Naomi Oreskes

Naomi Oreskes is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University, and an internationally renowned earth scientist, science historian, and author of both scholarly and popular books and articles on the history of earth and environmental science. Her authored or co-authored books include the 2010 best-seller Merchants of Doubt (2010), the Collapse of Western Civilization (2014), Discerning Experts (2019), Why Trust Science? (2019), Science on a Mission (2021), and The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (2023).

Her 2004 essay “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” (Science 306: 1686) has been widely cited, both in the United States and abroad, including in the Royal Society’s publication, “A Guide to Facts and Fictions about Climate Change," in the Academy-award winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, and in Ian McEwan’s novel, Solar. Her 2014 Ted Talk, Why We Should Trust Scientists, has over 1.6 million views. In 2018 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow; in 2019, she received the British Academy Medal; and in 2024, she was named a “Master of our Time,” by the Nonino Foundation (Italy).