“Science fiction writers construct an imaginary future; historians attempt to reconstruct the past. Ultimately, both are seeking to understand the present. In this essay, we blend the two genres to imagine a future historian looking back on a past that… — Naomi Oreskes Copy Share
“If you believed in capitalism, you had to attack science, because science had revealed the hazards that capitalism had brought in its wake. The biggest hazard of them all—one that could truly affect the entire planet—was just at that moment coming to public attention: global warming. Global warming would become the mother of all environmental issues, because it struck at… — Naomi Oreskes Copy Share
“By the early 2000s, dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system was under way. Fires, floods, hurricanes, and heat waves began to intensify. Still,… — Naomi Oreskes Copy Share Image
“The writer C. S. Lewis once characterized this style of argument: “The very lack of evidence is thus treated as evidence; the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden.”18 Such arguments are effectively impossible to refute, as Lewis noted. “A belief in invisible cats cannot be logically disproved,” although it does “tell us a good deal… — Naomi Oreskes Copy Share
Why would scientists dedicated to uncovering the truth about the natural world deliberately misrepresent the work of their own colleagues? Why would they spread accusations with no basis? Why would they refuse to correct their arguments once they had been shown to be incorrect? And why did the press continue to quote them, year after year, even as their claims… — Naomi Oreskes Copy Share
“Robert Jastrow and William Nierenberg, wrote a report questioning the evidence of global warming.15 They were soon invited to the White House to brief the Bush administration. One member of the Cabinet Affairs Office said of the report: “Everyone has read it. Everyone takes it seriously.”16 It wasn’t just the Bush administration that took these claims seriously; the mass media… — Naomi Oreskes Copy Share
It really is a very radical call ... to reject materialism as our central value and to think about the sanctity of life and… — Naomi Oreskes Copy Share Image
“Congress was also looking into climate change. The 1978 National Climate Act had established a national climate research program,” — Naomi Oreskes Copy Share Image
I think Pope Francis is our Pope Francis. I mean, the point of him is that he's a global leader, and he's trying, I… — Naomi Oreskes Copy Share Image
At a recent conference, a colleague told one of us that in IPCC discussions, some scientists have been reluctant to make strong claims about… — Naomi Oreskes Copy Share Image
“While the idea of equal time for opposing opinions makes sense in a two-party political system, it does not work for science, because science is not about opinion. It is about evidence. It is about claims that can be, and have been, tested through scientific research—experiments, experience, and observation—research that is then subject to critical review by a jury of… — Naomi Oreskes Copy Share
Yet again, unscientific claims were being circulated broadly, but the scientists' refutation of them was published where only fellow scientists would see it. — Naomi Oreskes Copy Share Image
