36 Quotes by Naomi Oreskes

The problem was that public had no way to know that this “evidence” was part of an industry campaign designed to confuse. It was, in fact, part of a criminal conspiracy to commit fraud.

It’s extremely hard to know what the economic consequences of any decision will be. And I’m not a, a, a financial analyst, so I, I generally don’t try to make some kind of prediction about that.

Science is pretty much the same. A conclusion becomes established not when a clever person proposes it, or even a group of people begin to discuss it, but when the jury of peers – the community of researchers – reviews the evidence and concludes that it is sufficient to accept the claim.

The same mentality that leads to environmental despoliation, environmental destruction, also leads to damage to people.

C. P. Snow once argued that foolish faith in authority is the enemy of truth.

The industry had realized you could create the impression of controversy simply by asking questions.

These men, committed as they were to freedom – liberty as they understood it, and viewing themselves as the guardians of it – were therefore also committed capitalists. But their scientific colleagues were increasingly finding evidence that capitalism was failing in a crucial respect: it was failing to protect the natural environment upon which all life – free or not – ultimately depends.

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.

Two crucial developments during the presidential campaign year of 1988 changed climate science forever. The first was the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The second was the announcement by climate modeler James E. Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, that anthropogenic global warming had begun. An organized campaign of denial began the following year, and soon ensnared the entire climate science community.