Dr. Naomi Oreskes

Dr. Naomi Oreskes is professor of the History of Science and affiliated professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University.  She is an internationally renowned science historian, geologist and author.  She received a B.Sc. in Mining Geology from the Royal School of Mines, Imperial College, London (1981) and then worked as an exploration geologist in the Australian outback. In 1990 she received an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Geological Research and History of Science from Stanford University. She joined the faculty at Harvard in 2013 after 15 years at the University of California, San Diego.

Professor Oreskes has lectured widely and won numerous prizes.  She is the author of both scholarly and popular books and articles on the history of earth and environmental science, and in recent decades has been a leading voice on the issue of anthropogenic climate change.

Her 2004 essay “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” has been widely cited, both in the United States and abroad. She has written nearly 50 opinion pieces, which have appeared in The Times (London), The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Nature, Science, The New Statesman, Frankfurter Allgemeine, and other venues. Her 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, co-authored with Erik M. Conway, was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, won the Watson-Davis Prize from the History of Science Society, has been translated into eight languages, and adapted as a film.  Oreskes and Conway have also written The Collapse of Western Civilization. Oreskes wrote the introduction to the Melville House edition of the Papal Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality, Laudato Si’ in 2015. Also in 2015 the New York Times published a long piece on Oreskes, “Naomi Oreskes, a Lightning Rod in a Changing Climate”.