36 Quotes by Naomi Oreskes

For the past 150 years, industrial civilization has been dining on the energy stored in fossil fuels, and the bill has come due. Yet, we have sat around the dinner table denying that it is our bill, and doubting the credibility of the man who delivered it.

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.

Scientists should continue doing what they’ve always done, which is to understand the Earth as well as they can.

Throughout our story, the people involved demanded the right to be heard, insisting that we – the public – had the right to hear both sides and that the media had an obligation to present it. They insisted that this was only fair and democratic. But were they attempting to preserve democracy? No. The issue was not free speech; it was free markets.

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.

This was the Bad Science strategy in a nutshell: plant complaints in op-ed pieces, in letters to the editor, and in articles in mainstream journals to whom you’d supplied the “facts,” and then quote them as if they really were facts. Quote, in fact, yourself. A perfect rhetorical circle. A mass media echo chamber of your own construction.

Scientists are scientists. They’re not really in a position to speak clearly on the moral dimensions, and they’re not really comfortable doing that.

Did all of Singer’s efforts to discredit mainstream science matter? When asked in 1995 where he got his assessments of ozone depletion, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, probably the most powerful man in Congress at the time, said, “my assessment is from reading people like Fred Singer.”93.

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.