Quotes from Naomi Oreskes

Nobody can publish an article in a scientific journal claiming the Sun orbits the Earth, and for the same reason, you can't publish an article in a peer-reviewed journal claiming there's no global warming. Probably well-informed professional science journalists wouldn't publish it either. But ordinary journalists repeatedly did.

The public cares little about science, except insofar as its conclusions can be made to intervene in behalf of some moral, religious or social controversy.

A similar phenomenon developed with acid rain in the 1990s, as the media attended to the idea that its cause was still not established—more than a decade after that was no longer true—or the claim that it would cost more to fix than it was worth, which was unsupported by evidence.

CO2 had increased due to human activities, CO2 will continue to increase unless changes are made, and these increases will affect weather, agriculture, and ecosystems. None of the physical scientists suggested that accumulating CO2 was not a problem, or that we should simply wait and see.

Historians and sociologists in the 1960s and '70s had stressed that scientists work in communities where they are buffeted by the same social forces that prevail in all human communities, plus a few distinctive ones. One of these distinctive pressures was the pressure to innovate, which at times encouraged individuals to cut corners.

While most physicists had long been accepting military R & D funds, they reacted differently to SDI, fomenting a coordinated effort to block the program. By May 1986, sixty-five hundred academic scientists had signed a pledge not to solicit or accept funds from the missile defense research program, a pledge that received abundant media coverage.

History shows us clearly that science does not provide certainty. It does not provide proof. It only provides the consensus of experts, based on the organized accumulation and scrutiny of evidence.

Bad, bad science. You can practically see the fingers wagging. Scientists had been bad boys; it was time for them to behave themselves. The tobacco industry would be the daddy who made sure they did. It wasn't just money at stake; it was individual liberty. Today, smoking, tomorrow … who knew? By protecting smoking, we protected freedom.

Conversely, if the claim is rejected, the honest scientist is expected to accept that judgment, and move on to other things. In science, you don't get to keep harping on a subject until your opponents just give up in exhaustion.

A belief in invisible cats cannot be logically disproved," although it does "tell us a good deal about those who hold it."19

This is a characteristic pattern in science: first there is scattered evidence of a phenomenon, published in specialist journals or reports, and then someone begins to connect the dots.

Doubt is crucial to science in the version we call curiosity or healthy scepticism, it drives science forward – but it also makes science vulnerable to misrepresentation, because it is easy to take uncertainties out of context and create the impression that everything is unresolved. This was the tobacco industry's key insight: that you could use normal scientific uncertainty to undermine the status of actual scientific knowledge.

The doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest,"36 Soros wrote. Like its bête noire, Marxism, laissez-faire economics claimed to be scientific, based upon immutable laws of nature, and also like Marxism, it has not stood the test of experience. If it were a scientific theory, it would have long ago been rejected.

But asking a physicist to comment on smoking and cancer is like asking an Air Force captain to comment on the design of a submarine. He might know something about it; then again, he might not. In any case, he's not an expert.

It was one thing for adults to choose to take risks, another thing to impose those risks on children (or anyone else). The EPA wisely refocused attention on this crucial distinction: "Having a choice to take a risk for themselves should not permit smokers to impose a risk on others.

The tobacco road would lead through Star Wars, nuclear winter, acid rain, and the ozone hole, all the way to global warming. Seitz and his colleagues would fight the facts and merchandise doubt all the way.

The tobacco, processed food, and chemical industries face an essential conflict of interest when discussing scientific results that bear on the safety, efficacy, or healthfulness of their products.

Lomborg and his followers make the philosophical error of thinking that things that can't be counted don't count.

Western scientists built an intellectual culture based on the premise that it was worse to fool oneself into believing in something that did not exist than not to believe in something that did.

In July 1997, three months before the Kyoto Protocol was finalized, U.S. senators Robert Byrd and Charles Hagel introduced a resolution blocking its adoption.168 Byrd-Hagel passed the Senate by a vote of 97–0.

If science took the side of regulation—or even gave evidence to support the idea that regulation might be needed to protect the life on Earth—then science, the very thing Jastrow, Nierenberg, Teller, and Frederick Seitz had spent their working careers trying to build up, would now have to be torn down.

Markets spread the technology of machine tools throughout the world, but markets did not create it. Centralized government, in the form of the U.S. Army, was the inventor of the modern machine age.

In recent years, something we now all depend on—the Internet, originally ARPANET—was developed as a complex collaboration of universities, government agencies, and industry, funded largely by the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency.

If science took the side of regulation—or even gave evidence to support the idea that regulation might be needed to protect the life on Earth—then science, the very thing Jastrow, Nierenberg, Teller, and Frederick Seitz had spent their working careers trying to build