Merchants of Doubt

In the evening of June 24 Naomi Oreskes will give a public ISSP-lecture in Copenhagen revolving around her new book "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming". The event is organized in collaboration between ISSP, University of Southern Denmark, Dagbladet Information and University of Copenhagen.

This event Copenhagen is directed at scientists and science policy makers, and addresses some of the risks of misunderstanding and distortion that they face in public. Naomi Oreskes will discuss some of the strategies employed by the opponents of science, and offer some practical advice as to how one can counter these strategies of deception.

About Naomi Oreskes

Naomi Oreskes holds positions at several US universities, and has received several grants for her work and won numerous major prizes and awards.

For the past twenty years, Professor Oreskes has studied the process of consensus and dissent in science: How do scientists decide when a fact is 'established'? How do they judge how much evidence is sufficient to deem something scientifically demonstrated? And what happens when scientists can't agree?

An Inconvenient Truth

In 2004, she began to investigate the question of what scientists had to say about global warming, and quickly realized that scientific experts had a consensus on the reality of global warming and its human causes.

Her essay 'The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change' (Science 306: 1686), led to numerous Op-Ed pieces, including in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

This work has been widely cited in the mass media in the United States and Europe, including in the Royal Society's publication, 'A guide to facts and fictions about climate change', and in the Academy-award winning film, 'An Inconvenient Truth'.

Speech to the U.S. Senate

Her work has also led to numerous speaking invitations, including in the U.S. Senate as well as to attacks by individuals and institutions who are reluctant to accept the scientific results.

Oreskes' research also highlighted the disconnect between the state of scientific debate and the way it was being presented in the mass media and perceived by the American public.

Teaming up with Erik Conway, her further research suggested that the reason we are all confused is that people have been trying to confuse us. The resulting book is Merchants of Doubt.