Naomi Oreskes
Naomi Oreskes (* 1958 in New York City ) is an American historian of science and Professor of History and Science Studies (History and Science Studies) at the University of California, San Diego.
Life and work
Oreskes graduated in 1981 with a Bachelor of Science degree in geology of mining with First Class Honours from Imperial College in London. Then worked until 1984 as a geologist at Western Mining Corporation in Australia. It postdoctoral studies and teaching at Stanford University (1984-1989) and Dartmouth College ( 1990-1996). Your promotion of Geology and History of Science 1990 she received at Stanford University. Since 1991 she has worked not only in geology, but also in history. From 1996 to 1998 she was Associate Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at New York University with a visiting professor in the fall of 2001 in the Department of History of Science at Harvard University. Since 2005 she is Professor of History of Science at the University of California in San Diego.
Naomi Oreskes is married and has two daughters.
Essay on consensus on climate change
In addition to several books published Oreskes also regularly essays on current scientific topics. Her most famous essay is probably Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change, which was published in December 2004 in the journal Science. In it she addresses the question of how much a scientific consensus on issues of human-induced global warming is evident.
In an evaluation of the abstracts of 928 publications in scientific journals in 1993-2003, which contained the keyword "global climate change", Oreskes found no article that doubted openly that " takes place climate change and man 's activities are at least partly helps ". Doubters of this hypothesis among experts should be possible to find according to their weight in the scientific debate in the abstracts of publications. Just over 20% of the abstracts were of the opinion that a person is with responsibility for climate change, slightly more than half of the abstracts dealt with the consequences of climate change, without addressing the question of the causes. Approximately 25% of treated Abstracts methods or paleoclimate studies. This result it treated as an indication that a consensus in climate research on this issue. In addition, it leads to an argument that the most important question in this scientific associations and institutions also published corresponding positions.
Awards and prizes
- George Sarton Award Lecture, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2004
- American Philosophical Society Sabbatical Fellowship, 2001-2002.
- Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize of the History of Science Society, 2000
- National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, 1994-1999.
- National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers, 1993-94.
- Society of Economic Geologists Lindgren Prize for outstanding work by a young scientist, 1993.
- Ritter Memorial Fellowship in History of Marine Sciences, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 1994.
Publications
- The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science. Oxford University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-19-511733-6
- James R. Fleming ( Eds.): Perspectives on Geophysics. Special Issue of Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics. Vol 31B, No. 3, 2000
- With Homer Le Grand (ed.): Plate Tectonics: . An Insider's History of the Modern Theory of the Earth, edited by Homer Le Grand, Westview Press, 2003, ISBN 0-8133-4132-9
- The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change. In: Science. Vol 306, 4 December 2004, revised January 21, 2005 (PDF, 81 KB)
- With Erik M. Conway: Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Bloomsbury Press, 2010, ISBN 978-1596916104 Official website of the book