Trust Science?, Princeton University Press, 2019, Edited by Stephen Macedo, ISBN 9780691179001
Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don't Know about the Ocean, University of Chicago Press, 2020, ISBN 9780226732381
The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023. ISBN 978-1-635-57357-2
Papers
Hitzman, Murray W.; Oreskes, Naomi; Einaudi, Marco T. (1992). "Geological characteristics and tectonic setting of Proterozoic iron oxide (Cu-U-Au-LREE) deposits". Precambrian Research. 58 (1–4): 241–287. Bibcode:1992PreR...58..241H. doi:10.1016/0301-9268(92)90121-4.
Oreskes, Naomi; Shrader-Frechette, Kristin; Belitz, Kenneth (1994). "Verification, Validation, and Confirmation of Numerical Models in the Earth Sciences" (PDF). Science. 263 (5147): 641–646. Bibcode:1994Sci...263..641O. doi:10.1126/science.263.5147.641. PMID 17747657. S2CID 16428790.
Oreskes, Naomi (December 2004). "The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change". Science. 306 (5702): 1686. doi:10.1126/science.1103618. PMID 15576594.
Oreskes, Naomi (2004). "Science and public policy: what's proof got to do with it?" (PDF). Environmental Science & Policy. 7 (5): 369–383. Bibcode:2004ESPol...7..369O. doi:10.1016/j.envsci.2004.06.002.
Oreskes, Naomi; Conway, Erik M. (2010). "Defeating the merchants of doubt". Nature. 465 (7299): 686–687. Bibcode:2010Natur.465..686O. doi:10.1038/465686a. PMID 20535183. S2CID 4414326.
Brysse, Keynyn; Oreskes, Naomi; O'Reilly, Jessica; Oppenheimer, Michael (2013). "Climate change prediction: Erring on the side of least drama?". Global Environmental Change. 23 (1): 327–337. Bibcode:2013GEC....23..327B. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2012.10.008.
Risbey; et al. (2014). "Well-estimated global surface warming in climate projections selected for ENSO phase". Nature Climate Change. 4 (9): 835–840. Bibcode:2014NatCC...4..835R. doi:10.1038/nclimate2310.
Lewandowsky, Stephan; Oreskes, Naomi; Risbey, James S.; Newell, Ben R.; Smithson, Michael (2015). "Seepage: Climate change denial and its effect on the scientific community". Global Environmental Change. 33: 1–13. Bibcode:2015GEC....33....1L. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2015.02.013.
Zalasiewicz, Jan; et al. (2015). "When did the Anthropocene begin? A mid-twentieth century boundary level is stratigraphically optimal" (PDF). Quaternary International. 383: 196–203. Bibcode:2015QuInt.383..196Z. doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2014.11.045. hdl:11250/2485908.
Editorials and opinion articles
Oreskes, Naomi (December 26, 2004). "Undeniable global warming". The Washington Post.
Oreskes, Naomi (July 24, 2006). "Global warming -- signed, sealed and delivered". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved August 19, 2019.
Oreskes, Naomi (February 1, 2007). "The Long Consensus On Climate Change". The Washington Post. Retrieved August 19, 2019.
Oreskes, Naomi (January 17, 2013). "Put government labs to work on climate change". The Washington Post. Retrieved August 19, 2019.
Oreskes, Naomi; Conway, Erik (July 25, 2014). "14 concepts that will be obsolete after catastrophic climate change". The Washington Post. Retrieved August 19, 2019.
Oreskes, Naomi (October 10, 2015). "Exxon's Climate Concealment". The New York Times. Retrieved August 19, 2019.
Oreskes, Naomi; Supran, Geoffrey (September 1, 2017). "Yes, ExxonMobil misled the public". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved August 19, 2019.
Supran, Geoffrey; Oreskes, Naomi (August 22, 2017). "What Exxon Mobil Didn't Say About Climate Change". The New York Times. Retrieved August 19, 2019.
Oreskes, Naomi; Conway, Erik M. (October 16, 2018). "Fixing the Climate Requires More Than Technology". The New York Times. Retrieved August 19, 2019.
Oreskes, Naomi, "History Matters to Science: It helps to explain how cynical actors undermine the truth", Scientific American, vol. 323, no. 6 (December 2020), p. 81. "In our 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt, Erik M. Conway and I showed how the same arguments [as those used to cast doubt on the link between tobacco use and lung cancer] were used to delay action on acid rain, the ozone hole and climate change – and this year [2020] we saw the spurious "freedom" argument being used to disparage mask wearing [during the COVID-19 pandemic]."