Naomi Oreskes

Harvard University | Harvard · Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Public trust in scientists may be essential for widespread acceptance of science-based solutions to societal problems, including climate change. Across 68 countries (N = 69,534), individuals expressed less trust in climate scientists than scientists in general. In most countries and overall, conservative political orientation was more strongly asso...

Understanding the link between well-being and income is crucial for assessing the viability of sustainability strategies that limit affluence. Here, we examine the extent to which the satisfaction of basic human needs can explain the correlation between income and life evaluation, an indicator of subjective well-being. Using more than 1.3 million r...

Science communicators, educators, and policy-makers around the world need robust evidence on how people inform themselves about science-related issues and communicate about them with others. We provide such evidence, drawing on a global population survey (n = 71,922 in 68 countries) that gives nationally representative insights into people’s scienc...

Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and intense due to climate change. This might affect support for climate policies, especially if more people attribute these events to climate change. Yet little is known about whether actual impacts of extreme events and subjective attribution of these events to climate change influence climate pol...

A common sense: The Anthropocene was originally understood by Crutzen as not only representing humanity’s influence on Earth’s geological record (he was well aware of earlier anthropogenic impacts), but also reflecting a system with physical characteristics that had, since widespread industrialization, departed from the prolonged, relatively stable...

Mis- and disinformation pose substantial societal challenges, and have thus become the focus of a substantive field of research. However, the field of misinformation research has recently come under scrutiny on two fronts. First, a political response has emerged, claiming that misinformation research aims to censor conservative voices. Second, some...

In today’s polarized political climate, researchers who combat mistruths have come under attack and been labelled as unelected arbiters of truth. But the fight against misinformation is valid, warranted and urgently required.

Trust in climate science provides the foundation for evidence-based policymaking on climate change mitigation and adaptation and public perceptions of the urgency of climate change. Here we consider the possibility that lack of public trust in climate science and climate scientists may undermine the effectiveness of climate science communication. T...

Onset of generative AI threatens public trust in data and documents that are crucial for informed decision-making in our society. We explore whether decentralization technology, such as blockchain, can ensure public trust by distributing data and documents storage across multiple private and public institutions, rather than relying on single entiti...

Christian Dayé’s new book, Experts, Social Scientists, and Techniques of Prognosis in Cold War America (2020), recounts the development of a set of techniques of expertise developed in the United States during the Cold War, and (ostensively) enabling policy makers to make decisions based on likely social, political, and military developments. The t...

The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) has concluded that the Anthropocene represents geological reality and should be linked with the plethora of stratigraphic proxies that initiate or show marked perturbations at around the 1950s, and should be defined using a Global boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP). We propose formalizing the Anthropoc...

This part of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) submission proposes that the base of the Anthropocene should be defined as series/epoch, terminating the Holocene Series/Epoch with a single Crawfordian stage/age using a Global boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) in an annually varved Crawford Lake core, Ontario, Canada, defined at 17.5 cm...

This is the Executive Summary of a report produced by the membership of the Anthropocene Working Group as part of a submission to the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy to seek formalisation of the Anthropocene as an epoch of geological time. It summarises the content of two reports and their associated appendices which provide a background t...

Recent academic debate has seen the emergence of a position that misinformation is not a significant current problem. We believe that the arguments used to support this minimizing position are flawed, particularly if interpreted (e.g., by policymakers or the public) as evidence suggesting that misinformation can be safely ignored. Here, we rebut th...

Science is integral to society because it can inform individual, government, corporate, and civil society decision-making on issues such as climate change. Yet, public distrust and populist sentiment may challenge the relationship between science and society. To help researchers analyse the science society nexus across different cultural contexts,...

Scientific information is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in science can help decision-makers act based on the best available evidence, especially during crises such as climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low public...

Scientific information is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in science can help decision-makers act based on the best available evidence, especially during crises such as climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low public...

Mis- and disinformation pose substantial societal challenges, and have thus become the focus of a substantive field of research. However, the field of misinformation research has recently come under scrutiny on two fronts. First, a political response has emerged, claiming that misinformation research aims to censor conservative voices. Second, some...

Trust in climate science provides the foundation for evidence-based policymaking on climate change mitigation and adaptation. If the IPCC and climate scientists are right, global decarbonization should be one of humanity's top priorities. Yet, most countries are not on track to meet the emissions reduction goal ratified under the Paris Agreement an...

Scientists are called upon by policymakers to provide recommendations on how to address climate change. It has been argued that as policy advisors, scientists can legitimately make instrumental value judgements (recommendations based on defined policy goals), but not categorical value judgements (challenge and/or redefine established policy goals),...

Empirical data do not support the conclusion of a crisis of public trust in science. They do support the conclusion of a crisis of conservative trust in science: polls show that American attitudes toward science are highly polarized along political lines. In this essay, we argue that conservative hostility toward science is rooted in conservative h...

Scientists in the United States are more politically liberal than the general population. This fact has fed charges of political bias. To learn more about scientists’ political behavior, we analyze publicly available Federal Election Commission data. We find that scientists who donate to federal candidates and parties are far more likely to support...

Glavovic et al. ([2021]. The tragedy of climate change science. Climate and Development, 1–5.) recently argued that the science-society contract is broken and that–given the urgency of climate change–scientists should agree to a moratorium on climate change research. We are grateful to the authors for their courage to spark this very important disc...

This paper investigates how ExxonMobil uses rhetoric and framing to shape public discourse on climate change. We present an algorithmic corpus comparison and machine-learning topic model of 180 ExxonMobil climate change communications, including peer-reviewed publications, internal company documents, and advertorials in The New York Times. We also...

Standards of proof for attributing real world events/damage to global warming should be the same as in clinical or environmental lawsuits, argue Lloyd et al. The central question that we raise is effective communication. How can climate scientists best and effectively communicate their findings to crucial non-expert audiences, including public poli...

Stratigraphy provides insights into the evolution and dynamics of the Earth System over its long history. With recent developments in Earth System science, changes in Earth System dynamics can now be observed directly and projected into the near future. An integration of the two approaches provides powerful insights into the nature and significance...

This work reviews the literature on an alleged global warming 'pause' in global mean surface temperature (GMST) to determine how it has been defined, what time intervals are used to characterise it, what data are used to measure it, and what methods used to assess it. We test for 'pauses', both in the normally understood meaning of the term to mean...

ExxonMobil Corp Vice President Vijay Swarup's criticisms of our 2017 study (2017 Environ. Res. Lett. 12 084019), which demonstrated that ExxonMobil misled the public about climate change, are misleading and incorrect. Thanks in part to his feedback, we can now conclude with even greater confidence that Exxon, Mobil, and ExxonMobil Corp have all, va...

In our 2017 study ‘Assessing ExxonMobil’s climate change communications (1977–2014)’, we concluded that ExxonMobil has in the past misled the public about climate change. We demonstrated that ExxonMobil ‘advertorials’—paid, editorial-style advertisements—in The New York Times spanning 1989–2004 overwhelmingly expressed doubt about climate change as...

Some well-established scientific findings may be rejected by vocal minorities because the evidence is in conflict with political views or economic interests. For example, the tobacco industry denied the medical consensus on the harms of smoking for decades, and the clear evidence about human-caused climate change is currently being rejected by many...

We start by reviewing the complicated situation in methods of scientific attribution of climate change to extreme weather events. We emphasize the social values involved in using both so-called ``storyline'' and ordinary probabilistic or ``risk-based'' methods, noting that one important virtue claimed by the storyline approach is that it features a...

The Anthropocene, a term launched into public debate by Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen, has been used informally to describe the time period during which human actions have had a drastic effect on the Earth and its ecosystems. This book presents evidence for defining the Anthropocene as a geological epoch, written by the high-profile international...

International assessments of ozone depletion began in the 1980s, after anti-regulation groups (such as the CFC industry) seized on differences between early national and institutional assessments, and the policy leanings expressed in some of them, as justification to delay regulation of CFCs. This spurred Bob Watson and colleagues to bring together...

Consensus reports emerged in the mid-twentieth century as a means for scientists to give advice to governments. For the scientists involved, the goal of consensus reflects a belief in the power of univocality: that a single, consistent message would be more likely to be influential than alternatives, such as expressing majority and minority views....

Assessments are not independent overviews limited to evaluating peer-reviewed, decision-ready knowledge. They are the products of interactive processes continually shaping questions asked and answers given, where the assessors and those whose work is assessed overlap, and scientists work iteratively to redefine knowledge during and between assessme...

The US National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program was established in 1980 to serve as both a research program and an assessment body. It is generally thought to have been successful in the former aim but not the latter; the fact that the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments were made prior to the publication of NAPAP’s final assessment is often taken...

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) has major policy significance due to its potential to disintegrate rapidly, producing a disastrous sea level rise. Scientists have struggled to find ways to express the magnitude of the risk and its time frame, in the face of huge uncertainty and changing scientific understandings of the dynamic behavior of ice s...

A twentieth-century tradition of distinguished scientists offering policy advice has in the twenty-first century mostly given way to large, international, and highly bureaucratic assessments by hundreds or thousands of “rank-and-file” scientists, whose charge is to inform but not recommend policy. Epistemic authority has apparently shifted from the...

Paul Hoyningen-Huene argues that what makes scientific knowledge special is its systematic character, and that this can be used to solve the demarcation problem. He labels this STDC: “Systematicity Theory’s Demarcation Criterion.” This paper argues that STDC fails, because there are areas of intellectual activity that are highly systematic, but tha...

This work reviews the literature on an alleged global warming 'pause' in global mean surface temperature (GMST) to determine how it has been defined, what time intervals are used to characterise it, what data are used to measure it, and what methods used to assess it. We test for 'pauses', both in the normally understood meaning of the term to mean...

We review the evidence for a putative early 21st-century divergence between global mean surface temperature (GMST) and Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) projections. We provide a systematic comparison between temperatures and projections using historical versions of GMST products and historical versions of model projections that...

In 1995, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced that anthropogenic climate change had become discernible. Since then, numerous independent studies have affirmed that anthropogenic climate change is underway, and the meta-conclusion that there is a broad expert consensus on this point. It has also been demonstrated that most of the...

The most common approaches to detection and attribution of extreme weather events using FAR or RR (Fraction of Attributable Risk or Risk Ratio) answer a particular form of research question, namely, “What is the probability of a certain class of weather events, given global climate change, relative to a world without?” In a set of recent papers, Ke...

The conventional approach to detecting and attributing climate change impacts on extreme weather events is generally based on frequentist statistical inference wherein a null hypothesis of no influence is assumed, and the alternative hypothesis of an influence is accepted only when the null hypothesis can be rejected at a sufficiently high (e.g., 9...

This paper assesses whether ExxonMobil Corporation has in the past misled the general public about climate change. We present an empirical document-by-document textual content analysis and comparison of 187 climate change communications from ExxonMobil, including peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed publications, internal company documents, and paid...

During the early years of the twenty-first century, Republican politicians publicly doubted the validity of climate-change science in their appeals to evangelical Christian voters in the United States. Because this religious community is viewed as anti-science, contemporary debates in the US often assume that “religion” must necessarily oppose envi...

This is the link to the press release from University of Leicester for the new AWG paper authored by the above members of the working group: https://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/press/press-releases/2017/march/the-anthropocene-scientists-respond-to-criticisms-of-a-new-geological-epoch

A range of published arguments against formalizing the Anthropocene as a geological time unit have variously suggested that it is a misleading term of non-stratigraphic origin and usage, is based on insignificant temporal and material stratigraphic content unlike that used to define older geological time units, is focused on observation of human hi...

We assess the scale and extent of the physical technosphere, defined here as the summed material output of the contemporary human enterprise. It includes active urban, agricultural and marine components, used to sustain energy and material flow for current human life, and a growing residue layer, currently only in small part recycled back into the...

Stratigraphy provides insights into the evolution and dynamics of the Earth System over its long history. With recent developments in Earth System science, changes in Earth System dynamics can now be observed directly and projected into the near future. An integration of the two approaches provides powerful insights into the nature and significance...

The consensus that humans are causing recent global warming is shared by 90%–100% of publishing climate scientists according to six independent studies by co-authors of this paper. Those results are consistent with the 97% consensus reported by Cook et al (Environ. Res. Lett. 8 024024) based on 11 944 abstracts of research papers, of which 4014 to...

Biospheric relationships between production and consumption of biomass have been resilient to changes in the Earth system over billions of years. This relationship has increased in its complexity, from localised ecosystems predicated on anaerobic microbial production and consumption, to a global biosphere founded on primary production from oxygenic...

Scientists have argued that no more than 275GtC (IPCC, 2013) of the world’s reserves of fossil fuels of 746GtC can be produced in this century if the world is to restrict anthropogenic climate change to ≤2°C. This has raised concerns about the risk of these reserves becoming “stranded assets” and creating a dangerous “carbon bubble” with serious im...

Human activity is leaving a pervasive and persistent signature on Earth. Vigorous debate continues about whether this warrants recognition as a new geologic time unit known as the Anthropocene. We review anthropogenic markers of functional changes in the Earth system through the stratigraphic record. The appearance of manufactured materials in sedi...

Sixty years after industry executives first decided to fight the facts of tobacco, the exploitation of doubt and uncertainty as a defensive tactic has spread to a diverse set of industries and issues with an interest in challenging scientific evidence. However, one can find examples of doubt-mongering before tobacco. One involves the early history...

Recent public debate and the scientific literature have frequently cited a “pause” or “hiatus” in global warming. Yet, multiple sources of evidence show that climate change continues unabated, raising questions about the status of the “hiatus”. To examine whether the notion of a “hiatus” is justified by the available data, we first document that th...

There has been much recent published research about a putative “pause” or “hiatus” in global warming. We show that there are frequent fluctuations in the rate of warming around a longer-term warming trend, and that there is no evidence that identifies the recent period as unique or particularly unusual. In confirmation, we show that the notion of a...

Vested interests and political agents have long opposed political or regulatory action in response to climate change by appealing to scientific uncertainty. Here we examine the effect of such contrarian talking points on the scientific community itself. We show that although scientists are trained in dealing with uncertainty, there are several psyc...

Responsibility for climate change lies at the heart of societal debate over actions to address it. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change established the principle of Bcommon but differentiated responsibilities^ among nations , suggesting that industrialized nations that had produced the greatest share of historic emissions bore...

We evaluate the boundary of the Anthropocene geological time interval as an epoch, since it is useful to have a consistent temporal definition for this increasingly used unit, whether the presently informal term is eventually formalized or not. Of the three main levels suggested e an ‘early Anthropocene’ level some thousands of years ago; the begin...

Because of their specific knowledge, scientists are well positioned to identify environmental threats to humankind, sound the alarm, and propose and comment, at least on a general level, on potential responses. However, many policy makers and scientists believe that scientists should have no more to say about public issues than anyone else and that...

Many major questions in earth science research today are not matters of the behavior of physical systems alone, but of the interaction of physical and social systems. Information and assumptions about human behavior, human institutions and infrastructures, and human reactions and responses, as well as consideration of social and monetary costs, pla...

The question of how climate model projections have tracked the actual evolution of global mean surface air temperature is important in establishing the credibility of their projections. Some studies and the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report suggest that the recent 15-year period (1998-2012) provides evidence that models are overestimating current temper...

The year is 2393, and the world is almost unrecognizable. Clear warnings of climate catastrophe went ignored for decades, leading to soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, widespread drought and—finally—the disaster now known as the Great Collapse of 2093, when the disintegration of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet led to mass migration and a comple...

Historians have been slow to incorporate the ocean as a focus of study, in part because we have viewed it as standing mostly apart from human societies and activities. Whether that was ever truly the case is arguable, but it is certainly no longer true today. Global climate change and ocean acidification point to the now-pervasive impact of humans...

Si rien n est fait, qu adviendrait-il de l humanité et de la planète à l aube du XXIIe siècle ?Deux des plus grands intellectuels aux U.S.A. se posent dans cet essai de prospective la question suivante : pourquoi restons-nous inactifs, alors que nous disposons d informations scientifiques robustes sur le changement climatique et que nous savons que...

The Guanajuato epithermal district is one of the largest silver producers in Mexico. Mineralization occurs along three main vein systems trending dominantly northwest–southeast: the central Veta Madre, the La Luz system to the northwest, and the Sierra system to the east. Mineralization consists dominantly of silver sulfides and sulfosalts, base me...

Both geologists and historians study the past, but they have divergent views of the present. Geologists are unambiguously presentist. They believe that the observable present is a crucial resource in understanding the past, because in the observable present we can see and study the processes that have occurred in the unobservable past. For geologis...

Authors' note: Science fiction writers construct an imaginary future; historians attempt to reconstruct the past. Ultimately, both are seeking to understand the present. In this essay, we blend the two genres to imagine a future historian looking back on a past that is our present and (possible) future. The occasion is the tercentenary of the end o...

Fifty years after a paper linked sea-floor magnetic stripes with continental drift, Naomi Oreskes explains its legacy as a lesson in achieving scientific consensus.

Overfishing is most commonly explained as an example of the tragedy of the commons, where individuals are unable to control their activities, leading to the destruction of the resource they are dependent on. The historical record suggests otherwise. Between1949 and 1958, the US State Department used fisheries science, and especially the concept of...