Quotes from Naomi Oreskes

The relationship between technology, innovation, and economic and political systems is varied and complex. It cannot be reduced to a simple article of faith about the virtues of a free market.

statistics, like any tool, don't work well in all cases and conditions and like any tool can be used well or badly

Yet in many cases, the social components were the dominant system drivers. It was often said, for example, that climate change was caused by increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. Scientists understood that those greenhouse gases were accumulating because of the activities of human beings—deforestation and fossil fuel combustion—yet they rarely said that the cause was people, and their patterns of conspicuous consumption.

A focus on one method above all others is a kind of fetish. These cases suggest that some of the historical examples of "science gone awry" arose from what I designate methodological fetishism. These are situations where investigators privileged a particular method and ignored or discounted evidence obtained by other methods, which, if heeded, could have changed their minds.

After the Cold War, most scientists were relieved to be freed of the burdens of secrecy and misrepresentation, but Seitz, Singer, and Nierenberg continued to act as if the Cold War had not ended.

The IPCC explicitly addressed—and rejected—the Marshall Institute argument for blaming the Sun. The upper limits on solar variability, they explained, are "small compared with greenhouse forcing and even if such a change occurred over the next few decades, it would be swamped by the enhanced greenhouse effect."75

diversity can result in a more rigorous intellectual outcome by fostering critical interrogations that reveal embedded social prejudice.

The chapters written by the natural scientists were broadly consistent with what other natural scientists had already said. No one challenged the basic claim that warming would occur, with serious physical and biological ramifications.

What are the relative risks of ignoring scientific claims that turn out to be true versus acting on claims that turn out to be false?194 The risks of not flossing are real, but not inordinate. The risks of not acting on the scientific evidence of climate change are inordinate.

the philosopher Isaiah Berlin sagely pointed out, liberty for wolves means death to lambs.124

Past environmental changes were mostly local and reversible. Today, human activities have a global reach. We are changing our planet in radical ways, and we may not have the wherewithal to respond to the challenges ahead, at least not without enduring a good deal of discomfort and dislocation. Moreover, some of these changes—like sea level rise and the melting of Arctic ice—are almost certainly irreversible.

The industry was finally found guilty under the RICO Act (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations).121 In 2006, U.S. district judge Gladys Kessler found that the tobacco industry had "devised and executed a scheme to defraud consumers and potential consumers" about the hazards of cigarettes, hazards that their own internal company documents proved they had known about since the 1950s.

The EPA was saying no more and no less than this. It was saying that protecting lambs required the government to control the wolves—and government control was what the Cold Warriors most feared. It was what they had spent their lives fighting.

when the consequences of our scientific conclusions are non-epistemic—i.e., when they are moral, ethical, political, or economic—it is almost inevitable that our values will creep into our judgments of evidence.

The network of right-wing foundations, the corporations that fund them, and the journalists who echo their claims have created a tremendous problem for American science. A recent academic study found that of the fifty-six "environmentally skeptical" books published in the 1990s, 92 percent were linked to these right-wing foundations (only thirteen were published in the 1980s, and 100 percent were linked to the foundations).

Because the results of scientific investigation seem to suggest that government really did need to intervene in the marketplace if pollution and public health were to be effectively addressed, the defenders of the free market refused to accept those results. The enemies of government regulation of the marketplace became the enemies of science.

Until recently the mass media presented global warming as a raging debate—twelve years after President George H. W. Bush had signed the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, and twenty-five years after the U.S. National Academy of Sciences first announced that there was no reason to doubt that global warming would occur from man's use of fossil fuels.

A handful of economists in the late 1960s had realized that free market economics, focused as it was on consumption growth, was inherently destructive to the natural environment and to the ecosystems on which we all depend.

In 2003, the EPA reported to Congress that the overall cost of air pollution control during the previous ten years was between $8 billion and $9 billion, while the benefits were estimated from $101 billion to $119 billion—more than ten times as great.175 Singer's "billion-dollar solution to a million-dollar problem" was just plain wrong.

However, when pesticides are sprayed over large agricultural areas, they kill a large fraction of the total insect population, ensuring that the hardy survivors breed only with other hardy survivors; the very next generation may display resistance. The more extensive the agricultural use, the more likely bugs are to evolve resistance rapidly, and the less effective the pesticide is likely to be when you need it for disease control.

Global warming is a big problem, and to solve it we have to stop listening to disinformation. We have to pay attention to our science and harness the power of our engineering. Rome may not be burning, but Greenland is melting, and we are still fiddling. We all need a better understanding of what science really is, how to recognize real science when we see it, and how to separate it from the garbage.

Outside their domains of expertise, scientists may be no more well informed than ordinary people. Indeed, they may be less so as their intense training in one area can lead them to be undereducated in others.

Barry Goldwater famously argued that extremism in the defense of liberty was no vice. Our story will show that it is.

some people have been attacking not just the message, but the messenger. Ever since scientists first began to explain the evidence that our climate was warming—and that human activities were probably to blame—people have been questioning the data, doubting the evidence, and attacking the scientists who collect and explain it. And no one has been more brutally—or more unfairly—attacked than Ben Santer.