36 Quotes by Naomi Oreskes

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.

The Heartland Institute is known among climate scientists for persistent questioning of climate science, for its promotion of “experts” who have done little, if any, peer-reviewed climate research, and for its sponsorship of a conference in New York City in 2008 alleging that the scientific community’s work on global warming is a fake.75 But Heartland’s activities are far more extensive, and reach back into the 1990s when they, too, were working with Philip Morris.

The “real” agenda of environmentalists – and the scientists who provided the data on which they relied – was to destroy capitalism and replace it with some sort of worldwide utopian Socialism – or perhaps Communism. That echoed a common right-wing refrain in the early 1990s: that environmental regulation was the slippery slope to Socialism. In 1992, columnist George Will encapsulated this view, saying that environmentalism was a “green tree with red roots.”99.

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 think he’s embracing that role.

One aspect of the effort to cast doubt on ozone depletion was the construction of a counternarrative that depicted ozone depletion as a natural variation that was being cynically exploited by a corrupt, self-interested, and extremist scientific community to get more money for their research. One of the first people to make this argument was a man who had been a fellow at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1980s: Fred Singer.

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.

I think it is important for people to understand that there are real serious economic costs and real serious economic damages associated with inaction on climate change.

All scientific work is incomplete – whether it be observational or experimental. All scientific work is liable to be upset or modified by advancing knowledge. That does not confer upon us a freedom to ignore the knowledge we already have, to postpone action that it appears to demand at a given time. Who knows, asks Robert Browning, but the world may end tonight? True, but on available evidence most of us make ready to commute on the 8:30 next day.9.

Economists have a term for these costs – a less reassuring one than Friedman’s “neighborhood effects.” They are “negative externalities”: negative because they aren’t beneficial and external because they fall outside the market system. Those who find this hard to accept attack the messenger, which is science.